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Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#351

Post by balamatom »

torginus wrote: post #228
alsetmusic wrote: post #191

It almost seems as though the record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI might have been a little shortsighted. A couple of years ago, I asked a financial investment person about AI as a trick question. She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure). I was waiting for her to put her foot in her mouth an…

It boggles the mind that this kind of management is what it takes to create one of the most valuable companies in the world (and becoming one of the world's richest in the process).

I'll differ from the siblingposters who compare it to the luck of the draw, essentially explaining this away as the excusable randomness of confusion rather than the insidious evil of stupidity; while the "it's fraud" perspective presumes a solid grasp of which things out there are not fraud besides those which are coercion, but that's not a subject I'm interested in having an opinion about.

Instead, think of whales for a sec. Think elephants - remember those? Think of Pando the tree, the largest organism alive. Then compare with one of the most valuable companies in the world. To a regular person's senses, the latter is a vaster and more complex entity than any tree or whale or elephant.

Gee, what makes it grow so big though? The power of human ambition?

And here's where I say, no, it needs to be this big, because at smaller scales it would be too dumb to exist.

To you and me it may all look like the fuckup of some Leadership or Management, a convenient concept beca corresponding to a mental image of a human or group of humans. That's some sort of default framing, such as can only be provided to boggle the mind; considering that they'll keep doing this and probably have for longer than I've been around. The entire Internet is laughing at Zuckerberg for not looking like their idea of "a person" but he's not the one with the impostor syndrome.

For ours are human minds, optimized to view things in term of person-terms and Dunbar-counts; even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped. But last time I checked my hand wasn't shaped anything like the invisible network of cause and effect that the metaphor represents; instead I would posit that for an entity like Facebook, to perform an action that does not look completely ridiculous from the viewpoint of an individual observer, is the equivalent an anatomical impossibility. It did evolve after all from American college students

See also: "Beyond Power / Knowledge", Graeber 2006.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#352

Post by jauntywundrkind »

benterix wrote: post #290
torginus wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boggles the mind that this kind of management is what it takes to create one of the most valuable companies in the world (and becoming one of the world's richest in the process).

It's a cliche but people really underestimate and try to downplay the role of luck[0]. [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/the-...

Luck. And capturing strong network effect.

The ascents of the era all feel like examples of anti-markets, of having gotten yourself into an intermediary position where you control both side's access.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#353

Post by dylan604 »

skeezyboy wrote: post #288
estearum wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of them do try and fail, and then one succeeds, and it doesn't mean that person is intrinsically smarter/wiser/better/etc than the others. There are far, far more external factors on a business's success than internal ones, especially early on.

for instance if that social network film by david fincher hadnt come out, would we have even heard of this mark guy?

But then we wouldn't have had that great soundtrack from Trent and Atticus

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#354

Post by ninetyninenine »

I don’t think it’s entirely a bubble. Definitely this is revolutionary technology on the scale of going to the moon. It will fundamentally change humanity.

But while the technology is revolutionary the ideas and capability behind building these things aren’t that complicated.

Paying a guy millions doesn’t mean shit. So what mark zuckerberg was doing was dumb.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#356

Post by ninetyninenine »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #299
miki123211 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an overwhelming feeling that what we're trying to do here is "Netflix over DialUp." We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do, just like many VOD, smartphone and grocery delivery companies of the 90s did with the internet. The groundwork has been laid, and it's not too hard to see the shape of things to come. This tech, however, is still far too immature for a lot of use cases. There's enough…

There’s no evidence that it’ll scale like that. Progress in AI has always been a step function.

Uh it’s been multiple repeated step ups in the last 15 years. The trend line is up up up.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#357

Post by dylan604 »

siliconc0w wrote: post #323

It never really made sense for Meta to get into AI, the motivations were always pretty thin and it seemed like they just wanted to ride the wave.

Isn't that what companies are supposed to do by seeing/following/setting trends in a way that increases revenue and profit for the shareholders?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#358

Post by ghurtado »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #299
miki123211 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an overwhelming feeling that what we're trying to do here is "Netflix over DialUp." We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do, just like many VOD, smartphone and grocery delivery companies of the 90s did with the internet. The groundwork has been laid, and it's not too hard to see the shape of things to come. This tech, however, is still far too immature for a lot of use cases. There's enough…

There’s no evidence that it’ll scale like that. Progress in AI has always been a step function.

There's also no evidence that it won't, so your opinion carries exactly the same weight as theirs.

> Progress in AI has always been a step function.

There's decisively no evidence of that, since whatever measure you use to rate "progress in AI" is bound to be entirely subjective, especially with such a broad statement.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#359

Post by Windchaser »

conartist6 wrote: post #319
baby wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone using LLMs daily, it's always interesting to read something about AI being a bubble or just hype. I think you're going to miss the train, I am personally convinced this is the technology of our lifetime.

I'll say it again since I've said it a million times, it can be useful and a bubble. The logic of investors before the last market crash was something like "houses are useful, so no amount of hype around the housing market could be a bubble"

Or, quite similarly, the internet bubble of the large ‘90s

Very obviously the internet is useful, and has radically changed our lives. Also obviously, most of the high stock valuations of the ‘90s didn’t pan out.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#360

Post by ethbr1 »

code_for_monkey wrote: post #317
ethbr1 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we agree that Meta is at minimum the equal of every big tech company?

we agree that at maximum its the equal of every tech company

In what other metrics do other big tech companies exceed it, causing them to be ranked higher?
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