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Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

telegraph.co.uk

361–370 of 936 posts

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#361

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).

Giving 1.5 million salary is nothing for these people.

It shouldn’t be mind boggling. They see revolutionary technology that has potential to change the world and is changing the world already. Making a gamble like that is worth it because losing is trivial compared to the upside of success.

You are where you are and not where they are because your mind is boggled by winning strategies that are designed to arrive at success through losing and dancing around the risk of losing.

Obviously mark is where he is also because of luck. But he’s not an idiot and clearly it’s not all luck.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#362

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).

When you start to think about who exactly determines what makes a valuable company, and if you believe in the buffalo herd theory, then it makes a little bit of sense.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1000 people can't get a woman to have a child faster than 1 person. So it depends on the type of problem you're trying to solve. If you're trying to build a bunch of Wendy's locations, it's clearly better to have more construction workers. It's less clear that if you're trying to build SGI that you're better off with 1000 people than 10. It might be! But it might not be, too. Who knows for certain til post-ex?

> 1000 people can't get a woman to have a child faster than 1 person. I always get slightly miffed about business comparisons to gestation: getting 9 women pregnant won't get you a child in 1 month. Sure, if you want one child. But that's not what business is often doing, now is it? The target is never "one child". The target is "10 children", or "100 children" or "1000 children". You are definitely going to overrun…

Ironically, rather than being facile the point of the comparison is to explain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law to people who are clearly not familiar with it.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#364

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.

> on the scale of going to the moon

Of all the examples of things that actually had an impact I would pick this one last... Steam engine, internet, personal computers, radios, GPS, &c. but going to the moon ? The thing we did a few times and stopped doing once we won the ussr vs usa dick contest ?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I view success as the product of three factors, luck, skill and hard work. If any of these is 0, you fail, regardless of how high the other two are. Extraordinary success needs all three to be extremely high.

There is another dimension, which is mostly but not fully characterized as perseverance, but many times with an added dose of ruthlessness Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, google and many others all had strong doses of ruthlessness

Metaverse and this AI turnaround are characterized by the LACK of perseverance, though. They remind me of the time I bought a guitar and played it for three months.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#366
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bubble narrative is coming from the outside. More likely is that the /acquisition/ of Scale has led to an abundance of talent that is being underutilised. If you give managers the option to hire, they will. Freezing hiring while reorganising is a sane strategy regardless of how well you are or are not doing.

Better strategy of course is to quietly freeze hiring. Perhaps that is not an option for a publicly traded company though.

You could just keep having interviews yet never actually hire anyone based on the talent pool is wide but shallow. It results in the same as a freeze, but without the negative connotation to the company while shifting it to the workforce

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#368

I really do wonder if any of those rock star $100m++ hires managed to get a 9-figure sign-on bonus, or if the majority have year(s) long performance clauses. Imagine being paid generational wealth, and then the house of cards comes crashing down a couple of months later.

If we're actually headed for a "house of cards" AI crash in a couple months, that actually makes their arrangement with Meta likely more valuable, not less. Meta is a much more diversified company than the AI companies that these folks were poached from. Meta stock will likely be more resilient than AI-company stock in the event of an AI bubble bursting. Moreover, they were offered so much of it that even if it were to crash 50%, they'd still be sitting on $50M-$100M+ of stock.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven’t been there in a while, did they figure out how to give people, I don’t know, legs and stuff?

You will have no genitals, and you will like it.

But genitals is like, the whole point of VR!

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1000 people can't get a woman to have a child faster than 1 person. I always get slightly miffed about business comparisons to gestation: getting 9 women pregnant won't get you a child in 1 month. Sure, if you want one child. But that's not what business is often doing, now is it? The target is never "one child". The target is "10 children", or "100 children" or "1000 children". You are definitely going to overrun…

>> Sure, if you want one child. But that's not what business is often doing, now is it? Your designing one thing. You're building one plant. Yes, you'll make and sell millions of widgets in the end but the system that produces them? Just one. Engineering teams do become less efficient above some size.

>> Your designing one thing.

You might well be making 100 AI babies, and seeing which one turns out to be the genius.

We shouldn’t assume that the best way to do research is just through careful, linear planning and design. Sometimes you need to run a hundred experiments before figuring out which one will work. Smart and well-designed experiments, yes, but brute force + decent theory can often solve problems faster than just good theory alone.

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