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Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

telegraph.co.uk

411–420 of 936 posts

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#411

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.

Must feel real good to get a golden ticket out of the bubble collapse when it's this imminent.

Is it imminent? Reading the article, the only thing that's actually changed is that the CEO has stopped hand-picking AI hires and has placed that responsibility on Alexandr Wang instead. The rest is just fluff to turn it into an article. The tech sector being down is happening in concert with the non-tech sector sliding too.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#412
post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of Netflix - I think the image, video, audio, world model, diffusion domains should be treated 100% separately from LLMs. They are not the same thing. Image and video AI is nothing short of revolutionary. It's already having huge impact and it's disrupting every single business it touches. I've spoken with hundreds of medium and large businesses about it. They're changing how they bill clients and budget pro…

As long as you do not make ads with four-fingered hands, like those clowns ... :) https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/chroniques/2025-07-08/polemique...

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/23/nx-s1-5432712/ai-video-ad-kal...

Typical large team $300,000 ad made for It's going to be a bloodbath.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have an overwhelming feeling that what we're trying to do here is "Netflix over DialUp." I totally agree with you... though the other day, I did think the same thing about the 8bit era of video games.

Speaking of Netflix - I think the image, video, audio, world model, diffusion domains should be treated 100% separately from LLMs. They are not the same thing. Image and video AI is nothing short of revolutionary. It's already having huge impact and it's disrupting every single business it touches. I've spoken with hundreds of medium and large businesses about it. They're changing how they bill clients and budget pro…

I see the point at the moment on “low quality advertising”, but we are still far from high quality video generated for AI.

It’s the equivalent of those cheap digital effects. They look bad for a Hollywood movie, but it allows students to shot their action home movies

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#414

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…

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…

Or maybe not. Scaling AI will require an exponential increase in compute and processing power, and even the current LLM models take up a lot of resources. We are already at the limit of how small we can scale chips and Moore’s law is already dead.

So newer chips will not be exponentially better but will be more of incremental improvements, so unless the price of electricity comes down exponentially we might never see AGI at a price point that’s cheaper than hiring a human.

Most companies are already running AI models at a loss, scaling the models to be bigger(like GPT 4.5) only makes them more expensive to run.

The reason why internet, smartphones and computers have seen exponential growth from the 90s is due to underlying increase in computing power. I personally used a 50Mhz 486 in the 90s and now use a 8c/16t 5Ghz CPU. I highly doubt if we will see the same form of increase in the next 40 years

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of Netflix - I think the image, video, audio, world model, diffusion domains should be treated 100% separately from LLMs. They are not the same thing. Image and video AI is nothing short of revolutionary. It's already having huge impact and it's disrupting every single business it touches. I've spoken with hundreds of medium and large businesses about it. They're changing how they bill clients and budget pro…

I see the point at the moment on “low quality advertising”, but we are still far from high quality video generated for AI. It’s the equivalent of those cheap digital effects. They look bad for a Hollywood movie, but it allows students to shot their action home movies

You're looking at individual generations. These tools aren't for casual users expecting to 1-shot things.

The value is in having a director, editor, VFX compositor pick and choose from amongst the outputs. Each generation is a single take or simulation, and you're going to do hundreds or thousands. You sift through that and explore the latent space, and that's where you find your 5-person Pixar.

Human curated AI is an exoskeleton that enables small teams to replace huge studios.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I was in the metaverse just now. I took my headset off though — could you please repeat that?

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

Yes

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#417

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…

> A couple of years ago, I asked a financial investment person about AI as a trick question.

Why do you assume this people know any better than average Joe on the street?

Study after study demonstrates they can't even keep up with the market benchmarks, how would they be any wiser to tell you what's a fad or not.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#418
post #215

META has only made $78.7 billion operating income in the past 12 months of returns. Time to buckle up! https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META/financials/

how does this compare to the depreciation cost of their datacenters?

The financials from the link to not specifically call out Depreciation Expense. But Operating Income should take into account Depreciation Expense.

The financials have a line below Net Income Line called "Reconciled depreciation" with about $16.7 billion. I do not know what that means (maybe this is how they get to the EBITDA metric) but maybe this is the metric you are looking for.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#419

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).

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…

But how is it worth for meta, since they won't really monetize it.

At least the others can kinda bundle it as a service.

After spending tens of billions in AI how has it impacted a single dollar on meta's revenue?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying the ad revenue sort of allows them to "be their own bank?" Then they can bankroll their own new entrepreneurial ideas risk-free, essentially.

They are a publicly traded company, shareholders are their bank.

What's a buyback?
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