Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

Post by epolanski » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

gdbsjjdn wrote: post #158

TrackerFF wrote: post #53

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.

I'm sure everyone is doing just fine financially, but I think it's common knowledge that these kind of comp packages are usually a mix of equity and cash earned out over multiple years with bonuses contingent on milestones, etc. The eye-popping top-line number is insane but it's also unlikely to be fully realized.

Post by bob1029 » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 4:51 PM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #276

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…

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…

Post by chatmasta » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

boringg wrote: post #257

chatmasta wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So wage suppression is good because it’s better for the _collective_?

Wage suppression? Its the opposite were talking about here. Pay large amounts of money to make sure people don't work on challenging problems. But sure you cant try and argue that's wage suppression.

Post by UncleMeat » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:00 PM UTC

alpha_squared wrote: post #259

UncleMeat wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that meta is bad for the world and that zuck has made a lot of huge mistakes but calling him a one hit wonder doesn't sit right with me. Facebook made the transition to mobile faster than other competitors and successfully kept G+ from becoming competition. The instagram purchase felt insane at the time ($1b to share photos) but facebook was able to convert it into a moneymaking juggernaut in time for the fla…

No one else is adding the context of where things were at the time in tech... > The instagram purchase felt insane at the time ($1b to share photos) but facebook was able to convert it into a moneymaking juggernaut in time for the flattened growth of their flagship application. Facebook's API was incredibly open and accessible at the time and Instagram was overtaking users' news feeds. Zuckerberg wasn't happy that an…

Post by epicureanideal » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:04 PM UTC

HDThoreaun wrote: post #348

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this works, as the costs of running inference is so much higher than the revenues earned by the frontier labs. Anthropic and OpenAI don't continue to exist long-term in a world where GPT-5 and Claude 4.1 cost-quality models are SOTA.

With gpt5 I’m not sure this is true. Certainly openAI is still losing money but if they stopped research and just focused on productionizing inference use cases I think they’d be profitable.