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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

#491

Post by Schiendelman »

sebstefan wrote: post #277
mrits wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we will see the opposite. If we made no progress with LLMs we'd still have huge advancements and growth opportunities enhancing the workflows and tuning them to domain specific tasks.

I agree with this, but how will these companies make money? Short of a breakthrough, the consumer isn't ready to pay for it, and even if they were, open source models just catch up. My feelings are that most of the "huge advancements" are not going to benefit the people selling AI. I'd put my money on those who sell the pickaxes, and the companies who have a way to use this new tech to deliver more value.

The people who make money serving in users will be the one with the best integrations. Those are harder to do, require business relationships, and are massively differentiating.

You'll probably have a player that sells privacy as well.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#492

Post by [deleted] »

KaiserPro wrote: post #273
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.

Its all in RSUs Supposedly, all people that join meta are on the same contract. They also supposedly all have the same RSU vesting schedules as well. That means that these "rockstars" will get a big sign on bonus (but its payable back inside 12 months if they leave) then ~$2m every 3 months in shares

[deleted]

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#493

Post by ssl-3 »

tombert wrote: post #440
dh2022 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite anecdote about Sears is from Starbucks current HQs - the HQs used to be a warehouse for Sears. Before renovation the first floor walls next to the elevators used to have Sears' "commitment to customers" (or something like that). To me it read like it was written by Amazon decades earlier. Something about how Sears promises that customers will be 100% satisfied with the purchase, and if for whatever reason…

Craftsman tools have almost felt like a life-hack sometimes; their no-questions-asked warranties were just incredible. My dad broke a Craftsman shovel once that he had owned for four years, took it to Sears, and it was replaced immediately, no questions asked. I broke a socket wrench that I had owned for a year and had the same story. I haven't tested these warranties since Craftsman was sold to Black and Decker, but…

Lots of tools have lifetime warranties. Harbor Freight's swap process is probably fastest, these days, for folks with one nearby. Tekton's process is also painless, but slower: Send them a photo of the broken tool, and they deliver a new tool to your door.

But I'm not old enough to remember a time when lifetime warranties were unusual. In my lifetimes, a warranty on handtools has always seemed more common than not outside of the bottom-most cheese-grade stuff.

I mean: The Lowes house-brand diagonal cutters I bought for my first real job had a lifetime warranty.

And before my time of being aware of the world, JC Penney sold tools with lifetime warranties.

(I remember being at the mall with my dad when he took a JC Penney-branded screwdriver back to JC Penney -- probably 35 years ago.

He got some pushback from people who insisted that they had never sold tools, and then from people who insisted that they never had warranties, and then he finally found the fellow old person who had worked there long enough to know what to do. Without any hesitation at all, she told us to walk over to Sears, buy a similar Craftsman screwdriver, and come back with a receipt.

So that's what we did.

She took the receipt and gave him his money back.

Good 'nuff.)

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#494

Post by criddell »

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.

But would they be profitable enough? They've taken on more than $50 billion of investment.

I think it's relatively easy for Meta to plow billions into AI. Last quarter their revenue was something like $15 billion. Open AI will be lucky to generate that over the next year.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#496

Post by aaronblohowiak »

mattnewton wrote: post #478
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are either limited by compute, available training data, or algorithms. You seem to believe we are limited by compute. I've seen other people argue that we are limited by training data. It is my totally inexpert belief that we are substantially limited by algorithms at this point.

I think algorithms is a unique limit because it changes how much data or compute you need. For instance, we probably have the algorithms we need to brute force solving more problems today, but they require infeasible compute or data. We can almost certainly train a new 10T parameter mixture of experts that continues to make progress in benchmarks, but it will cost so much to train and be completely undeployable with…

There are a few "hints" that suggest to me algorithms will bear a lot more fruit than compute (in terms of flops):

1) there already exist very efficient algorithms for rigorous problems that LLMs perform terribly at! 2) learning is too slow and is largely offline 3) "llms aren't world models"

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#497

Post by _heimdall »

marcyb5st wrote: post #218
_heimdall wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference I see is that, conversely to websites like pets.com, AI gave the masses something tangible and transformative with the promise it could get even better. The promise is being offered, that's for sure. The product will never get there, LLMs by design will simply never be intelligent. They seem to have been banking on the assumption that human intelligence truly is nothing more than predicting the next…

I agree with you fully. However, even friends/colleagues that like me are in the AI field (I am more into the "ML" side of things) always mention that while it is true that predicting the next token is a poor approximation of intelligence, emergent behaviors can't be discounted. I don't know enough to have an opinion on that, but for sure it keeps people/companies buying GPUs.

> but for sure it keeps people/companies buying GPUs.

That's a tricky metric to use as an indicator though. Companies, and more importantly their investors, are pouring mountains of cash in the industry based on the hope of what AI may be in the future rather than what it is today. There are multiple incentives that could drive the market for GPUs, only a portion of those have to do with today's LLM outputs.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#498

Post by colinsane »

dylan604 wrote: post #366
JKCalhoun wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

wow there's really _zero_ sense of mutual respect in this industry isn't there. it's all just "let's make a buck by being total assholes to everyone around us".

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#500

Post by Karrot_Kream »

ghurtado wrote: post #385
balamatom wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

why is there so much of this on HN? I'm on a few social networks, but this is the only one where I find this kind of quasi-spiritual, stream of consciousness, word length steadily increasing, pseudo-technical, word salad diatribes? It's very unique to this site and these type of comments all have an eerily similar vibe.

This is pretty common on HN but not unique to it. Lots of rationalist adjacent content (like stuff on LessWrong, replies to Scott Alexander's substack, etc) has it also. Here I think it comes from users that try to intellectualize their not-very-intellectual, stream of consciousness style thoughts, as if using technical jargon to convey your feelings makes them more rational and less emotional.
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