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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

#511

Post by spjt »

lukeschlather wrote: post #392
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 have never heard of anyone getting a sign on bonus that was unconditional. When I have had signing bonuses they were owed back prorated if my employment ended for any reason in the first year.

Are most people that money hungry? I wouldn't expect someone like Zuckerberg to understand, but if I ever got to more than a couple million dollars, I'm never doing anything else for the sake of making more money again.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#512

Post by wyre »

Jensson wrote: post #468
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw LLMs are also revolutionary. There's currently more anti-AI hype than AI hype imho. As in there's literally people claiming it's completely useless and not going to change a thing. Which is crazy.

One sides extremes says LLM wont change a thing, the other sides extremes says LLM will end the world. I don't think the ones saying it wont change a thing are the most extreme here.

Luckily for humanity reality is somewhere in between extremes, right?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#513

Post by neaden »

echelon wrote: post #412
realo wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This ad was purposefully playing off the fact that it was AI though, it was a large amount of short bizarre things like two old women selling Fresh Manatee out of the back of a truck. You couldn't replace a regular ad with this.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#514

Post by isoprophlex »

renecito wrote: post #447

Mission accomplished: who'd tell disrupting your competition poaching their talent and erasing value (giving it away for free) would make people realize there is no long term value in the core technology itself. Don't get me wrong, we are moving to commoditization, as any new tech it'd be transparent to our lifestyle and a lot of money will be done as an industry, but it'd be hard to compete as a core business compet…

Whoa that's actually a brilliant strategy: accelerate the hype first by offering 100M comp packages, then stop hiring and strategically drop a few "yeah bubble's gonna pop soon" rumours. Great way to fuck with your competition, especially if you're meta and you're not in the lead yourself

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#515

Post by lostlogin »

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…

> 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.

This is covered by consumer protection laws in some places. 4 years on a spade would be pushing it, but I’d try with a good one. Here in New Zealand it’s called ‘The Consumer Guarantees Act’. We pay more at purchase time, but we do get something for it.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#516

Post by penteract »

fluoridation wrote: post #464
mindcrime wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scaling AI will require an exponential increase in compute and processing power, A small quibble... I'd say that's true only if you accept as an axiom that current approaches to AI are "the" approach and reject the possibility of radical algorithmic advances that completely change the game. For my part, I have a strongly held belief that there is such an algorithmic advancement "out there" waiting to be discovered, t…

If we suppose that ANNs are more or less accurate models of real neural networks, the reason why they're so inefficient is not algorithmic, but purely architectural. They're just software. We have these huge tables of numbers and we're trying to squeeze them as hard as possible through a relatively small number of multipliers and adders. Meanwhile, a brain can perform a trillion fundamental simultaneously because eve…

If you account for the fact that biological neurons operate at a much lower frequency than silicon processors, then the raw performance gets much closer. From what I can find, neuron membrane time constant is around 10ms [1], meaning 10 billion neurons could have 1 trillion activations per second, which is in the realm of modern hardware.

People mentioned in [2] have done the calculations from a more informed position than I have, and reach numbers like 10^17 FLOPS when doing a calculation that resembles this one.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/fast-efficient-neural-networks-cop...

[2] https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#518

Post by quantified »

ericd wrote: post #480
benterix wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Ability vastly increases your luck surface area. A single poker hand has a lot of luck, and even a game, but over long periods, ability starts to strongly differentiate peoples' results.

Win a monster pot and you can play a lot of more interesting hands.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#519

Post by benzible »

bemmu wrote: post #407
zeristor wrote: post #286

Didn't Meta invest big into the Metaverse, then back track on that, was it $20 billion. I'd like for these investments to pay off, they're bold but it highlights how deep the pockets are to be able to invest so much.

They're still on it though. The new headset prototypes with high FOV sound amazing, and they are iterating on many designs. They're already doing something like ~$500M/year in Meta Quest app sales. Granted not huge yet after their 30% cut, but sales should keep increasing as the headsets get better.

That'll pay for 50% of an AI researcher!

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#520

Post by asadotzler »

eep_social wrote: post #297
zeristor wrote: post #286

Didn't Meta invest big into the Metaverse, then back track on that, was it $20 billion. I'd like for these investments to pay off, they're bold but it highlights how deep the pockets are to be able to invest so much.

> was it $20 billion more like 40, yes

More like $80B
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