Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

telegraph.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 936 posts

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#531

Post by jopsen »

ethbr1 wrote: post #155
code_for_monkey wrote: post #147

what happened to the metaverse??? I thought we finally had legs! Seriously why does anyone take this company seriously? Its gotta be the worst of the big tech, besides maybe anything Elon touches, and even then...

1. They've developed and open sourced incredibly useful and cool tech 2. They have some really smart people working there 3. They're well run from a business/financial perspective, especially considering their lack of a hardware platform 4. They've survived multiple paradigm shifts, and generally picked the right bets Among other things.

0. Many people use Facebook messenger as primary contact book.

Even my parents are on Facebook messenger.

Convincing people to use signal is not easy, and there are lots of people I talk to whose phone number I don't have.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#532

Post by raydev »

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…

> 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

Or the more likely explanation is that they feel they've completed the hiring necessary to figure out what's next.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#533

Post by hnfong »

deegles wrote: post #523
miki123211 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do Are we though? Aside from a narrow set of tasks like translation, grammar, and tone-shifting, LLMs are a dead end. Code generation sucks. Agents suck. They still hallucinate. If you wouldn't trust its medical advice without review from an actual doctor, why would you trust its advice on anything else? Also, the companies trying to "fix" issues with LLMs wit…

I have a feeling that you believe "translation, grammar, and tone-shifting" works but "code generation sucks" for LLMs because you're good at coding and hence you see its flaws, and you're not in the business of doing translation etc.

Pretty sure if you're going to use LLMs for translating anything non-trivial, you'd have to carefully review the outputs, just like if you're using LLMs to write code.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#534

Post by penteract »

eikenberry wrote: post #486
fluoridation wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we suppose that ANNs are more or less accurate models of real neural networks [..] IANNs were inspired by biological neural structures and that's it. They are not representative models at all, even of the "less" variety. Dedicated hardware will certainly help, but no insights into how much it can help will come from this sort of comparison.

Could you explain your claim that ANNs are nothing like real neural networks beyond their initial inspiration (if you'll accept my paraphrasing). I've seen it a few times on HN, and I'm not sure what people mean by it.

By my very limited understanding of neural biology, neurons activate according to inputs that are mostly activations of other neurons. A dot product of weights and inputs (i.e. one part of matrix multiplication) together with a threshold-like function doesn't seem like a horrible way to model this. On the other hand, neurons can get a bit fancier than a linear combination of inputs, and I haven't heard anything about biological systems doing something comparable to backpropogation, but I'd like to know whether we understand enough to say for sure that they don't.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#535

Post by hnfong »

rs186 wrote: post #387
cm2012 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a company that replaced their sales call center with an AI calling bot instead. The bot got better sales and higher feedback scores from customers.

And I happen to know a different company that regrets their decision to do something similar: https://tech.co/news/klarna-reverses-ai-overhaul Is my anecdotal evidence any better than yours?

I'm going to interpret the two stories as "50% businesses find LLMs useful" (sample size 2).

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#536

Post by 369548684892826 »

isoprophlex wrote: post #514
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

But if Meta believe it's a bubble then why not let the competition continue to waste their money pumping it up? How does popping it early benefit Meta?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#537

Post by FlyingBears »

baxtr wrote: post #399

Make a mistake once, it’s misjudgment. Repeat it, it’s incompetence? Meta nearly doubled its headcount in 2020 and 2021, assuming the pandemic growth would continue. However, Zuckerberg later admitted this was a mistake.

So did everyone else ...

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#538

Post by chasd00 »

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 we suppose that ANNs are more or less accurate models of real neural networks

i believe the problem is we don't understand actual neurons let alone actual networks of neurons to even know if any model is accurate or not. The AI folks cleverly named their data structures "neuron" and "neural network" to make it seem like we do.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#539

Post by armada651 »

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…

> The groundwork has been laid, and it's not too hard to see the shape of things to come.

The groundwork for VR has also been laid and it's not too hard to see the shape of things to come. Yet VR hasn't moved far beyond the previous hype cycle 10 years ago, because some problems are just really, really hard to solve.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#540

Post by jiveturkey »

seu wrote: post #422

These changes in direction (spending billions, freezing hiring) over just a few months show that these people are as clueless as to what's going to happen with AI, as everyone else. They just have the billions and therefore dictate where money goes, but that's it.

you think folks that have experience managing this much money/resources (unlike yourself) are clueless? more likely it's 4D chess.
Post reply on HN