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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

#541

Post by skywhopper »

baby wrote: post #304
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…

As someone using LLMs daily, it's always interesting to read something about AI being a bubble or just hype. I think you're going to miss the train, I am personally convinced this is the technology of our lifetime.

How are you using it? The execs and investors believe the road to profit is by getting rid of your role in the process. Do you think that’d be possible?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#542

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ »

epolanski wrote: post #421
gdbsjjdn wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point isn't doing fine financially, it's having left multi million dollar startups as founders. In essence, they have left stellar projects with huge money potential for the corporate rat race, albeit at important $.

They’re pretty sophisticated people and weighed the trades. It’s not as if they’re deserving of any sort of sympathy.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#543

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

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…

> 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)

If you had actually invested in AI pure players and Nvidia, the shovel seller, a couple years ago and were selling today, you would have made a pretty penny.

The hard thing with potential bubbles is not entirely avoiding them, it’s being there early enough and not being left at the end holding the bag.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#544

Post by jstummbillig »

epolanski wrote: post #421
gdbsjjdn wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point isn't doing fine financially, it's having left multi million dollar startups as founders. In essence, they have left stellar projects with huge money potential for the corporate rat race, albeit at important $.

I think we are stretching the term "corporate rat race" a bit in this case.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#545

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ »

spjt wrote: post #511
lukeschlather wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a very weird take. Lots of people want to actively work on things that are interesting to them or impactful to the world. Places like Meta potentially give the opportunity to work on the most impactful and interesting things, potentially in human history.

Setting that aside, even if the work was boring, I would jump at the chance to earn $100M for several years of white collar, cushy work, purely for the impact I could have on the world with that money.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#546

Post by gspencley »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #394
GoatInGrey wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are welcome to share how AI has transformed a revenue generating role. Personally, I have never seen a durable example of it, despite my excitement with the tech. In my world, AI has been little more than a productivity boost in very narrowly scoped areas. For instance, generating an initial data mapping of source data against a manually built schema for the individual to then review and clean up. In this case, A…

What you've described is reasonable and a clear takeaway is that AI is a timesaving tool you should learn. Where i share concern with the parent is the claims that AI is useless which isn't coming from your post at all but i have definitely seen instances of it in the programmer community still to this day. As in the parents concern that some programmers are missing the train is unfortunately completely warranted.

I went through the parents, looking for a claim somewhere that AI was "useless." I couldn't find it.

Yes there are lots of skeptics amongst programmers when it comes to AI. I was one myself (and still am depending on what we're talking about). My skepticism was rooted in the fact that AI is trained on human-generated output. Most human written code is not very good, and so AI is going to produce not very good code by design because that's what it was trained on.

Then you add to that the context problem. AI is not very good at understanding your business goals, or the nuanced intricacies of your problem domain.

All of this pointed to the fact, very early on, that AI would not be a good tool to replace programmers. And THAT'S the crux of why so many programmers pushed back. Because the hype was claiming that automation was coming for engineering jobs.

I have started to use LLMs regularly for a variety of tasks. Including some with engineering. But I always end up spending a lot of time refactoring what LLMs produce for me, code-wise. And much of the time I find that I"m still learning what the LLMs can do for me that truly saves me time, vs what would have been faster to just write myself in the first place.

LLMs are not useless. But if only 20% of a programmer's time is actually spent writing code on average then even if you can net a 50% increase in coding productivity... you're only netting a 10% overall productivity optimization for an engineer BEST CASE SCENARIO.

And that's not "useless" but compared to the hype and bullshit coming out of the mouths of CEOs, it's as good as useless. It's as good as the MIT study finding that only 5% of generative AI projects have netted ANY measurable returns for the business.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#547

Post by bcrosby95 »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #543
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…

> 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) If you had actually invested in AI pure players and Nvidia, the shovel seller, a couple years ago and were selling today, you would have made a pretty penny. The hard thing with potential bubble…

Financial advisors usually work on wholistic plans not short term ones. It isn't about timing markets its about a steady hand that doesn't panic and makes sure you don't get caught with your pants down when you need cash.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#548

Post by aksss »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #543
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…

> 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) If you had actually invested in AI pure players and Nvidia, the shovel seller, a couple years ago and were selling today, you would have made a pretty penny. The hard thing with potential bubble…

Are you bearish on the shovel seller? Is now the time to sell out? I'm still +40% on nvda - quite late to the game but people still seem to be buying the shovels.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#550

Post by foobarian »

me551ah wrote: post #414
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…

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…

> Scaling AI will require an exponential increase in compute and processing power,

I think there is something more happening with AI scaling; I think the scaling factor per user is a lot higher and a lot more expensive. Compare to the big initial internet companies. You added one server you could handle thousands more users; incremental cost was very low, not to mention the revenue captured through whatever adtech means. Not so with AI workloads; they are so much more expensive than ad revenue it's hard to break even even with an actual paid subscription.

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