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

551–560 of 936 posts

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#551

Post by fluoridation »

penteract wrote: post #534
eikenberry wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 multi…

>I haven't heard anything about biological systems doing something comparable to backpropogation

The brain isn't organized into layers like ANNs are. It's a general graph of neurons and cycles are probably common.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#552

Post by esaym »

tombert wrote: post #376
bryanlarsen wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people even figured it out in the 80's. Sears founded and ran Prodigy, a large BBS and eventually ISP. They were trying to set themselves up to become Amazon. Not only that, Prodigy's thing (for a while) was using advertising revenue to lower subscription prices. Your "Netflix over dialup" analogy is more accessible to this readership, but Sears+Prodigy is my favorite example of trying to make the future happen…

Today I learned that Sears founded Prodigy! Amazing how far that company has fallen; they were sort of a force to be reckoned with in the 70's and 80's with Craftsman and Allstate and Discover and Kenmore and a bunch of other things, and now they're basically dead as far as I can tell.

There were quite a few small ISP's in the 1990's. Even Bill Gothard[0] had one.

[0]https://web.archive.org/web/19990208003742/http://characterl...

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#553

Post by whatevertrevor »

lokar wrote: post #391
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.

That’s an anecdote about intensity, not volume. The extremes on both sides are indeed very extreme (no value, replacing most white collar jobs next year). IME the volume is overwhelming on the pro-LLM side.

Yeah the conversation on both extremes feels almost religious at times. The pro LLM hype feels more disconcerting sometimes because there are literally billions if not trillions of dollars riding on this thing, so people like Sam Altman have a strong incentive to hype the shit out of it.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#554

Post by mdemare »

hnfong wrote: post #533
deegles wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Exactly. Books are still being translated by human translators.

I have a text on my computer, the first couple of paragraphs from the Dutch novel "De aanslag", and every few years I feed it to the leading machine translation sites, and invariably, the results are atrocious. Don't get me wrong, the translation is quite understandable, but the text is wooden, and the translation contains 3 or 4 translation blunders.

GPT-5 output for example:

Far, far away in the Second World War, a certain Anton Steenwijk lived with his parents and his brother on the edge of Haarlem. Along a quay, which ran for a hundred meters beside the water and then, with a gentle curve, turned back into an ordinary street, stood four houses not far apart. Each surrounded by a garden, with their small balconies, bay windows, and steep roofs, they had the appearance of villas, although they were more small than large; in the upstairs rooms, all the walls slanted. They stood there with peeling paint and somewhat dilapidated, for even in the thirties little had been done to them. Each bore a respectable, bourgeois name from more carefree days: Welgelegen Buitenrust Nooitgedacht Rustenburg Anton lived in the second house from the left: the one with the thatched roof. It already had that name when his parents rented it shortly before the war; his father had first called it Eleutheria or something like that, but then written in Greek letters. Even before the catastrophe occurred, Anton had not understood the name Buitenrust as the calm of being outside, but rather as something that was outside rest—just as extraordinary does not refer to the ordinary nature of the outside (and still less to living outside in general), but to something that is precisely not ordinary.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#555

Post by ghurtado »

balamatom wrote: post #457
ghurtado wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>why is there so much of this on HN? Where?

Hacker News

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#556

Post by whatevertrevor »

dingnuts wrote: post #439
echelon wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

oh no the poor advertisers

Cheaper poorer quality ads means a bad time for us, people who are being incessantly targeted by this crap.

Websites are already finding creative ways around DNS blocklists for ads serving.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#557

Post by kens »

tombert wrote: post #376
bryanlarsen wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people even figured it out in the 80's. Sears founded and ran Prodigy, a large BBS and eventually ISP. They were trying to set themselves up to become Amazon. Not only that, Prodigy's thing (for a while) was using advertising revenue to lower subscription prices. Your "Netflix over dialup" analogy is more accessible to this readership, but Sears+Prodigy is my favorite example of trying to make the future happen…

Today I learned that Sears founded Prodigy! Amazing how far that company has fallen; they were sort of a force to be reckoned with in the 70's and 80's with Craftsman and Allstate and Discover and Kenmore and a bunch of other things, and now they're basically dead as far as I can tell.

On the topic of how Sears used to be high-tech: back in 1981, when IBM introduced the IBM PC, it was the first time that they needed to sell computers through retail. So they partnered with Sears, along with the Computerland chain of computer stores, since Sears was considered a reasonable place for a businessperson to buy a computer. To plan this, meetings were held at the Sears Tower, which was the world's tallest building at the time.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#558

Post by frmersdog »

KerrAvon wrote: post #476
dehrmann wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't wrong. Its core business in what is still a viable-enough sector collapsed. Or if it were truly well-managed, running an ISP and a retailer should have been enough insight to be Amazon.

It wasn't possible for them to be well managed at the time it mattered. Sears was loaded with debt by private equity ghouls; same story for almost all defunct brick and mortar businesses; Amazon was a factor, but private equity is what actually destroyed them.

And, knowing Jeff Bezos' private equity origins, one could be forgiven for entertaining the thought that none of this was an accident. Just don't be an idiot and, you know, give voice to that thought or anything.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#559

Post by ghurtado »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #500
ghurtado wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you.

I find this type of thing really interesting from a psychological perspective.

A bit like watching videos of perpetual motion machines and the like. Probably says more about me than it does about them, though.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#560

Post by matthewdgreen »

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…

As someone who was a customer of Netflix from the dialup to broadband world, I can tell you that this stuff happens much faster than you expect. With AI we're clearly in the "it really works, but there are kinks and scaling problems" of, say, streaming video in 2001 -- whereas I think you mean to indicate we're trying to do Netflix back in the 1980s where the tech for widespread broadband was just fundamentally not available.
Post reply on HN