If AI really is a bubble and somehow imploded spectacularly for the rest of this year, universities would continue to spit out AI specialists for years to come. Mr. Z. will keep hiring them into every opening that comes up whether he wants to or not.
Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
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Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#612Why is he always behind the curve, always?
To be fair it worked for him the first time. And for Apple too multiple times for that matter.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#613Earlier 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 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.
This is a bit of a cynical take. Neural networks have been "a thing" for decades. A quick google suggests 1940s. I won't quibble on the timeline but no-one was trying to trick anyone with the name back then, and it just stuck around.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#614I'm somewhere in the middle on this, with regards to the ROI... this isn't the kind of thing where you see immediate reflection on quarterly returns... it's the kind of thing where if you don't hedge some bets, you're likely to completely die out from a generational shift. Facebook's product is eyeballs... they're being usurped on all sides between TikTok, X and BlueSky in terms of daily/regular users... They're comp…
I think apple is fine. When AI works without 1 in 5 hallucinations then it can be added to their product. Showing up late with features that exists elsewhere but are polished in apple presentation is the way.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#615Earlier 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…
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 a…
Oh, like RealPlayer in the late 90's (buffering... buffering...)
Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#616If there is a path to AGI then ROI is going to be enormous literally regardless of how much was invested. hopefully this is another bubble. i would really rather not have my lifes work vaporized by the singularitt
Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#617Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#618Earlier 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…
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…
This is a great example that I hadn't heard of and reminds me of when Nintendo tried to become an ISP when they built the Family Computer Network System in 1988
A16Z once talked about the scars of being too early causes investors/companies to get fixed that an idea will never work. Then some new younger people who never got burned will try the same idea and things will work.
Prodigy and the Faminet probably fall into that bucket along with a lot of early internet companies where they tried things early, got burned and then possibly were too late to capitalise when it was finally the right time for the idea to flourish
Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#619Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a logical fallacy that just because some technology experienced some period of exponential growth, all technology will always experience constant exponential growth. There are plenty of counter-examples to the scaling of computers that occurred from the 1970s-2010s. We thought that humans would be traveling the stars, or at least the solar system, after the space race of the 1960s, but we ended up stuck orbiting…
True, but adoption of AI has certainly seen exponential growth. Improvement of models may not continue to be exponential. But models might be good enough, at this point it seems more like they need integration and context. I could be wrong :)
At what cost though? Most AI operations are losing money, using a lot of power, including massive infrastructure costs, not to mention the hardware costs to get going, and that isn't even covering the level of usage many/most want, and certainly aren't going to pay even $100s/month per person that it currently costs to operate.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#620I 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.
If we're actually headed for a "house of cards" AI crash in a couple months, that actually makes their arrangement with Meta likely more valuable, not less. Meta is a much more diversified company than the AI companies that these folks were poached from. Meta stock will likely be more resilient than AI-company stock in the event of an AI bubble bursting. Moreover, they were offered so much of it that even if it were…
A social media company is more diversified? Maybe compared to anthropic or openai, but not to any of the hyperscalers