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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

#621

Post by jimbokun »

dh2022 wrote: post #408
tombert wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

The Sears Catalog was the Amazon of its day.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#622

Post by matthewn »

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.

For more on this -- and how Sears had everything it needed (and more) to be what Amazon became -- see this comment from a 2007 MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Declin...

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#623

Post by Melatonic »

ben_w wrote: post #206
indoordin0saur wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard of high 7-figure salaries but no 9 figure salaries. Source for this?

"Why Andrew Tulloch Turned Down a $1.5 Billion Offer From Mark Zuckerberg" - https://techiegamers.com/andrew-tulloch-rejects-zuckerberg/

That seems insane - even over 6 years. Maybe he was offered 1.5 billion in funding for the work itself ?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#624

Post by NordSteve »

kens wrote: post #557
tombert wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bought my IBM PC from Sears back in the day. Still have the receipt.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#625

Post by jimbokun »

armada651 wrote: post #539
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…

> 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.

Is it still giving people headaches and making them nauseous?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#626

Post by whodidntante »

woooooo wrote: post #365
whodidntante wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another dimension, which is mostly but not fully characterized as perseverance, but many times with an added dose of ruthlessness Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, google and many others all had strong doses of ruthlessness

Metaverse and this AI turnaround are characterized by the LACK of perseverance, though. They remind me of the time I bought a guitar and played it for three months.

True, but I was around and saw first hand how Zuckerberg dominated social networking. He was pretty ruthless when it came to both business and technology, and he instilled in his team a religious fervor.

There is luck (and skill) involved when new industries form, with one or a very small handful of companies surviving the many dozens of hopefuls. The ones who do survive, however, are usually the most ruthlessness and know how to leverage skill, business, markets.

It does not mean that they can repeat their success when their industry changes or new opportunities come up.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#627

Post by HDThoreaun »

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.

When you hit on 12 in blackjack and go bust is it a mistake or a gamble? No one can tell the future.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#628

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#629

Post by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t »

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.

By definition, transformers can never exceed average.

That is the thing, and what companies pushing LLMs don't seem to realize yet.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#630

Post by hdgvhicv »

azinman2 wrote: post #465
hbosch wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Everything zuck has done since the "dawn of AI" has been to intentionally subvert and sabotage existing AI players, because otherwise Meta would be too far behind. In the same way that AI threatens Search, we are seeing emergently that AI is also threatening social networks --…

> AI is very much an existential threat to Meta. How so?

“you can get companionship, advice, information, emotional validation, etc. directly from an AI. People are forming serious relationships with these things in as much a real way as you would with anyone else on Facebook or Instagram. Not to mention, how long before most of the "people" on those platforms are AI themselves?”
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