Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears • Hacker News Board

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#631

Post by la64710 » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 9:55 PM UTC

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…

Correction if I may: Lot of AI jobs will disappear. Lot of usual jobs that were put on hold will return. This is good news for most of humankind.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#632

Post by toephu2 » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 9:55 PM UTC

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.

The media always says AI is the biggest technological change of our lifetime.. I think it was the internet actually.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#633

Post by toephu2 » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 9:57 PM UTC

TrackerFF wrote: post #53

I 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.

None of them are getting $100m+ packages. Zuck himself even debunked that myth. But the media loves to run with it because it generates clicks.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#634

Post by TacticalCoder » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 9:57 PM UTC

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…

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#635

Post by slashdev » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 9:58 PM UTC

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #455

me551ah wrote: post #435

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 AGI at a pric…

We are either limited by compute, available training data, or algorithms. You seem to believe we are limited by compute. I've seen other people argue that we are limited by training data. It is my totally inexpert belief that we are substantially limited by algorithms at this point.

I think we might also be limited by energy.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#636

Post by toephu2 » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 9:58 PM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #273

TrackerFF wrote: post #53

I 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.

Its all in RSUs Supposedly, all people that join meta are on the same contract. They also supposedly all have the same RSU vesting schedules as well. That means that these "rockstars" will get a big sign on bonus (but its payable back inside 12 months if they leave) then ~$2m every 3 months in shares

It's not even in RSUs. No SWEs/researchers are getting $100M+ RSU packages. Zuck said the numbers in the media were not accurate.

If you still think they are, do you have any proof? any sources? All of these media articles have zero sources and zero proof. They just ran with it because they heard Sam Altman talk about it and it generates clicks.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#637

Post by HDThoreaun » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 9:58 PM UTC

zeristor wrote: post #286

Didn't Meta invest big into the Metaverse, then back track on that, was it $20 billion. I'd like for these investments to pay off, they're bold but it highlights how deep the pockets are to be able to invest so much.

I havent seen any evidence that meta is backtracking on VR. Theyve got more than enough money to focus on both, in fact they probably need to. Gen AI is a critical complement of the metaverse. Without gen ai metaverse content is too time consuming to make.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#638

Post by toephu2 » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 10:01 PM UTC

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/

"according to people familiar with the matter."

aka, made up. They can make up anything by saying that. There are numerous false articles published by WSJ about Tesla also. I would take what they say here with a grain of salt. Zuck himself said the numbers in the media were widely exaggerated and he wasn't offering these crazy packages as reported.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#639

Post by toephu2 » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 10:02 PM UTC

bilsbie wrote: post #271

I’ve never seen so much evidence for a bubble yet so much potential to be the biggest Thing ever. Just getting a lot of mixed signals right now. Not sure what to think.

I think the internet is bigger than AI.

Without the internet there is no AI.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#640

Post by novembermike » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 10:05 PM UTC

dml2135 wrote: post #443

skeezyboy wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have an overwhelming feeling that what we're trying to do here is "Netflix over DialUp." I totally agree with you... though the other day, I did think the same thing about the 8bit era of video games.

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…

Most growth is actually logistic. An S shaped curve that starts exponential but slows down rapidly as it reaches some asymptote. In fact basically everything we see as exponential in the real world is logistic.