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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

#661

Post by azinman2 »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #630
azinman2 wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?”

Meta doesn’t really serve companionship. It used to make Yu connected to others in your social graph, which AI cannot replace. If IG still has the eyeballs, people can put AI generated content on it with or without meta’s permission.

Like with most things, people will want what’s expensive and not what’s cheap. AI is cheap, real humans are not. Why buy diamonds when you can’t tell the difference with cubic zirconia? And yet demand for diamonds only increases.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#662

Post by mschuster91 »

djtango wrote: post #618
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…

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…

Reminds me of Elon not taking a no for an answer. He did it twice, with a massive success.

A true shame to see how he's completely lost track with Tesla, the competition particularly from China is eating them alive. And in space, it's a matter of years until the rest of the world catches up.

And now, he's ran out of tricks - and more importantly, on public support. He can't pivot any more, his entire brand is too toxic to touch.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#663

Post by AngryData »

jiveturkey wrote: post #540
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.

you think folks that have experience managing this much money/resources (unlike yourself) are clueless? more likely it's 4D chess.

Yes, yes I do. How much practical experience does someone with billions of dollars have with the average person, the average employee, the average job, and the kind of skills and desires that normal people possess? How much does today's society and culture and technology resemble society even just 15 years ago? Being a billionaire allows them to put themselves into their own social and cultural bubble surrounded by sycophants.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#664

Post by mschuster91 »

ezst wrote: post #488
ghurtado wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also no evidence that it won't, so your opinion carries exactly the same weight as theirs. > Progress in AI has always been a step function. There's decisively no evidence of that , since whatever measure you use to rate "progress in AI" is bound to be entirely subjective, especially with such a broad statement.

> There's also no evidence that it won't There are signs, though. Every "AI" cycle, ever, has revolved around some algorithmic discovery, followed by a winter in search for the next one. This one is no different and propped up by LLMs, whose limitations we know quite well by now: "intelligence" is elusive, throwing more compute at them produces vastly diminishing returns, throwing more training data at them is no lon…

Oh, I believe that while LLMs are a dead end now, the applications of AI in vision and physical (i.e. robots with limbs) world will usher in yet another wrecking of the lower classes of society.

Just as AI has killed off all demand for lower-skill work in copywriting, translation, design and coding, it will do so for manufacturing. And that will be a dangerous bloodbath because there will not be enough juniors any more to replace seniors aging out or quitting in frustration of being reduced to cleaning up AI crap.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#665

Post by zenonu »

NordSteve wrote: post #624
kens wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Worthy if its own hacker news post. Would love to see it.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#666

Post by makeitdouble »

daheza wrote: post #614
tracker1 wrote: post #601

I'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.

In general I don't think Google or Apple need AI.

In practice though their platform is closed to any other assistant than theirs, so they have to come up with a competent service (basically Ben Thomson's "strategy tax" playing in full)

That question will be moot the day Apple allows other companies to ingest everything's happening on device and operate the whole device in reaction to user's requests, and some company actually does a decent job at it.

Today Google is doing a decent job and Apple isn't.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#668

Post by martinald »

tracker1 wrote: post #619
jopsen wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a really basic way to look at unit economics of inference.

I did some napkin math on this.

32x H100s cost 'retail' rental prices about $2/hr. I would hope that the big AI companies get it cheaper than this at their scale.

These 32 H100s can probably do something on the order of >40,000 tok/s on a frontier scale model (~700B params) with proper batching. Potentially a lot more (I'd love to know if someone has some thoughts on this).

So that's $64/hr or just under $50k/month.

40k tok/s is a lot of usage, at least for non-agentic use cases. There is no way you are losing money on paid chatgpt users at $20/month on these.

You'd still break even supporting ~200 Claude Code-esque agentic users who were using it at full tilt 40% of the day at $200/month.

Now - this doesn't include training costs or staff costs, but on a pure 'opex' basis I don't think inference is anywhere near as unprofitable as people make out.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#669

Post by tschwimmer »

mdemare wrote: post #554
hnfong wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. GP…

Can you provide a reference translation or at least call out the issues you see with this passage? I see "far far away in the [time period]" which I should imagine should be "a long time ago" What are the other issues?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#670

Post by godelski »

aksss wrote: post #548
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What's the old Rockefeller clique? When your shoe shiner is giving you stock advice it is time to sell (may have heard the taxicab driver version).

It depends on how risk adverse you are and how much money you have there.

If you're happy with those returns, sell. FOMO is dumb. You can't time the market, the information just isn't available. If those shares are worth a meaningful amount of money, sell. Take your wins and walk away. A bird in your hand is worth more than two in the bush, right? That money isn't worth anything until it is realized[0].

Think about it this way: how much more would you need to make to risk making nothing? Or losing money? This is probably the most important question when investing.

If you're a little risk adverse or a good chunk of your profile is in it, sell 50-80% of it and then diversify. You're taking wins and restructuring.

If you wanna YOLO, then YOLO.

My advice? Don't let hindsight get in the way of foresight.

[0] I had some Nvidia stocks at 450 and sold at 900 (before the split, so would be $90 today). I definitely would have made more money if I kept them. Almost double if I sold today! But I don't look back for a second. I sold those shares and was able to pay off my student debt. Having this debt paid off is still a better decision in my mind because I can't predict the future. I could have sold 2 weeks later and made less! Or even in April of this year and made the same amount of money.

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