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

671–680 of 936 posts

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#671

Post by tombert »

esaym wrote: post #552
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.

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...

At a previous job I worked under a guy who started his own ISP in the early 90’s. I would have loved to have been part of that scene but I was only like four when that happened.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#672

Post by qeternity »

Jagerbizzle wrote: post #646
oblio wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch. Other FAANG in a similar position?

I guess there's no 'M' in "FAANG" but there's this: https://www.geekwire.com/2025/im-good-for-my-80-billion-what...

FAANG has been replaced by Mag7: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#673

Post by armada651 »

jimbokun wrote: post #625
armada651 wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yes, it still gives people headaches because the convergence-accommodation conflict remains unsolved. We have a few different technologies to address that, but they're expensive, don't fully address the issue, and none of them have moved beyond the prototype stage.

Motion sickness can be mostly addressed with game design, but some people will still get sick regardless of what you try. Mind you, some people also get motion sick by watching a first-person shooter on a flat screen, so I'm not sure we'll ever get to a point where no one ever gets motion sick in VR.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#674

Post by godelski »

BrawnyBadger53 wrote: post #653
aksss wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personal opinion, I'm bearish on the shovel seller long term because the companies that are training AI are likely to build their own hardware. Google already does this. Seems like a matter of time for the rest of the mag 7 to join. The rest of the buyers aren't growing enough to offset that loss imo.

FWIW, Nvidia's moat isn't hardware and they know this (they even talk about it). Hardware wise AMD is neck and neck with them, but AMD still doesn't have a CUDA equivalent. CUDA is the moat. As painful as it is to use, there's a long way to go for companies like AMD to compete here. Their software is still pretty far behind, despite their rapid and impressive advancements. It will also take time to get developer experience to saturate within the market, and that will likely mean AMD needs some good edge over Nvidia, like adding things Nvidia can't do or being much more cost competitive. And that's not something like adding more VRAM or just taking smaller profit margins because Nvidia can respond to those fairly easily.

That said, I still suggested the parent sell. Real money is better than potential money. Classic gambler's fallacy, right? FOMO is letting hindsight get in the way of foresight.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#675

Post by sarthaksingh99 »

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.

We are limited by both compute and available training data.

If all we wanted was to train bigger and bigger models we have more than enough compute to last us for years.

Where we lack compute is in scaling the AI to consumers. Current models take too much power and specialized hardware to be be profitable. If AI was able to improve your productivity by 20-30% percent but it costed you even 10% of your monthly salary, none would use it. I have used up $10 worth of credits using claude code in an hour multiple times. Assuming I use it continuously for 8 hours every day in a month, 10 * 8 * 24 = $1920. So its not that far off the current costs or running the models. If the size of the models scales faster than the speed of the inference hardware, the problem is only going to get worse.

I too believe that we will eventually discover an algorithm that gives us AGI. The problem is that we cannot will a breakthrough. We can make one more likely by investing more and more into AI but breakthroughs and research in general by their nature are unpredictable.

I think investing in new individual ideas is very important and gives us lot of good returns. Investing in a field in general hoping to see a breakthrough is a fool's errand in my opinion.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#676

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

krona wrote: post #153
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.

Taking rockstar players 'off the pitch' is the best way second-rate competitors can neutralize their opponents' advantage.

Who would be the first-rate companies in this analogy?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#677

Post by alex1138 »

librasteve wrote: post #101
UncleMeat wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that meta is bad for the world and that zuck has made a lot of huge mistakes but calling him a one hit wonder doesn't sit right with me. Facebook made the transition to mobile faster than other competitors and successfully kept G+ from becoming competition. The instagram purchase felt insane at the time ($1b to share photos) but facebook was able to convert it into a moneymaking juggernaut in time for the fla…

Whatsapp was also an inspired move

Yeah and also much deserving of antitrust

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#678

Post by janalsncm »

h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote: post #629
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.

By definition, transformers can never exceed average. That is the thing, and what companies pushing LLMs don't seem to realize yet.

Can you expand on this? For tasks with verifiable rewards you can improve with rejection sampling and search (i.e. test time compute). For things like creative writing it’s harder.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#679

Post by rafaelmn »

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.

Have you used Siri recently ? It's actually amazing how it can be crap at tasks consistently considering underlying tech. 1 in 5 hallucinations would be a welcome improvement.

Using ChatGPT voice mode and Siri makes Siri feel like a legacy product.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#680

Post by fragmede »

matthewn wrote: post #622
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.

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...

The untold story, is the names of individuals fighting office politics that lead to that (not) happening.
Post reply on HN