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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

#691

Post by duderific »

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…

Wow, I hadn't thought about Computerland for quite a while. That was my go-to to kill some time at the mall when I was a teen.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#692

Post by snickerbockers »

StarterPro wrote: post #578

Its almost like nobody asked for the dramatic push of ai, and it was all created by billionaires trying to become even richer at the cost of people's health and the environment.

I still have yet to see it do anything useful. I've seen several very impressive "parlor tricks" which a decade ago i thought were impossible (image generation, text-parsing, arguably passing the turing-test) but I still haven't seen anybody use AI in a way that solves a real problem which doesn't already have an existing solution.

I will say that grok is a very useful research assistant for situations where you understand what you're looking at but you're at an impasse because you don't know what its name is and are therefore unable to look it up, but then it's just an incremental improvement over search-engines rather than a revolutionary new technology.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#693

Post by duderific »

armada651 wrote: post #673
jimbokun wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> Mind you, some people also get motion sick by watching a first-person shooter on a flat screen

Yep I'm that guy. I blame it on being old.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#694

Post by scheme271 »

penteract wrote: post #534
eikenberry wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we suppose that ANNs are more or less accurate models of real neural networks [..] IANNs were inspired by biological neural structures and that's it. They are not representative models at all, even of the "less" variety. Dedicated hardware will certainly help, but no insights into how much it can help will come from this sort of comparison.

Could you explain your claim that ANNs are nothing like real neural networks beyond their initial inspiration (if you'll accept my paraphrasing). I've seen it a few times on HN, and I'm not sure what people mean by it. By my very limited understanding of neural biology, neurons activate according to inputs that are mostly activations of other neurons. A dot product of weights and inputs (i.e. one part of matrix multi…

Neurons don't just work on electrical potentials, they also have a multiple whole systems of neurotransmitters that affect their operation. So I don't think their activation is a continuous function. Although I suppose we could use non-continuous functions for activations in a NN, I don't think there's an easy way to train a NN that does that.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#695

Post by tracker1 »

martinald wrote: post #668
tracker1 wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My thought is closer to the developer user who would want to have their codebase as part of the queries along with heavy use all day long... which is closer to my point that many users are less likely to spend hundreds a month, at least with the current level of results people get.

That said, you could be right, considering Claude max's price is $100/mo... but I'm not sure where that is in terms of typical, or top 5% usage and the monthly allowance/usage.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#696

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

rafaelmn wrote: post #679
daheza wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t think that’s the point. Yes, Siri is crap, but Apple is already working on integrating LLMs at the OS level and those are shipping soon. It’s a quick fix to catch up in the AI game, but considering their track record, they’re likely to eventually retire third party partnerships and vertically integrate with their own models in the future. The incentive is there—doing so will only boost their stock price.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#697

Post by postalrat »

toephu2 wrote: post #632
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.

I believe it's the biggest change since the Internet but what will be bigger will probably remain subjective.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#698

Post by tracker1 »

mvdtnz wrote: post #689
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…

> they're being usurped on all sides between TikTok, X and BlueSky Good grief. Please leave your bubble once or twice in a month. Tiktok yes. X and Bluesky, absolutely not.

Monthly active users:

From DemandSage:

    Facebook - 12 billion!?
    TikTok - 1.59 billion
    X - 611 million
    Bsky - 38 million
That's according to DemandSage ... I'm not sure I can trust the numbers, FB jumped up from around 3b last year, which again I don't trust. 12b is more than the global population, so it's got to be all bots. And even the 3b number is hard to believe (at close to half the global population), no idea how much of the population of earth has any internet access.

From Grok:

    Facebook - 3.1 billion
    TikTok - 1.5-2 billion
    X - 650 million
    Bsky - 4.1 million
Looks like I'm definitely in a bubble... I tend to interact 1:1 as much on X as Facebook, which is mostly friends/family and limited discussions in groups. A lot of what I see on feeds is copy/pasta from tiktok though.

That said, I have a couple friends who are die hard on Telegram.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#699

Post by echelon »

neaden wrote: post #513
echelon wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/23/nx-s1-5432712/ai-video-ad-kal... Typical large team $300,000 ad made for It's going to be a bloodbath.

This ad was purposefully playing off the fact that it was AI though, it was a large amount of short bizarre things like two old women selling Fresh Manatee out of the back of a truck. You couldn't replace a regular ad with this.

I've got friends at WPP. Heads are rolling.

This is very much real and happening as we speak.

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