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Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

telegraph.co.uk

841–850 of 936 posts

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#841

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We are already at the limit of how small we can scale chips I strongly suspect this is not true for LLMs. Once progress stabilizes, doing things like embedding the weights of some model directly as part of the chip will suddenly become economical, and that's going to cut costs down dramatically. Then there's distillation, which basically makes smaller models get better as bigger models get better. You don't necessa…

> "We're profitable on inference. If we didn't pay for training, we'd be a very profitable company."

That's OpenAI (though I'd be curious if that statement holds for subscriptions as opposed to API use). What about the downstream companies that use OpenAI models? I'm not sure the picture is as rosy for them.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#842
post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may well be true, but my point is more that Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg seem almost uniquely unable to turn the startups into great new businesses, when compared with the other big tech companies. Amazon added cloud and prime, Microsoft added cloud, xbox, 365, Google added Chrome, Android, cloud, Youtube, consumer subscriptions, workspace, etc. Netflix added streaming and their own content, Apple added mobile, wear…

> Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg seem almost uniquely unable to turn the startups into great new businesses, when compared with the other big tech companies. Really? Instagram, WhatsApp... the two most used apps & services in the world? > Google added Chrome, Android, cloud, Youtube, It's arguable how GCP is profitable, but chrome/android/yt are money-losing businesses if you exclude ad revenues.

They're money losing business if you exclude their revenue source? Thats a weird take, you could say the same thing facebook itself ...

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#843
post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a structural problem with our economy, much larger than just Facebook. Due its large scale concentration, the allocation of capital in the economy as a whole has become far less efficient over the last 20 years.

But always remember, it's not technically a monopoly! Boy am I tired of that one. We desperately need more smaller companies and actual competition but nobody seems to even be trying

Many of us in the antitrust/competition law community are trying. One issue, specific to digital markets, is that the field has very few people who are both legally and technically literate. If you're a technical person looking for a career shift, moving into legal policy/academia has the potential to be quite high impact for that reason.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#844

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a specific architecture. Of course there are (massive amounts) of feedback paths, since that's how we learn - top-down prediction and bottom-up sensory input. There is of course looping too - e.g. thalamo-cortical loop - we are not just as pass-thru reactionary LLM! Yes, there is a lot more structure to the brain than just the neocortex - there are all the other major components (thalamus, hippocampus, etc) each…

Did I say "random graph", or did I say "general graph"? >There is of course looping too - e.g. thalamo-cortical loop - we are not just as pass-thru reactionary LLM! Uh-huh. But I was responding to a comment about how the brain doesn't do something analogous to back-propagation. It's starting to sound like you've contradicted me to agree with me.

I didn't say anything about back-progagation, but if you want to talk about that then it depends on how "analogous" you want to consider ...

It seems very widely accepted that the neocortex is a prediction machine that learns by updating itself based on sensory detection of top-down prediction failures, and with multiple layers (cortical patches) of pattern learning and prediction, there necessarily has to be some "propagation" of prediction error feedback from one layer to another, so that all layers can learn.

Now, does the brain learn in a way directly equivalent to backprop in terms of using exact error gradients or a single error function? No - presumably not, it more likely works in layered fashion with each higher level providing error feedback to the layer below, with that feedback likely just being what was expected vs what was detected (i.e. not a gradient - essentially just a difference). Of course gradients are more efficient in terms of selecting varying update step sizes, but directional would work fine too. It would also not be surprising if evolution has stumbled upon something similar to Bayesian updates in terms of how to optimally incrementally update beliefs (predictions) based on conflicting evidence.

So, that's an informed guess of how our brain is learning - up to you whether you want to regard that as analogous to backprop or not.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#845
post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kalshi's Jack Such declined to disclose Accetturo's fee for creating the ad. But, he added, "the actual cost of prompting the AI — what is being used in lieu of studios, directors, actors, etc. — was under $2,000." So in other words, if you ignore the costs of paying people to create the ad, it barely costs anything. A true accounting miracle!

Do you pay people to pump your gas? How about harvesting your whale blubber to power your oil lamp at night? The nature of work changes all the time. If an ad can be made with one person, that's it. We're done. There's no going back to hiring teams of 50 people. It's stupid to say we must hire teams of 50 to make an advertisement just because. There's no reason for that. It's busy work. The job is to make the ad, not…

> Your local plumber is going to want a funny action movie trailer slash plumbing advertisement to advertise their services. They wouldn't have even been in the market before.

And why would your local plumber hire someone to produce this funny action trailer (which I'm not convinced would actually help them from an advertising perspective), when they can simply have an AI produce that action funny action trailer without hiring anyone? Assuming models improve sufficiently that will become trivially possible.

> Independent filmmakers will be making their own Miyazaki and Spielberg epics that cater to the most niche of audiences - no more mass market Marvel that has to satisfy everybody, you're going to see fictional fantasy biopic reimaginings of Grace Hopper fighting the vampire Nazis.

Well, first of all, if the audience is "the most niche of audiences", then I'm not sure how that's going to lead to a sustainable career. And again -- if I want to see my niche historical fantasy interests come to life in a movie about Grace Hopper fighting vampire Nazis, why will I need a filmmaker to create this for me when I can simply prompt an AI myself? "Give me a fun action movie that incorporates famous computer scientists fighting Nazis. Make it 1.5 hours long, and give it a comedic tone."

I think you're fundamentally overvaluing what humans will be able to provide in an era where creating content is very cheap and very easy.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#846
post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sometimes you lose

When your track record includes a lot of losses, the scale points more and more toward "clueless" and away from "4D chess".

Especially when there are hours of public footage of the decision maker in question not sounding particular astute as a technical or strategic thinker.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But always remember, it's not technically a monopoly! Boy am I tired of that one. We desperately need more smaller companies and actual competition but nobody seems to even be trying

Many of us in the antitrust/competition law community are trying. One issue, specific to digital markets, is that the field has very few people who are both legally and technically literate. If you're a technical person looking for a career shift, moving into legal policy/academia has the potential to be quite high impact for that reason.

is there a state bar bootcamp?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But always remember, it's not technically a monopoly! Boy am I tired of that one. We desperately need more smaller companies and actual competition but nobody seems to even be trying

Many of us in the antitrust/competition law community are trying. One issue, specific to digital markets, is that the field has very few people who are both legally and technically literate. If you're a technical person looking for a career shift, moving into legal policy/academia has the potential to be quite high impact for that reason.

Once, out of curiosity, I looked into how easily someone without a formal law degree and work experience could take the bar exam "for fun", and IIRC in my state it wasn't really possible.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#849
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.

I think the use of "4d chess" was your downfall.

I do however think that this is a business choice that at the very least was likely extensively discussed.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’d say that the social media revolution had a bigger effect than AI has at this point.

in the context of LLM's we are in the Friendster era
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