Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 506 posts

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#221

Post by moffkalast »

more_corn wrote: post #174
jfim wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the future of human connection is chatting with a large language model, at least according to Meta. Haven't they added chatbots to messenger?

That’s not “the future of human connection” The critical word in there is… Never mind. If you can’t already see it, nothing I can say will make you see it.

If your friends are human then you could collectively decide to leave for another platform, that's not very cash money for Meta. They want to go past you being on Facebook cause all your friends are there, they want you to be friends with the platform itself.

Side note, has black mirror done this yet or are they still stuck on "what if you are the computer" for the 34th time?

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#222

Post by qsort »

jonas21 wrote: post #218
scrollop wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you asking questions about their PR department coordinated "Company missions"? Let me summarise their real missions: 1. Power and money 2. Power and money 3. Power and money How does AI help them make money and gain more power? I can give you a few ways...

Even if we assume you're correct and every company's true mission is to maximize power and money, the stated mission is still useful in helping us understand how they plan to do this. The questions in the original comment were really about the "how", and are still worth considering.

Have you considered that people can just say things?

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#223

Post by AndrewKemendo »

djmips wrote: post #71
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #13

This is actually really interesting because I’ve never actually seen anything coming out of Lecun‘s group that made it into production that does not mean that nothing did, but this indicates to me that FAIR work never actually made it out of the lab and basically everything that Lecun has been working on has been shelved That makes sense to me as he and most of the AI divas have focused on their “Governor of AI” role…

>I’ll be interested to see how this shakes out for who is leading AI at Meta going forward Alexandr Wang

I think you’re probably right

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#224

Post by paxys »

ceejayoz wrote: post #3

Because the AI works so well, or because it doesn't? > ”By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Wang writes in a memo seen by Axios. That's kinda wild. I'm kinda shocked they put it in writing.

TL;DR

New leader comes in and gets rid of the old team, putting his own preferred people in positions of power.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#225

Post by zkmon »

scrollop wrote: post #151
Rebuff5007 wrote: post #126

From a quick online search: - OpenAI's mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. - Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. - Meta's mission is to build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible. Lets just take these three companies, and their self-defined mission…

Why are you asking questions about their PR department coordinated "Company missions"? Let me summarise their real missions: 1. Power and money 2. Power and money 3. Power and money How does AI help them make money and gain more power? I can give you a few ways...

Same difference with social media too. I thought Twitter was for micro-blogging, LinkedIn for career-networking, Instagram for pictures, and youtube for video-sharing etc. Now everything boiled down to just a feed of pictures, videos and text. So much for a "network", graph theory, research, ...

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#226

Post by paxys »

Fanofilm wrote: post #112

I think this is because older AI doesn't get done what LLM AI does. Older AI = normal trained models, neural networks (without transformers), support vector machines, etc. For that reason, they are letting them go. They don't see revenue coming from that. They don't see new product lines (like AI Generative image/video). AI may have this every 5 years. A break through moves the technology into an entirely new area. T…

This is not "older AI". This team built everything up to and including Llama 4.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#227

Post by 1718627440 »

qsort wrote: post #222
jonas21 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we assume you're correct and every company's true mission is to maximize power and money, the stated mission is still useful in helping us understand how they plan to do this. The questions in the original comment were really about the "how", and are still worth considering.

Have you considered that people can just say things?

But we can still consider the consistency of their story, because they are telling that story to influence the perception of their actions.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#228

Post by fukka42 »

heathrow83829 wrote: post #146
Rebuff5007 wrote: post #126

From a quick online search: - OpenAI's mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. - Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. - Meta's mission is to build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible. Lets just take these three companies, and their self-defined mission…

i've been wondering this for some time as well. what's it all for? the only product i see in their lineup that seems obvious is the meta glasses. Other then that I guess AI would have to be used in their ad platform perhaps for better targetting. Ad targetting is absolutely atrocious right now, at least for me personally.

[dead]

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#229

Post by Herring »

StackRanker3000 wrote: post #152
Herring wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It damages trust. Layoffs are nearly always bad for a company, but are terrible in a research environment. You want people who will geek out over math/code all day, and being afraid for your job (for reasons outside your control!) is very counterproductive. This is why tenure was invented.

But that doesn’t explain why this particular justification is especially ”wild”, does it?

You watch too much game of thrones.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#230

Post by wslh »

PaulHoule wrote: post #213
randmeerkat wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sometimes they manage to meld it into one goal, because money is power. Money is a measure of power, but it is not in fact power.

Power is a measure of money, but it is not in fact money. See https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma or the fact that John D. Rockefeller was furious that Standard Oil got split up despite the stock going up and making him much richer. It's not so clear what motivates the very rich. If I doubled my income I might go on a really fancy vacation and get that Olympus 4/3 body I've been looking at and the fast 70-30…

To clarify you can have power without money, for example initial revolutionaries. Money buys power, and power could convert into money depending the circumstances.
Post reply on HN