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Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

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Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#311

Post by kridsdale1 »

wkat4242 wrote: post #297
magicalist wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More likely: people in charge change, and they usually want “their people” around Also, planning reorgs is a ton of work when you never bothered to learn what anyone does and have no real vision for what they should be doing. If your paycheck goes up no matter what, why not just fire a bunch of them, shamelessly rehire the ones who turned out to be essential (luckily the job market isn't great), declare victory reg…

Can you rehire that quickly though? I know where I live the government won't allow you to rehire people you just fired. Because the severance benefits have lower tax requirements and if you could do that you could do it every year as a form of tax evasion.

Are you in California?

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#312

Post by kgwgk »

JCM9 wrote: post #264

Lots of companies spun up giant AI teams over the last 48 months. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if 50+% of these roles are eliminated in the next 48 months. The AI party is coming to an end. Those without clear ROI are ripe for the chopping block.

Well, the told us from the beginning that AI would make many developer jobs redundant, didn’t they?

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#313

Post by jongjong »

I get it though. Big tech's HR sucks big time. You need super intelligent people for this kind of work. You can't have incompetent people with PhDs holding back the real brains.

I don't know how it's possible that companies like Meta could get away with having non-technical people as HR. They need all their HR people to be top software engineers.

You need coding geniuses just to be doing the hiring... And I don't mean people who can solve leetcode puzzles quickly. You need people with a proven track record solving real, difficult problems. Fully completed projects. And that's just to qualify for the HR team IMO... Not worthy enough to be contributing code to such important project. If you don't treat the project as if it is highly important, it won't be.

Normal HR people just fill the company with political nonsense.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#314

Post by username223 »

bix6 wrote: post #232

I’m kind of surprised Wang is leading AI at Meta? His knowledge is around data labeling which is important sure but is he really the guy to take this to the next level?

A skim of his Wikipedia bio suggests that he's smart, but mostly just interested in making money for himself. Since high school, he's spent time at: some fintech place, a Q-and-A site, MIT briefly, another fintech place, then data labeling and defense contracting. He sounds like a cash-seeking missile to me.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#315

Post by alephnerd »

Aperocky wrote: post #130
deanc wrote: post #107

Meta is fumbling hard. Winning the AI race is about marketing at this point - the difference between the models is negligible. Chat GPT is the one on everyone's lips outside of technology, and in the media. They have a platform by which to push some kind of assistant but where is it? I log into facebook and it's buried in the sidebar as Meta AI. Why aren't they shoving it down my throat? They have a huge platform of…

Winning the AI race is winning the application war. Similar to how internet, OS has been there for a long time, but the ecosystem took years to build. But application work is toiling and knowing the question set even with AI help, that's doesn't bode well for teams whose goal is owning and profiting from super AI that can do everything. But maybe something will change? Maybe adversarial agents will see improvements l…

> Winning the AI race is winning the application war

This. 100% This.

As an early stage VC, the foundational model story is largely over, and understanding how to apply models to applications or how to protect applications leveraging models is the name of the game now.

> Maybe adversarial agents will see improvements...

There is increased appetite now to invest in those models that are taking a reasoning and RL problem.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#316

Post by conductr »

bee_rider wrote: post #212
thewebguyd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pournelle's law of bureaucracy. Any sufficiently large organization will have two kinds of people: those devoted to the org's goals, and those devoted to the bureaucracy itself, and if you don't stop it the second group will take control to the point that bureaucracy itself becomes the goal secondary to all others. Self preservation takes over at that point, and the bureaucratic org starts prioritizing its own surviv…

Who’s “you” in this case? The bureaucracy crew will win, they are playing the real game, everybody else is wasting effort on doing things like engineering. The process is inevitable, but whatever. It is just part of our society, companies age and die. Sometimes they course correct temporarily but nothing is permanent.

The you in that example is the Org, or the person leading it. I find that what usually happens is the executive in charge of it all either wises up to the situation or, more commonly, gets replaced by someone with fresh eyes. In any case, it often takes months and years to get to a point of bureaucratic bloat but the corrections can be swift.

I also think on this topic specifically there is so much labor going into low/no ROI projects and it's becoming obvious. That's just like my opinion though, should Meta even be inventing AI or just leveraging other AI products? I think that's likely an open question in their Org - this may be a hint to their latest thoughts on it.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#318

Post by wkat4242 »

joshl32532 wrote: post #257
svara wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is too reductionist. When you go to work, do you go maximize shareholder value? Were you ever part of a team and felt good about the work you were doing together? Was it because you were maximizing shareholder value?

> When you go to work, do you go maximize shareholder value? Yes. The further up the ladder you go, the more this is pounded into your head. I was in a few Big Tech and this is how you write your self-assessment. "Increased $$$ revenue due to higher user engagement, shipped xxx product that generated xxx sales etc". If you're level 1/2 engineer, sure. You get sold on the company mission. But once you're in senior lev…

Most of the work I as an engineer do is jumping through hoops that engineers from other departments have drawn up. If someone up high really cared, wouldn't they have us work on something that matters?

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#319

Post by janalsncm »

noosphr wrote: post #275
dekhn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing a lot of frustration at the leadership level about product velocity- and much of the frustration is pointed at internal gatekeepers who mainly seem to say no to product releases. My leadership is currently promoting "better to ask forgiveness", or put another way: "a bias towards action". There are definitely limits on this, but it's been helpful when dealing with various internal negotiations. I don't spe…

Big tech is suffering from the incumbents disease. What worked well for extracting profits from stable cash cows doesn't work in fields that are moving rapidly. Google et al. were at one point pinnacle technologies too, but this was 20 years ago. Everyone who knew how to work in that environment has moved on or moved up. Were I the CEO of a company like that I'd reduce headcount in the legacy orgs, transition them to…

Once you have a golden goose, the risk taking innovators who built the thing are replaced by risk averse managers who protect it. Not killing the golden goose becomes priority 1, 2, and 3.

I think this is the steel man of “founder mode” conversation that people were obsessed with a year ago. People obsessed with “process” who are happy if nothing is accomplished because at least no policy was violated, ignoring the fact that policies were written by humans to serve the company’s goals.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#320

Post by nopurpose »

noosphr wrote: post #275
dekhn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing a lot of frustration at the leadership level about product velocity- and much of the frustration is pointed at internal gatekeepers who mainly seem to say no to product releases. My leadership is currently promoting "better to ask forgiveness", or put another way: "a bias towards action". There are definitely limits on this, but it's been helpful when dealing with various internal negotiations. I don't spe…

Big tech is suffering from the incumbents disease. What worked well for extracting profits from stable cash cows doesn't work in fields that are moving rapidly. Google et al. were at one point pinnacle technologies too, but this was 20 years ago. Everyone who knew how to work in that environment has moved on or moved up. Were I the CEO of a company like that I'd reduce headcount in the legacy orgs, transition them to…

> Google et al. were at one point pinnacle technologies too, but this was 20 years ago.

In 2017 Google literally gave us transformer architecture all current AI boom is based on.

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