I thought the are on a hiring spree for AI roles. Axing jobs in that exact org doesn’t send a good message, not just within the company but also to the larger AI ecosystem and markets.
Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
351–360 of 506 posts
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#352Earlier 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…
> Were I the CEO of a company like that I'd reduce headcount in the legacy orgs, transition them to maintenance mode, and start new orgs within the company that are as insulated from legacy as possible.
Didn't Netflix do this when they went from DVDs to online streaming?
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#353Earlier 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…
I seldom quote Steve Jobs, but: "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will."
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real question is, how/why did they over-hire in the first place?
> The real question is, how/why did they over-hire in the first place place This question has been answered many times. Time to move on and fix forward.
I havent seen a single answer that isnt surface level stuff.
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#355Wang doesn’t strike me as an inspiring AI leader, and Meta’s AI leadership and strategy feel unclear. Hopefully they’ll address that soon, because in the meantime OpenAI is executing and shipping.
> OpenAIs leadership and strategy feel unclear.
Fixed that for you.
Shipping a TikTok clone slop app and a keylogger browser while incinerating money and simultaneously talking a big game how AGI is imminent are the opposite of leadership or strategy.
More like acts of desperation to fill massively oversized shoes.
The ones who have been shipping quality consistently are the Chinese AI labs.
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean...what you say is not, in the face of it, false; however ... For the past few decades, the ways and the degree to which we have been genuinely trying (at the government level) to "progressively tax money" in the US have been failing and falling, respectively. If we were genuinely serious about the kind of progressive taxation you're talking about, capital gains taxes (and other kinds of taxes on non-labor inco…
Look into the Laffer curve if you want to know why tax rates are what they are. Basically, using tax avoidance strategies have both a cost (accountants and lawyers) and a risk. Making the tax rate too high and the percentage of the wealthy that choose to utilize tax avoidance strategies increases (also the aggressiveness of those strategies increases). The change in this rate forms a curve with a maximum. There is a…
I frankly don't believe this. (edit for clarity: the proposition that our current rates are highly likely to be towards the top end of what's feasible, not the existence of such a curve)
It's been cited as unshakable truth many times, including just before places like Washington State significantly raised their top tax brackets—and saw approximately zero rich people leave.
There's a lot of widely-believed economic theory underlying our current practice that's based on extremely shaky ground.
As for how SS taxes are handled, I'm 100% in agreement with you.
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#357OODA loop for organizations would help here
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#358Because 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.
Up or Out
Coming soon to your software development team.
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the eternal struggles of BigCo is there are structural incentives to make organizations big and slow. This is basically a bureaucratic law of nature. It's often possible to get promoted by leading "large efforts" where large is defined more or less by headcount. So if a hot new org has unlimited HC budget all the incentives push managers to complicate things as much as possible to create justification for more…
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…
I'd always heard the Iron Laws of Beauraracy as:
(0) The only thing that matters is the budget.
(1) Beauraracies only grow, never shrink. You can only control the growth rate.
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that depends on how optimistic/pessimistic one is on how much more superior the models are going to get. If you're really pessimistic then there isn't all too much one company could do to be 2x or more ahead already. If you're really optimistic then it doesn't matter what anyone is doing today because it's about who finds the next 100x leap.
I don't think it does. The models have increased greatly in capabilities, but the competitors have simply kept up, and it's not apparently that they won't continue to do that. Furthermore, the breakthroughs-- i.e. fundamentally better models, can happen anywhere where people can and do try out new architectures, and that can happen in surprisingly small places. It's mostly about culture and being willing to experimen…
Which is why getting rid of friction is a good idea.
This is R&D. You want a skunkworks culture where you have the best people in the world trying as many new things as possible, and failure is fine as long as it's interesting failure.
Not a culture where every development requires a permission slip from ten other teams, and/or everyone is worried if they'll still have a job a month from now.