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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

#431

Post by another_twist »

thenaturalist wrote: post #355
gip wrote: post #344

Wang 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.

This feels overly critical. I think OpenAI definitely shipped quality stuff. It just seems like AI is not the crazy high margin engine everybody thought it would be. Or perhaps that for now, OpenAI is going the Google way of throwing a lot of stuff and checking what sticks. Not a bad way of executing tbh, atleast they're shipping.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#432

Post by nradov »

dekhn wrote: post #420
nradov wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting up a separate insulated internal organization to pursue disruptive innovations is basically what Clayton Christensen recommended in "The Innovator's Dilemma" back in 1997. It's what IBM did to successfully develop the original PC. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=46 Every tech industry executive has read that book and most large companies have at least tried to put it into practice. For example…

but X isn't really an insulated org... it has close ties with other parts of Google. It shares the corporate infra and it's not hard to get inside and poke around. it has to be, because it's intended to create new products that get commercialized through Google or other Alphabet companies. A better example would be Calico, which faced significant struggles getting access to internal Google resources, while also being…

There are varying degrees of insulation. I'm not convinced that Calico is a good example of Christensen's recommendations. It seems like a vanity research project sponsored by a Google founder rather than an internal startup intended to bring a disruptive innovation to market.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#433

Post by another_twist »

r32gsaf wrote: post #70

AI has no demand, they overhired, Wang has no clue what to do next and fires people to make an impact. Other AI companies will soon follow.

I guess the opposite, he's probably consolidating power, will likely cash his cheques and fail upwards for putting up a great fight while Meta's engineering culture ends up thoroughly buggered.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#434

Post by nradov »

esyir wrote: post #422
janalsncm wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Feels like this is the fundamental flaw with a lot of things not just in the private sector, but the public one too. Look at the FDA, where it's notoriously bogged down in red tape, and the incentives slant heavily towards rejection. This makes getting pharmaceuticals out even more expensive, and raises the overall cost of healthcare. It's too easy to say no, and people prioritize CYA over getting things done. The qu…

You have a flawed understanding of the FDA pharmaceutical approval process. There is no bias towards either rejection or approval. If an drug application checks all the required boxes then it will be approved.

I think the reason why some people mistakenly think this makes healthcare more expensive is that over recent years the FDA has raised the quality bar on the clinical trials data they will accept. A couple decades ago they sometimes approved drugs based on studies that were frankly junk science. Now that standards have been raised, drug trials are generally some of the most rigorous, high-quality science you'll find anywhere in the world. Doing it right is necessarily expensive and time consuming but we can have pretty high confidence that the results are solid.

For patients who can't wait there is the Expanded Access (compassionate use) program.

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/public-health-focus/expanded...

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#435

Post by BoiledCabbage »

dom96 wrote: post #209
themagician wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is happening everywhere. In every industry. Our economy is being propped up by this. From manufacturing to software engineering, this is how the US economy is continuing to "flourish" from a macroeconomic perspective. Margin is being preserved by reducing liabilities and relying on a combination of increased workload and automation that is "good enough" to get to the next step—but assumes there is a next step an…

There is plenty of evidence that the technology has plateaued. Is there any evidence to the contrary?

> There is plenty of evidence that the technology has plateaued.

What technology? Can you link to some evidence?

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#436

Post by scheme271 »

fidotron wrote: post #123
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…

There always has been a stunning amount of inertia from the old big data/ML/"AI" guard towards actually deploying anything more sophisticated than linear regression.

There's a lot of areas where you need to be able to explain the decisions that your AI models make and that's extremely hard to do unless you're using linear regression. E.g. you're a bank and your AI model for some reason appears to be accepting applications from white people and rejecting applications from african americans or latinos. How are you going to show in court that your model isn't discriminating based on race or some proxy for race?

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#437

Post by janalsncm »

esyir wrote: post #422
janalsncm wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Feels like this is the fundamental flaw with a lot of things not just in the private sector, but the public one too. Look at the FDA, where it's notoriously bogged down in red tape, and the incentives slant heavily towards rejection. This makes getting pharmaceuticals out even more expensive, and raises the overall cost of healthcare. It's too easy to say no, and people prioritize CYA over getting things done. The qu…

I take your broader point but personally I feel like it’s ok if the FDA is cautious. The incentives that bias towards rejection may be “not killing people”.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#438

Post by moomoo11 »

bee_rider wrote: post #219
darth_avocado wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ve done this before with their metaverse stuff. You hire a bunch, don’t see progress, let go of people in projects you want to shut down and then hire people in projects you want to try out. Why not just move people around you may ask? Possibly: different skill requirements More likely: people in charge change, and they usually want “their people” around Most definitely: the people being let go were hired when s…

VR + AI could actually be kinda fun (I’m sure folks are working on this stuff already!). Solve the problems of not enough VR content and VR content creation tools kind of sucking by having AI fill in the gaps. But it is just a little toy, Facebook is looking for their next billion dollar idea; that’s not it.

Billion is too little for them tbh.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#439

Post by kamaal »

dekhn wrote: post #87
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.

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…

>>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.

If we are serious about productivity.

I helps to fire the managers. More often than not, this layer has to act in its own self interest. Which means maintaining large head counts to justify their existence.

Crazy automation and productivity has been possible for like 50 years now. Its just that nobody wants it.

Death of languages like Perl, Lisp and Prolog only proves this point.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#440

Post by OhioMan2943 »

wkat4242 wrote: post #425
OhioMan2943 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In optimising for AI it feels like we stopped optimising for everything else

It's not even optimising. It's just dragging AI by the hairs into everywhere, where it's not even clear whether it belongs there or provides any benefit. Just to get the company a reputation of "first mover". Really, this is "blockchain" all over again, but 10x worse.

It's done a lot of damage to meritocracy and intellectualism that will take years to recover from. I don't look forward to having to play a role in fixing it.
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