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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

#441

Post by Jyaif »

dekhn wrote: post #423
keeda wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, maybe a better way to put it is: why was the current AI boom sparked by ChatGPT and not something from Google? It's clear in retrospect that Google had similar capabilities in LaMDA, the precursor to Gemini. As I recall it was even announced a couple years before ChatGPT but wasn't released (as Bard?) until after ChatGPT. LaMDA is probably more famous for convincing a Google employee that it was sentient…

Google had been burned badly in multiple previous launches of ML-based products and their leadership was extremely cautious about moving too quickly. It was convenient for Google that OpenAI acted as a first mover so that Google could enter the field after there was some level of cultural acceptance of the negative behaviors. There's a whole backstory where Noam Shazeer had come up with a bunch of nice innovations an…

> badly in multiple previous launches of ML-based products

Which ML-based products?

> It was convenient for Google that OpenAI acted as a first mover

That sounds like something execs would say to fend of critics. "We are #2 in AI, and that's all part of the plan"

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#442

Post by janderson215 »

criemen wrote: post #343
kstrauser wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard agree. It was management who messed up hiring. It’s management who should bear the responsibility for it.

How should they do that? I hear that phrase, and it's easy to agree to, but how would it look in practice?

Stepping down vs mass layoffs reduces headcount by 1/20th, so the only other solution is to continue floundering until everybody loses their job. These people complaining about layoffs would prefer the whole plant to rot versus pruning a few wilting stems.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#443

Post by creshal »

tchalla wrote: post #352
noosphr wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Cisco, too. Whether or not you want to consider current Cisco a success model is... yeah

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#444

Post by lII1lIlI11ll »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #369
kridsdale1 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked there (7 years), the gatekeeper effect was real. It didn’t stop broken or harmful, but it did stop revenue neutral or revenue negative. Even if we had proven the product was positive to user wellbeing or brand-favorability. Yes I’m still bitter.

Why would a business release a revenue negative product? Stopping engineers from making products that dont contribute to the bottom line is exactly what these gatekeepers should be doing

Because due to that mindset now FB sucks and no one wants to use it anymore?

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#445

Post by varjag »

tomnipotent wrote: post #418
varjag wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's little evidence that this is a common problem.

Besides the graveyard of failed start-ups? There's plenty of evidence, just no strong conclusions.

Did you look at the graveyard of failed start-ups and conclude they would of lived if they had enough non-coding overhead?

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#446

Post by com2kid »

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…

MSFT were the masters of this technique (spin off a startup, acquire it after it proves viable) for decades, but sadly they stopped.

Even internal to MS I worked on 2 teams that were 95% independent from the mothership, on one of them (Microsoft Band) we even went to IKEA and bought our own desks.

Pretty successful in regards to getting a product to market (Band 1 and 2 all up had iirc $50M in funding compared to Apple Watch's billion), but the big company politics still got us in the end.

Of course Xbox is the most famous example of MS pulling off an internal skunk works project leading to massive success.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#447

Post by svara »

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…

Of course the business needs to work as a business too. I'm not saying that's not real, I'm saying it's reductionist to say it's only that.

Put another way, you need to have an answer to the question: Why should I work towards optimizing the success of this business rather than another one's.

If there isn't a great answer to this, you'll have employees with no shared sense of direction and no motivation.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#448

Post by dpe82 »

conductr wrote: post #316
bee_rider wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

IMHO Meta should be investing/inventing AI. When the AI org was younger it was doing some impressive open source work. Then it bloated and we got Llama 3 and not much since. I don't know if they can recover that earlier magic or if the ship has sailed; there's a good chance the super effective early folks got fed up and left or are burned out by the bureaucracy, but if I were in charge my first move would also be to cut half the department.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#449

Post by 1718627440 »

qsort wrote: post #240
1718627440 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The consistency of a mission statement? Are you guys for real? To be clear: I'm not arguing that everyone at OpenAI or Meta is a bad person, I don't think that's true. Most of their employees are probably normal people. But seriously, you have to tell me what you guys are smoking if a mission statement causes you to update in any direction whatsoever. I can hardly think of anything more devoid of content.

A lie still tells you what the liar things you should believe of him, in this case what the public is supposed to think of these layoffs.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#450

Post by jongjong »

rhetocj23 wrote: post #329
jongjong wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense. It's easier to be right by saying no, but this mindset costs great opportunities. People who are interested in their own career management can't innovate. You can't innovate without taking career-ending risks. You need people who are confident to take career-ending risks repeatedly. There are people out there who do and keep winning. At least on the innovation/tech front. These people need to be in the d…

"You can't innovate without taking career-ending risks." Its not the job of employees to bear this burden - if you have visionary leadership at the helm, they should be the ones absorbing this pressure. And thats what is missing. The reality is folks like Zuck were never visionaries. Lets not derail the thread but a) he stole the idea for facebook b) the continued success of Meta comes from its numerous acquisitions…

If we want to maximize justice instead of corporate performance then we have to abolish the system, confiscate corporate wealth and redistribute it equally. That would probably be more just than what we have today... But the corporations would all collapse.

It depends what you want to optimize for.

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