Earlier quoted context omitted.
wishful thinking
I call it reasonable thinking
this is what wishful thinkers tell themselves
Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
471–480 of 506 posts
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
LLMs
GPT-5 is one piece of evidence
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No one can guess precisely how many people need to be hired Overshooting by 600 people sounds a lot like gross failure. Is someone going to take responsibilities for it? Probably not. That person's job is safe.
I suspect Mark Zuckerberg isn't going to fire himself for getting headcount wrong by 1%.
Well I guess that nobody takes decisions at Meta besides Mark then.
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#474Earlier 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…
> For example Google is in the amazing position that it's search can become a commodity that prints a modest amount of money forever as the default search engine for LLM queries, while at the same time their flagship product can be a search AI that uses those queries as citations for answers people look for. Search is not a commodity. Search providers other than Google are only marginally used because Google is so do…
Search, after Bert, is very much a commodity.
I get better results than Google on segments of common craw using a desktop computer and a research model.
Given that Google has decades of scrapes, and more than four gpus to work with, they can do a better job than me. That I beat them right now is nothing short of embarrassing, bordering on an existential threat.
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about the people who die because a safe and effective drug that could have saved their life got rejected? The problem is that there's a fundamental asymmetry here - those deaths are invisible but deaths from a bad drug that got approved are very visible.
I mean drugs are different than consumer technology. Instagram isn’t great but it doesn’t cause birth defects. Also things like the compassionate release of hiv drugs in study show the govt can see the nuance here with enough pressure.
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Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
My voice activated egg timer is amazing. There are millions of useful small tools that can be built to assist us in a day-to-day manner... I remain skeptical that anyone will come up with a miracle tool that can wholesale replace large sections of the labor market and I think that too much money is chasing after huge solutions where many small products will provide the majority of the gains we're going to get from th…
>My voice activated egg timer is amazing. Alexa?
I set up my own over home assistant on an rPi - but same idea.
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the step before it came to that would be, Mr. Wang getting the DevOps team to casually trip over the server rack(s) electrical....
I will accept the Chief Emergency Shutoff Activator Officer role; my required base comp is $25M. But believe me, nobody can trip over cables or run multiple microwaves simultaneously like I can.
I think you're on to something with that C.E.S.A.O. role. Trademark it ha
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#478Earlier 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…
Thanks for the helpful context. Google being risk averse is definitely a common criticism I've heard. I can't think of what previous problematic launches could have been, but ironically all the ones I remember offhand were after the release of Gemini!
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
FB ad serve up 10% yoy but no is using it?
Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thanks for the helpful context. Google being risk averse is definitely a common criticism I've heard. I can't think of what previous problematic launches could have been, but ironically all the ones I remember offhand were after the release of Gemini!
This is the canonical example: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/technology/ai-photo-label...
Some more details in https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/technology/artificial-int...