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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#371

Post by jrumbut »

Avicebron wrote: post #195
Havoc wrote: post #8

I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, infor…

My default is that I won't copy and paste anything that's AI generated in communications. I kind of think that's the line. Use whatever you want in the background, but I want to communicate with the synthesis of your thoughts. I think this is a reasonable standard to hold, otherwise, like many before have said...send me the prompt. It's actually more interesting/better I know a coworker is struggling to communicate a…

My typical practice is to write a reply using my own brain and whatever practices are called for, then attach any interesting chatbot responses that were generated as documents.

So there's a clear separation, a reply from me which I stand by and then some interesting chatbot stuff if you're into that.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#372

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

Havoc wrote: post #8

I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, infor…

You can use an LLM to fix spelling and grammar errors. You don't need to generate slop. (Cloud providers sell LLMs as "robot information workers" when they're actually "calculators for text".)

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#373

Post by zmmmmm »

duskwuff wrote: post #342
Animats wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The low execution quality of Meta's metaverse effort surprised me, too. But they wanted it to run on their relatively weak headgear. A good metaverse needs a decent gamer PC, a serious GPU, and a few hundred megabits per second of Internet bandwidth. (I've written a Second Life client in Rust, so I'm very aware of the system requirements.) Facebook needs to serve a user base which is mostly phones and people with wea…

I think the problem goes beyond that. Meta never had a particularly coherent story for what "Horizon Worlds" was supposed to be to users - it was variously pitched as an online conference room, a social hangout, a way to explore 3D models, a video game... it felt as if they were throwing ideas at the wall to see what stuck, and nothing really did.

Ultimately yes, that was the issue. In theory they built a viable product, even if it still was cartoonish etc. But it was enough to see that even if it was perfected - there simply wasn't a killer app for what to actually do in there. The vast majority of the worlds that got any traction were just kids playgrounds with silly or trivial games. Some of them were quite fun. But none of them represented a serious value proposition to anybody with actual money.

The crazy thing is, they built a half decent app called Horizon Workrooms. You could go in there with colleagues and co-work. With so many people WFH it was an actual useful thing to be able to share a room with your colleagues and anybody could throw up a shared screen on the projector, while having your own display in front of you that nobody could see. I did this with folks from my team and it became a regular Friday afternoon type thing for us all to hange out. This was actually useful. But they managed to screw it up and eventually canceled it as well.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#374

Post by ua709 »

dodu_ wrote: post #354
trollbridge wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can use LLMs to parse LLM-generated slop. They make nice summaries. I have taken this approach to people who send me obviously generated LLM text; I simply run it through an LLM, paste the summary, and ask them "Is this an accurate summary?" and then I ask the for their original prompt.

Ah yes, take my single sentence, blow it up to 3 paragraphs with LLMs, and then the person reading it can have an LLM summarize it in a single sentence. What the fuck are we even doing anymore?

I wonder if that even works. Kinda like when kids play telephone I think it’s unlikely the input and output sentences actually match.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#375

Post by udswagz »

menloshark wrote: post #198

Here's how things play out: Zuck gets some idea, he's surrounded by a bunch of yes men who say "yes, this will definitely change the world", then it turns into this optics game of kissing the ring. You ask yourself "how could they blow 80B on the Metaverse like that", this is how. DON'T JOIN META, no matter how fast the recruiters reply to your messages. No matter how cool the work sounds (the managers lie in team ma…

100% true, absolutely nailed it

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#376

Post by zmmmmm »

uzername wrote: post #298
zmmmmm wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm being heavily consulted to advise management on culture change towards AI. And my number one message is this: make the number one, first and potentially only beneficiary of AI use the individual staff members themselves. If they have more time now, DO NOT start filling that with more work for them to do. If they do more all by themselves accept it as a bonus (experience says this is overwhelming what will happen…

I would love to hear more about your advice and the coaching you are giving to management. We also have a strong push to prove evidence of climbing productivity with clearly state future staffing goals. I would like to advocate for this, at even partially, enhancement and quality of life improvement for IC folks.

It starts with the generic pitch around culture change - "culture eats strategy for breakfast" style. Then a bit of shock and awe around how extensively AI is going to redesign business processes in the long run, leading into an argument about it being a marathon, not a sprint and at the moment everyone is treating it like a sprint, the real winners will be those gearing up for endurance. Then structuring the pathway: personal productivity as a cornerstone ebbing into pilots of implementation in areas highly aligned with AI capabilities minimised risk - all as preparation for the main game which will ultimately redesign core business processes in an AI first way.

I will say I am a bit of an outlier. I see others mostly pitching for things like small teams of "AI Champions" etc. I don't favor this because I think it will lead to dysfunctional outcomes (people trying to make the initiatives fail because they weren't "chosen" etc). So I pitch for the broad based, whole organization journey etc. But it does require a strong argument for acceptance of a slower pace of externally visible adoption.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#378

Post by kraf »

menloshark wrote: post #198

Here's how things play out: Zuck gets some idea, he's surrounded by a bunch of yes men who say "yes, this will definitely change the world", then it turns into this optics game of kissing the ring. You ask yourself "how could they blow 80B on the Metaverse like that", this is how. DON'T JOIN META, no matter how fast the recruiters reply to your messages. No matter how cool the work sounds (the managers lie in team ma…

They create toxic products that make the entire world more toxic. How they still manage to not have any responsibility while being editors and publishers is beyond me. I couldn't imagine how their insides wouldn't be toxic as well. Nice people don't do this.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#379

Post by anon84873628 »

dodu_ wrote: post #354
trollbridge wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can use LLMs to parse LLM-generated slop. They make nice summaries. I have taken this approach to people who send me obviously generated LLM text; I simply run it through an LLM, paste the summary, and ask them "Is this an accurate summary?" and then I ask the for their original prompt.

Ah yes, take my single sentence, blow it up to 3 paragraphs with LLMs, and then the person reading it can have an LLM summarize it in a single sentence. What the fuck are we even doing anymore?

The thing is, eventually these products will be more integrated into business workflows and have access to all the context, so the three paragraph expansion probably will be a significant improvement upon the original input.

And either that person won't be employed anymore, of the thing they were asking for in the first place will be automated for them.

I've already got my agent building a dossier for everyone we interact with. I haven't started training it on their writing style so I can mirror back to them... yet.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#380

Post by andai »

Havoc wrote: post #8

I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, infor…

Well no, you're supposed to copy-paste it into ChatGPT, ask for executive summary, and recover an approximation of the original input. Duh :)
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