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Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company

#111

Post by PessimalDecimal »

hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #96
dazamarquez wrote: post #47

Is Wang even able to achieve superintelligence? Is anyone? I'm unable to make sense of Wang's compensation package. What actual, practical skills does he bring to the table? Is this all a stunt to drive Meta's stock value?

If Zuck throws $2-$4Bn towards a bunch of AI “superstars” and that’s enough to convince the market that Meta is now a serious AI company, it will translate into hundreds of billions in market cap increases. Seems like a great bang for the buck.

Oracle also briefly convinced the market it was a serious AI company and received a market cap increase. Until it evaporated.

Re: Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company

#112

Post by alpha_squared »

irjustin wrote: post #102
this_user wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way it sounds, Zuckerberg believes that they can, or at the very least has people around him telling him that they can. But Zuckerberg also though that the Metaverse would be thing. LeCun obviously thinks otherwise and believes that LLMs are a dead-end, and he might be right. The trouble with LLMs is that most people don't really understand how they work. They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just go…

> They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart There are too many different ways to measure intelligence. Speed, matching, discovery, memory, etc. We can combine those levers infinitely create/justify "smart". Are they dumb? Absolutely, but are they smart? Very much so. You can be both at the same time. Maybe you meant genius? Because that standard is quite high and there's no…

They're neither smart nor dumb and I think that trying to measure them along that scale is a fool's errand. They're combinatorial regurgitation machines. The fact that we keep pointing to that as an approximation of intelligence says more about us than it, namely that we don't understand intelligence and that we look for ourselves in other things to define intelligence. This is why when experts use these things within their domain of expertise they're underwhelmed, but when used outside of those domains they become halfway useful.

Trying to create new terminology ("genius", "superintelligence", etc.) seems to only shift goal posts and define new ways of approximation.

Personally, I'll believe a system is intelligent when it presents something novel and new and challenges our understanding of the world as we know it (not as I personally do because I don't have the corpus of the internet in my head).

Re: Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company

#113

Post by ginnyaang »

dazamarquez wrote: post #47

Is Wang even able to achieve superintelligence? Is anyone? I'm unable to make sense of Wang's compensation package. What actual, practical skills does he bring to the table? Is this all a stunt to drive Meta's stock value?

> What actual, practical skills does he bring to the table?

This hot dog, this no hot dog.

Re: Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company

#114

Post by mullingitover »

nl wrote: post #98
mullingitover wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd contrast this with Flickr. Flickr was the original social network. They have a modest loss leader, a reasonable free tier, but nothing like the permanent money bonfire that the big tech firms operate. They were kinda the first real Web 2.0 social media site, with a social graph, privacy controls, a developer API, tagging, RSS feeds. I feel that they never really got to their full potential exactly because these b…

Flickr failed because they sold to Yahoo which was bad place to end up. But a successful Flickr would look a lot like Instagram Del.icio.us is the same story. Good product ahead of its time, bought by Yahoo and died. Could have been Pinterest.

Fair point, there's a good chance we'd be living in a techno utopia right now if someone was able to go back in time and prevent Yahoo from murdering so many promising startups. Conversely, if Yahoo had just spent the relative pocket change that Google was asking for back in the day perhaps we'd be living under the oppressive thumb of a trillion dollar market cap Alta Vista.

Re: Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company

#115

Post by canyp »

sokoloff wrote: post #110
milowata wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wang is a networking machine and has connected with everyone in the industry. Likely was brought in as a recruiting leader. Mark being Mark, though, doesn’t understand the value of vision and figured getting big names in the same room was better than actually having a plan.

Your last sentence suggests that he willingly failed to take the choice to create a vision and a plan. If, for whatever reason, you don't have a vision and a plan, hiring big names to help kickstart that process seems like a way better next step than "do nothing".

How to draw an owl:

1. Hire an artist.

2. Draw the rest of the fucking owl.

Re: Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company

#116

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

hibern8 wrote: post #79
Mistletoe wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the differences between a person that is smart and an LLM that seems smart but isn't?

The ability to generate novel ideas.

How many people generate novel ideas? When I look around at work, most people basically operate like an LLM. They see what’s being done by others and emulate it.

Re: Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company

#117

Post by x______________ »

mlmonkey wrote: post #108
this_user wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine an actor who is playing a character speaking a language that they actor does not speak. Due to a lack of time, the actor decides against actually learning the language and instead opts to just memorise and train how to speak their lines without actually understanding the content. Let's assume they are doing a pretty convincing job too. Now, the audience watching these scenes may think that the actor is actual…

You are describing Searle's "Chinese Room argument"[1] to some extent. It's been discussed a lot recently, but anyone who has interacted with LLMs at a deeper level will tell you that there is something there; not sure if you'd call it "intelligence" or what. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary too. I guess this is a long-winded way of saying "we don't really know what's going on"... [1] https://plato.stanfor…

If an LLM was intelligent, wouldn't it get bored?

Re: Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company

#118

Post by jimbokun »

x______________ wrote: post #117
mlmonkey wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are describing Searle's "Chinese Room argument"[1] to some extent. It's been discussed a lot recently, but anyone who has interacted with LLMs at a deeper level will tell you that there is something there; not sure if you'd call it "intelligence" or what. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary too. I guess this is a long-winded way of saying "we don't really know what's going on"... [1] https://plato.stanfor…

If an LLM was intelligent, wouldn't it get bored?

Why should it?

Re: Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company

#119

Post by themafia »

irjustin wrote: post #102
this_user wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way it sounds, Zuckerberg believes that they can, or at the very least has people around him telling him that they can. But Zuckerberg also though that the Metaverse would be thing. LeCun obviously thinks otherwise and believes that LLMs are a dead-end, and he might be right. The trouble with LLMs is that most people don't really understand how they work. They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just go…

> They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart There are too many different ways to measure intelligence. Speed, matching, discovery, memory, etc. We can combine those levers infinitely create/justify "smart". Are they dumb? Absolutely, but are they smart? Very much so. You can be both at the same time. Maybe you meant genius? Because that standard is quite high and there's no…

> You can be both at the same time.

Smart and dumb are opposites. So this seems dubious. You can have access to a large base of trivial knowledge (mostly in a single language), as LLMs do, but have absolutely no intelligence, as LLMs demonstrate.

You can be dumb yet good at Jeopardy. This is no dichotomy.

Re: Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company

#120

Post by themafia »

KaiserPro wrote: post #34

As someone who's startup got bought out by facebook, many years ago, its not surprising to read. The politics surrounding zuck is wild. Cox left then came back, mainly because hes not actually that good, and has terrible judgement when it comes to features and how to shape effective teams (just throw people at it, features should be purely metric based, or a straight copy of competitors products. There is no cohesive…

Computer scientists spending a career building advertising inventory and private data lakes while at the same time desperate to never be perceived in this light. It must make for an interesting "culture."
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