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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

#131

Post by prng2021 »

octaane wrote: post #105

I feel like many of the comments are focused on the trees and not on the forest. The new head of Facebook AI is 28 years old? That's not OK, that's too young. Too inexperienced and not worldwise enough by a long shot. No shit they're having problems. Can you imagine being a facebook lifer, or one of the LLM pros they've bribed/hired over to the company, to be bossed around by someone with very little life experience?…

That’s much older than when Zuckerberg founded Facebook. Also older than when Bill Gates founded Microsoft, Steve Jobs founded Apple, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. We’re talking about running a tech company, not being a politician. Clearly there’s no need to be 50+ and have a bunch of “life experiences” to be successful.

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

#132

Post by subb »

heavyset_go wrote: post #103
Eisenstein wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart. Can you give an example of the difference between these two things?

Wisdom vs knowledge, where the word "knowledge" is doing a lot of work. LLMs don't "know" anything, they predict the next token that has the aesthetics of a response the prompter wants.

I suspect a lot of people but especially nerdy folks might mix up knowledge and intelligence, because they've been told "you know so much stuff, you are very smart!"

And so when they interact with a bot that knows everything, they associate it with smart.

Plus we anthropomorphise a lot.

Is Wikipedia "smart"?

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

#133

Post by hokumguru »

prng2021 wrote: post #131
octaane wrote: post #105

I feel like many of the comments are focused on the trees and not on the forest. The new head of Facebook AI is 28 years old? That's not OK, that's too young. Too inexperienced and not worldwise enough by a long shot. No shit they're having problems. Can you imagine being a facebook lifer, or one of the LLM pros they've bribed/hired over to the company, to be bossed around by someone with very little life experience?…

That’s much older than when Zuckerberg founded Facebook. Also older than when Bill Gates founded Microsoft, Steve Jobs founded Apple, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. We’re talking about running a tech company, not being a politician. Clearly there’s no need to be 50+ and have a bunch of “life experiences” to be successful.

Founding a faang and growing it provides a very different set of life experiences than being a startup owner thrust into it.

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

#134

Post by antonvs »

this_user wrote: post #74
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?

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 are really just good at appearing to be smart.

In other words, functionally speaking, for many purposes, they are smart.

This is obvious in coding in particular, where with relatively minimal guidance, LLMs outperform most human developers in many significant respects. Saying that they’re “not smart” seems more like an attempt to claim specialness for your own intelligence than a useful assessment of LLM capabilities.

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

#135

Post by yujzgzc »

Mistletoe wrote: post #76
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…

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

In my experience, discernment and good judgment. The "generating ideas" capabilities is good. The text summarization capabilities are great. However when it comes to making reasoned choices, it seems like it's losing all abilities, and even worse it will sound grossly overconfident or sycophantic or both.

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

#136

Post by futuraperdita »

octaane wrote: post #105

I feel like many of the comments are focused on the trees and not on the forest. The new head of Facebook AI is 28 years old? That's not OK, that's too young. Too inexperienced and not worldwise enough by a long shot. No shit they're having problems. Can you imagine being a facebook lifer, or one of the LLM pros they've bribed/hired over to the company, to be bossed around by someone with very little life experience?…

> The new head of Facebook AI is 28 years old? That's not OK, that's too young. Too inexperienced and not worldwise enough by a long shot.

This is ageist in the way I don't usually expect from the Valley. Plenty of entrepreneurs have built successful or innovative concepts in their 20s. It is OK to state that Wang is incompetent, but that has little to do with his age and more to do with his capability.

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

#137

Post by yujzgzc »

prng2021 wrote: post #131
octaane wrote: post #105

I feel like many of the comments are focused on the trees and not on the forest. The new head of Facebook AI is 28 years old? That's not OK, that's too young. Too inexperienced and not worldwise enough by a long shot. No shit they're having problems. Can you imagine being a facebook lifer, or one of the LLM pros they've bribed/hired over to the company, to be bossed around by someone with very little life experience?…

That’s much older than when Zuckerberg founded Facebook. Also older than when Bill Gates founded Microsoft, Steve Jobs founded Apple, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. We’re talking about running a tech company, not being a politician. Clearly there’s no need to be 50+ and have a bunch of “life experiences” to be successful.

When these companies were founded, they had nowhere near the scale and resources in the hands of the current set of folks. Zuckerberg at 28 was riding a bike and this is a rocketship (pointed up or down, is not clear)

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

#138

Post by retsibsi »

Salgat wrote: post #122
retsibsi wrote: post #101

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. Now imagine that, during the interval, you approach the actor backstage and initiate a conversation in that language. His respons…

You've missed the point of the example, of course it's not the exact same thing. With regard to LLM, the biggest difference is that it's a regression against the world's knowledge, like an actor who memorized every question that happens to have an answer written down in history. If you give him a novel question, he'll look at similar questions and just hallucinate a mashup of the answers hoping it makes sense, even t…

I don't think I missed the point; my point is that LLMs do something more complex and far more effective than memorise->regurgitate, and so the original analogy doesn't shed any light. This actor has read billions of plays and learned many of the underlying patterns, which allows him to come up with novel and (often) sensible responses when he is forced to improvise.

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

#139

Post by nl »

prng2021 wrote: post #125
nl wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans aren't smart, they are really just good at appearing to be smart. Prove me wrong.

If you don’t think humans are smart, then what living creature qualifies as smart to you? Or do you think humans created the word but it describes nothing that actually exists in the real world?

I think most things humans do are reflexive, type one "thinking" that AIs do just as well as humans.

I think our type two reasoning is roughly comparable to LLM reasoning when it is within the LLM reinforcement learning distribution.

I think some humans are smarter than LLMs out-of-distribution, but only when we think carefully, and in many cases LLMs perform better than many humams even in this case.

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

#140

Post by qingcharles »

atonse wrote: post #5

When I read that the dude was asked to take $2b from reality labs and spend it on AI, I was shocked… that they were still spending $2b on virtual reality nonsense in 2025. That said, from what I understand, X is working on using grok to improve the algorithm. Why can’t fb do the same and coexist?

I still don't think Meta is wrong about VR. It's just still not the year for it. (I know the market has been saying that for 30 years)
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