151–160 of 923 posts
Is this what they mean to "Feel the AGI?" AGI has been achieved internally once again at Meta.
> AGI has been achieved internally once again at Meta Care to elaborate on how you came to this conclusion?
It means layoffs with AI, with the smokescreen of "abundance".
It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." They want the efficiency, of course there's AI component, but they're not pre-claiming victory. Neat. It's worth remembering that there's an _actual_ underlying economic problem here. Interest rates are up. AI spending is expensive. A dollar invested in a company needs to do _more_ than it did 5 years ago, relative to sitting in treasury…
Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do. There is nothing "cowardly" about it. Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
I think they have a point. Facebook is making money. Tech is in a very dynamic phase, right now. This is a moment of huge opportunity for them, and one that won’t necessarily be as large in the future.
To be contracting right now, rather than making a play, seems like a lack of leadership.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh, did anything happen in 2020? I'm wracking my brains trying to think of anything.
As the article touches on, it's not just about what happened in 2020, but why it hasn't rebounded. It's been long enough we can't use 2020 as an excuse.
The fact that we are entertaining 50 year mortgages as a "solution" further adds insult to injury.
Nobody talks about how the "cure" was worse than the disease in 2020. Happiness matters and is worth dying for.
It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." They want the efficiency, of course there's AI component, but they're not pre-claiming victory. Neat. It's worth remembering that there's an _actual_ underlying economic problem here. Interest rates are up. AI spending is expensive. A dollar invested in a company needs to do _more_ than it did 5 years ago, relative to sitting in treasury…
It isn't good optics at the moment, or good politics, for a company to loudly proclaim "we're firing people because of AI taking their jobs". That doesn't mean that's what happened, it only means that whether or not its true, most companies aren't going to say it. The few that have said anything of the sort have suffered some backlash, and they aren't even as prominent as Meta or Microsoft (which also just announced…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Internally they operate like a government or military and less like a normal company.
As someone who has only worked for a company with maybe a thousand people, can you elaborate on this a bit?
And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend headcount optimizing datacenter spend down. Hire a team to re-write PHP to make it faster literally pays for itself. Or kernel engineers. Or even HW engineers and power generation. And on the product side, you can do lots of experiments where a 1% improvement in ad revenue pays like the entire department's wages for the year. So you do a lot of them, and the winners cover the cost of the losers. And you hire teams to build software to run more experiments faster and more correctly.
The brakes on this "flywheel of success" is the diseconomies of scale outweighing the economies. When the costs of communicating and negotiation are higher internally than those external contracts you previously subsumed. When you have two teams writing their own database engine competing (with suppliers!) for the same hires. When your datacenter plans outpace industrial power generation plans. When your management spins up secret teams to launch virtual reality products with no legs.
Re: > If America’s so rich how’d it get so sad > https://www.derekthompson.org/p/if-americas-so-rich-howd-it-...
It's well known since ancient times that money doesn't buy happiness.
The average American ain’t doing very well by OECD standards… literally bottom of the ladder.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it only takes an ounce more wisdom to recall this phrase: "Money can't buy happiness, but it helps."
Money buys you Freedom. A much more general category theory type framing.
"It buys a WaveRunner. You ever seen a sad person on a WaveRunner?"
I have a genuine dislike for all Meta products now. With time, their intentions have become much more clear and it was never to bring people closer or whatever.
Going back to the G+ era, I remember even by that time the FB dev advocates (these existed) came off as seriously slimy, to the point that it was clear we couldn't have the Google and FB reps in the same room at the same time. (And the Google ones were much more good humored about this). Admittedly that was just a couple of guys, but it takes something to be so obviously toxic yet still chosen to represent the values…
It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." They want the efficiency, of course there's AI component, but they're not pre-claiming victory. Neat. It's worth remembering that there's an _actual_ underlying economic problem here. Interest rates are up. AI spending is expensive. A dollar invested in a company needs to do _more_ than it did 5 years ago, relative to sitting in treasury…
Literally, what else can they possibly do that hasn't been done? there's just limited opportunity.
I survived all three rounds of layoffs, but I saw multiple great colleagues (some of them had been there for 10+ years), getting laid off. After so many re-orgs, I had enough and quit. It was just not worth it (all that uncertainity, people were unhappy, hunger games into trying to get a good rating, etc).
I think Zuck is taking its "Meta" failure (VR) into his own employees. After their treatment, many good people don't want to join Meta anymore, hence he had to spend so much money into buying engineers to join.
I think it is the start of a downwards spiral.