It's an interesting take for a guy who's company labels data.
Is it a hot dog? Yes, yes it is.
14 BILLIES!
Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy
21–30 of 77 posts
Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy
#22This post doesn't quite comprehend why Meta made a 49% investment instead of an acquisition.
The path Meta chose avoided global regulatory review. FTC, DOJ, etc and their international counterparts could have chosen to review and block an outright acquisition. They have no authority to review a minority investment.
Scale shareholders received a comparable financial outcome to an acquisition, and also avoided the regulatory uncertainty that comes with govt review.
It was win/win, and there's a chance for the residual Scale company to continue to build a successful business, further rewarding shareholders (of which Meta is now the largest), which is just like wildcard upside and was never the point of the original deal.
Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy
#23This post doesn't quite comprehend why Meta made a 49% investment instead of an acquisition. The path Meta chose avoided global regulatory review. FTC, DOJ, etc and their international counterparts could have chosen to review and block an outright acquisition. They have no authority to review a minority investment. Scale shareholders received a comparable financial outcome to an acquisition, and also avoided the regu…
I agree that this is a possible reason. Meta wants to move fast and m&a is too slow for their tastes. I make the case in the article though that the actual acquisition doesn't really make sense for metas core business, but I agree it's possible.
I disagree that this is a win/win. Scale stock is still illiquid, and people who remain at scale or have scale stock are now stuck with shares that are actually less valuable -- even though the market price has ostensibly gone up, the people who made the stock valuable are gone
Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's basically the benchmarks, and then "the benchmarks". The former is, like, actual stuff you can quantify and game. And the latter is the public response. The former is a leading indicator but it's not always accurate, and the latter is what actually matters. I knew Gemini 2.5 was better than Claude 3.7 based on the Reddit reaction lol
Just out of curiosity, what were the reactions like from what you saw? I had the opposite take from Reddit, which proved to be incorrect. So I'm just curious how you read(more correctly than me) the reactions vis-a-vis Reddit.
Idk just vibes. I haven't joined any subreddits except r/civ. The feed is inscrutable
Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy
#25This post doesn't quite comprehend why Meta made a 49% investment instead of an acquisition. The path Meta chose avoided global regulatory review. FTC, DOJ, etc and their international counterparts could have chosen to review and block an outright acquisition. They have no authority to review a minority investment. Scale shareholders received a comparable financial outcome to an acquisition, and also avoided the regu…
>They have no authority to review a minority investment.
That's just wrong. Partial acquisitions and minority shareholdings don't allow you to bypass antitrust investigations.
See 15 U.S.C. §18 for example. It is similar in the EU.
Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy
#26I guess OpenAI got a good deal at 6.5b for Jony Ive. >Supposedly, Llama 4 did perform well on benchmarks, but the user experience was so bad that people have accused Meta of cooking the books. This is one of those things that I've noticed. I don't understand the benchmarks, and my usage certainly isn't going to be wide ranging as benchmarks, but I hear "OMG this AI and benchmarks" and then I go use it and it's not an…
I think there's basically the benchmarks, and then "the benchmarks". The former is, like, actual stuff you can quantify and game. And the latter is the public response. The former is a leading indicator but it's not always accurate, and the latter is what actually matters. I knew Gemini 2.5 was better than Claude 3.7 based on the Reddit reaction lol
Any industry that cannot depend on artificial benchmarks, and instead has to depends on user benchmarks is a labor intensive industry. If it turns out that LLMs in their current form do depend a lot on manual user benchmarks, then they will always require human workers. Kind of like how AI means actually Indians.
Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy
#27> Meta is falling behind in the AI race How so?
Same way companies fell behind during the original "dot com" era: By not burning money quickly enough. Disclosure: I work for one of the companies that fell behind.
Was that the real reason companues failed? By not burning money, instead of burning through it too fast?
Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy
#28I guess OpenAI got a good deal at 6.5b for Jony Ive. >Supposedly, Llama 4 did perform well on benchmarks, but the user experience was so bad that people have accused Meta of cooking the books. This is one of those things that I've noticed. I don't understand the benchmarks, and my usage certainly isn't going to be wide ranging as benchmarks, but I hear "OMG this AI and benchmarks" and then I go use it and it's not an…
In retrospect it’s quite amazing how Jony Ive managed to make a superstar career out of almost directory copying Dieter Rams all the time. I can’t imagine what kind of value he could bring to OpenAI. The dude ruined Apple laptops for 5 years, he really should be an industry castaway.
I learned to program C in high school on the original iMacs and thanks to OS 9's lack of true multi-tasking and Ive's penchant for lack of buttons, anytime our code crashed or made an infinite loop, we would have to reach around and unplug the computer from the wall. The single power button on the front was a soft button that required CPU cycles to operate.
There was also a tiny hole in the front that you could insert a paperclip to reset the machine, but unplugging from the wall was faster.
Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy
#29This post doesn't quite comprehend why Meta made a 49% investment instead of an acquisition. The path Meta chose avoided global regulatory review. FTC, DOJ, etc and their international counterparts could have chosen to review and block an outright acquisition. They have no authority to review a minority investment. Scale shareholders received a comparable financial outcome to an acquisition, and also avoided the regu…
>They have no authority to review a minority investment. That's just wrong. Partial acquisitions and minority shareholdings don't allow you to bypass antitrust investigations. See 15 U.S.C. §18 for example. It is similar in the EU.
The current US administration allows you to bypass US antitrust regulations.
Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
>They have no authority to review a minority investment. That's just wrong. Partial acquisitions and minority shareholdings don't allow you to bypass antitrust investigations. See 15 U.S.C. §18 for example. It is similar in the EU.
The current US administration allows you to bypass US antitrust regulations.
But not because of majority/minority reasons as the other comment implies. It would be utterly ridiculous if you could just buy 49% of each of your competitors without any possibility for the government to interfere.