Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy

#31

Post by sh34r » Sat, Jun 28, 2025, 8:37 PM UTC

blobbers wrote: post #21

It's an interesting take for a guy who's company labels data. Is it a hot dog? Yes, yes it is. 14 BILLIES!

At least they could pivot Hotdog or Not into a dick-pic classifier, which was less trivial when that show was airing.

$14 billion for a glorified mechanical turk platform is bananas. Between this, the $6 billion Jonny Ive acquisition, and a ChatGPT wrapper for doctors called Abridge having a $5 billion valuation, this AI fraud bubble is making pets.com look like a reasonable investment.

Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy

#32

Post by moffkalast » Sat, Jun 28, 2025, 8:41 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #2

I 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 wasn't really that the models were that bad compared to benchmarks, it was that Meta didn't work with inference engine providers ahead of time to integrate the new architecture like other teams usually do, so it was even more bugged than expected for the first few weeks.

The second problem that compounded it was that both L4 models were too large for 99.9% of people to run, so the only opinion most people had of it was what the few that could load it were saying after release. And they weren't saying good things.

So after inference was fixed the reputation stuck because hardly anyone can even run these behemoths to see otherwise. Meta really messed up in all ways they possibly could, short of releasing the wrong checkpoint or something.

Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy

#33

Post by jnwatson » Sat, Jun 28, 2025, 8:42 PM UTC

nothrowaways wrote: post #10

> Meta is falling behind in the AI race How so?

Their latest Llama is a couple steps behind the frontier. Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI are all well ahead.

They missed the boat on LLMs and have been playing catch up.

Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy

#34

Post by linotype » Sat, Jun 28, 2025, 8:45 PM UTC

sigmoid10 wrote: post #30

linotype wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Utterly ridiculous is where we’re at right now.

Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy

#35

Post by aprilthird2021 » Sat, Jun 28, 2025, 8:46 PM UTC

andrewparker wrote: post #22

This 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…

Reportedly the only reason they did this at all is that Wang asked to get a return for investors and employees. It was not Meta who wanted to own any part of Scale (makes sense too, they are already users of Scale data and don't really need anything they get from owning Scale as a company / business).

Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy

#36

Post by sigmoid10 » Sat, Jun 28, 2025, 8:48 PM UTC

linotype wrote: post #34

sigmoid10 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Utterly ridiculous is where we’re at right now.

In the US perhaps, but elsewhere antitrust laws still have some meaning.

Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy

#37

Post by aprilthird2021 » Sat, Jun 28, 2025, 8:48 PM UTC

nothrowaways wrote: post #10

> Meta is falling behind in the AI race How so?

Deepseek is a solid competitor in their niche, the open-source LLM niche. Llama 4 didn't impress, and so they are very vulnerable even in the free niche they carved out for themselves

Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy

#38

Post by aprilthird2021 » Sat, Jun 28, 2025, 8:49 PM UTC

dangus wrote: post #4

The last two paragraphs sure contorted my face into an…interesting expression. I’m confused at how Zuck has proven himself to be a particularly dynamic and capable CEO compared to peers. Facebook hasn’t had new product success outside of acquisitions in at least a decade. The fact that a newcomer like TikTok came and ate Instagram’s lunch is downright embarrassing. Meta Quest is a cash-bleeding joke of a side quest t…

> Facebook hasn’t had new product success outside of acquisitions in at least a decade.

Wrong metric to evaluate dynamism and capability.

Also the Ray Ban Metas have been pretty successful. They consistently sell out

Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy

#39

Post by DataDaemon » Sat, Jun 28, 2025, 8:52 PM UTC

Someone remember the Meta Universe? How much money burnt? And now the AI. In the meantime stock going up and up.

Re: Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy

#40

Post by duxup » Sat, Jun 28, 2025, 8:56 PM UTC

theahura wrote: post #24

niuzeta wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Civ could sure use some AI…