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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#341

Post by jimbokun »

fidotron wrote: post #33
ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

Let's go there: this is what the Unabomber was on about, and there has long been an effort to stop people noticing this. Ultimately you end up with either going for totalitarianism (either to arrest development in the status quo, maintain a state of anarcho primitivism or technocratic tedium) or we resist that and break out by trying to forge forward into some unknown unchartered territory. In practice we have no cho…

Or find a way to make government respond more to voters than dollars.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#342

Post by duskwuff »

Animats wrote: post #324
zmmmmm wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to judge culture during a period of serial downsizing because it will always be toxic in that context. But what you tell aligns with what I have inferred over a period of many years observing, even during times when they were growing: at a high level, Zuck gives the right signals of a successful tech CEO. He's smart, insightful, talks well (now) and appears decisive and willing to back long term bets into…

The low execution quality of Meta's metaverse effort surprised me, too. But they wanted it to run on their relatively weak headgear. A good metaverse needs a decent gamer PC, a serious GPU, and a few hundred megabits per second of Internet bandwidth. (I've written a Second Life client in Rust, so I'm very aware of the system requirements.) Facebook needs to serve a user base which is mostly phones and people with wea…

I think the problem goes beyond that. Meta never had a particularly coherent story for what "Horizon Worlds" was supposed to be to users - it was variously pitched as an online conference room, a social hangout, a way to explore 3D models, a video game... it felt as if they were throwing ideas at the wall to see what stuck, and nothing really did.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#343

Post by voidfunc »

BobbyJo wrote: post #338
voidfunc wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im joining meta for the total comp not because I give a shit about the company or products. Same as every company.

OP was saying not to join because you'll have a shitty time, not because the products aren't inspirational enough.

Ill join purely for the comp. I can take a lot of abuse, trust me.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#344

Post by menloshark »

voidfunc wrote: post #334
menloshark wrote: post #198

Here's how things play out: Zuck gets some idea, he's surrounded by a bunch of yes men who say "yes, this will definitely change the world", then it turns into this optics game of kissing the ring. You ask yourself "how could they blow 80B on the Metaverse like that", this is how. DON'T JOIN META, no matter how fast the recruiters reply to your messages. No matter how cool the work sounds (the managers lie in team ma…

Im joining meta for the total comp not because I give a shit about the company or products. Same as every company.

The total comp is a lie because the average tenure is Just one suggestion: don't stop interviewing and be very observant of whatever team you land in, be ready to jump ship if there are too many red flags. Also don't trust any of the managers. Don't take anything people say at face value. Be very discerning in team matching, where you land determines everything.

You might be thinking "oh if I just work 7 days a week, I'll be safe". That's not true, it's all about where you land.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#345

Post by somewhatgoated »

2wdfsd wrote: post #242
bandrami wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The asymmetry is that lots of people want to use LLMs to produce things, and nobody wants to consume the things LLMs produce. The Nash equilibrium here is that the market has to find a way for the people producing things with LLMs to pay people to consume them, and the market always finds a way.

Not quite. Ultimately the lions-share of income of model producer's is coming from firms. Firms are only going to pay out to model producers if they are getting more in excess of the cost of financing projects over time. If a firm does not see this happen, they reduce their spend on tokens. Simple. Its a whole lot more nuanced than some shitty game theory.

“Firms are only making perfectly rational decisions that result in meaningful real outcomes” - not my experience.

Firms waste literally billions on some bullshit that gets them nothing.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#346

Post by blast »

mystraline wrote: post #204
mlinsey wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing efforts by powerful institutions to squash the technology, which they definitely try to do, but that's just a strong signal that the technology itself is inherently opposed to centralized power, not an enabler of it. Other technologies like surveillance (and, perhaps, AI) are more clearly centralizing and enabling of power. The difference matters a lot if you're having mixed feelings about working i…

You are anthromorphizing technology. He doesnt like that.

mlinsey wasn't anthropomorphizing technology, and your GP comment seems extreme to me.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#349

Post by johnfn »

somewhatgoated wrote: post #319
marcosdumay wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is incompetent execution of an untested idea. VR will be huge some day. Maybe not as huge as the Metaverse hype, but huge nonetheless. But did you expect Facebook to have any competence on making it? Even if the timing was correct, what differentiator do they have? And then the CEO throws a world-changing amount of money without even an idea (because "a VR world!" isn't an idea). Did you expect any of that mon…

VR won’t be huge someday. We won’t live to see it at least. We also won’t experience quantum computing having a real world impact. We also won’t see humanoid robots doing any meaningful real world work. There also won’t be a Mars base in our lifetime or datacenters in space or underwater. There won’t be any flying cars either.

I would definitely bet against the humanoid robot thing on good odds.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#350

Post by mkl »

pinkgolem wrote: post #268
Avicebron wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My default is that I won't copy and paste anything that's AI generated in communications. I kind of think that's the line. Use whatever you want in the background, but I want to communicate with the synthesis of your thoughts. I think this is a reasonable standard to hold, otherwise, like many before have said...send me the prompt. It's actually more interesting/better I know a coworker is struggling to communicate a…

I mean, i struggle with spelling/wording and ask the LLM to proofread a lot. I often send out the LLM version, but still check if it contains the original thoughts correctly. It's not a bad way to extend your vocabulary & catch spelling mistakes

You don't need a fake extended vocabulary. Just communicate directly and honestly. Underlining spelling errors as you type has been a standard feature of email software for nearly three decades.
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