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Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

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Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#371

Post by bongodongobob »

SoftTalker wrote: post #260
dekhn wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes moving fast in a large org boils down to finding a succinct way to tell the lawyer "I understand what you're saying, but that's not consistent with my understanding of the legality of the issue, so I will proceed with my work. If you want to block my process, the escalation path is through my manager." (I have more than once had to explain to a lawyer that their understanding was wrong, and they were imposi…

Raises the question though, why is the lawyer talking to you in the first place, and not your manager?

A lot of times, they do. But where I'm at, lawyers have the last say for some reason. A good example is our sub/sister companies. Our lawyers told us that we needed separate physical servers for their fucking VMs and IAM. We have a fucking data center and they wanted us to buy new hardware.

We fought and tried to explain that what they were asking didn't even make sense, all of our data and IAM is already under the same M365 tenant and other various cloud services. We can't take that apart, it's just not possible.

They wouldn't listen and are completely incapable of understanding so we just said "ok, fine" and I was told to just ignore them.

The details were forgotten in the quagmire of meetings and paperwork, and the sun rose the next day in spite of our clueless 70+ year old legal team.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#372

Post by oldpersonintx2 »

bongodongobob wrote: post #362
noosphr wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big tech is suffering from the incumbents disease. What worked well for extracting profits from stable cash cows doesn't work in fields that are moving rapidly. Google et al. were at one point pinnacle technologies too, but this was 20 years ago. Everyone who knew how to work in that environment has moved on or moved up. Were I the CEO of a company like that I'd reduce headcount in the legacy orgs, transition them to…

Your intuition is right. I work at a big corp right now and the average age in the operations department is probably just under 50. That's not to say age is bad, however... these people have never worked anywhere else. They are completely stuck in the 90s. Almost nothing is automated. Everyone clicks buttons on their grossly outdated tools. Meetings upon meetings upon meetings because we are so top heavy that if they…

[dead]

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#373

Post by HDThoreaun »

bee_rider wrote: post #219
darth_avocado wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ve done this before with their metaverse stuff. You hire a bunch, don’t see progress, let go of people in projects you want to shut down and then hire people in projects you want to try out. Why not just move people around you may ask? Possibly: different skill requirements More likely: people in charge change, and they usually want “their people” around Most definitely: the people being let go were hired when s…

VR + AI could actually be kinda fun (I’m sure folks are working on this stuff already!). Solve the problems of not enough VR content and VR content creation tools kind of sucking by having AI fill in the gaps. But it is just a little toy, Facebook is looking for their next billion dollar idea; that’s not it.

VR + AI synergies is why meta released their model open source Im guessing. The other big tech companies largely have LLMs as substitutes to their products(google being worried about people using chatgpt instead of traditional search) but for meta their products have incredible synergy with AI.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#374

Post by onelesd »

SoftTalker wrote: post #47

> Meta will allow impacted employees to apply for other roles within the company How gracious.

it means the person/people firing you are so far removed from impacting the business they don't know why you were hired in the first place or why they are firing you now.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#375

Post by HDThoreaun »

reaperducer wrote: post #256
ceejayoz wrote: post #3

Because the AI works so well, or because it doesn't? > ”By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Wang writes in a memo seen by Axios. That's kinda wild. I'm kinda shocked they put it in writing.

each person will be more load-bearing On what planet is it OK to describe your employees as "load bearing?" It's a good way to get your SLK keyed.

fuck off with the language police nonsense. We all know what he means

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#376

Post by gip »

thenaturalist wrote: post #355
gip wrote: post #344

Wang doesn’t strike me as an inspiring AI leader, and Meta’s AI leadership and strategy feel unclear. Hopefully they’ll address that soon, because in the meantime OpenAI is executing and shipping.

> OpenAIs leadership and strategy feel unclear. Fixed that for you. Shipping a TikTok clone slop app and a keylogger browser while incinerating money and simultaneously talking a big game how AGI is imminent are the opposite of leadership or strategy. More like acts of desperation to fill massively oversized shoes. The ones who have been shipping quality consistently are the Chinese AI labs.

We can disagree on this. From a product perspective, I think they’ve delivered - bringing cutting-edge AI to hundreds of millions of people. They’re also making progress in specific verticals (Codex is really impressive when used well).

I can’t speak to the purely financial side, but it’s definitely possible they’re overextended.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#377

Post by seanmcdirmid »

bongodongobob wrote: post #362
noosphr wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big tech is suffering from the incumbents disease. What worked well for extracting profits from stable cash cows doesn't work in fields that are moving rapidly. Google et al. were at one point pinnacle technologies too, but this was 20 years ago. Everyone who knew how to work in that environment has moved on or moved up. Were I the CEO of a company like that I'd reduce headcount in the legacy orgs, transition them to…

Your intuition is right. I work at a big corp right now and the average age in the operations department is probably just under 50. That's not to say age is bad, however... these people have never worked anywhere else. They are completely stuck in the 90s. Almost nothing is automated. Everyone clicks buttons on their grossly outdated tools. Meetings upon meetings upon meetings because we are so top heavy that if they…

You know in the 90s we were saying the same thing:

> They are completely stuck in the 70s. Almost nothing is automated. Everyone types CLI commands into their grossly outdated tools

I'm sure 30 years from now kids will have the same complaints.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#378

Post by HDThoreaun »

thatguysaguy wrote: post #127
Fanofilm wrote: post #112

I think this is because older AI doesn't get done what LLM AI does. Older AI = normal trained models, neural networks (without transformers), support vector machines, etc. For that reason, they are letting them go. They don't see revenue coming from that. They don't see new product lines (like AI Generative image/video). AI may have this every 5 years. A break through moves the technology into an entirely new area. T…

FAIR is not older AI... They've been publishing a bunch on generative models.

FAIR is 3000 people, they do tons of different things

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#379

Post by B-Con »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #286
djmips wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately there's probably a lot of opportunity for those 600 out there.

While ex-FAIR people should have little problem finding a job, the market for paying research folks that level of TC and working on ambitious research projects, unless you're in a very-LLM specific space, is absolutely shrinking. It certainly feels like the end of an era to see Meta increasingly diminishing the role of FAIR. Strategically it might not have been ideal for LeCun to be so openly and aggressively critica…

FAIR?

FAANG typo, or is there a new acronym?

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#380

Post by fooker »

noosphr wrote: post #321
nopurpose wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google et al. were at one point pinnacle technologies too, but this was 20 years ago. In 2017 Google literally gave us transformer architecture all current AI boom is based on.

And what did they do with it for the next five years?

Well, there was this wild two year drama where they had people fight and smear each other over whether wasting energy for LLMs is ethical.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/google-ai-chief-says...

That made plenty of scientists and engineers at google avoid AI for a while.

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