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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

#461

Post by danaris »

jongjong wrote: post #450
rhetocj23 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can't innovate without taking career-ending risks." Its not the job of employees to bear this burden - if you have visionary leadership at the helm, they should be the ones absorbing this pressure. And thats what is missing. The reality is folks like Zuck were never visionaries. Lets not derail the thread but a) he stole the idea for facebook b) the continued success of Meta comes from its numerous acquisitions…

If we want to maximize justice instead of corporate performance then we have to abolish the system, confiscate corporate wealth and redistribute it equally. That would probably be more just than what we have today... But the corporations would all collapse. It depends what you want to optimize for.

That doesn't mean there isn't a middle ground, y'know—where company/division/organization leaders both advance ideas and take responsibility for them.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#462

Post by mips_avatar »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #457
janalsncm wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take your broader point but personally I feel like it’s ok if the FDA is cautious. The incentives that bias towards rejection may be “not killing people”.

What about the people who die because a safe and effective drug that could have saved their life got rejected? The problem is that there's a fundamental asymmetry here - those deaths are invisible but deaths from a bad drug that got approved are very visible.

I mean drugs are different than consumer technology. Instagram isn’t great but it doesn’t cause birth defects. Also things like the compassionate release of hiv drugs in study show the govt can see the nuance here with enough pressure.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#463

Post by monkeynotes »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #284
monkeynotes wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly, they are burning money with TikSlop, they don't even know how to monetize it, just YOLO'd the product to keep investors interested. Even the porn industry can't seem to monetize AI, so I doubt OpenAI who knows jack shit about this space will be able to. Fact is generative AI is stupidly expensive to run, and I can't see mass adoption at subscription prices that actually allow them to break even. I'm sure folk…

> I just don't understand how smart people think this is going to work out at all. Thats the thing, they arent looking at the big picture or long term. They are looking to get a slice of the pie after seeing companies like Tesla and Uber milk the market for billions. In a market where everything from shelter to food is blowing up in cost, people struggle to provide/have a life similar to their parents.

How can you take the market for billions when you are investing hundreds and hundreds of billions? Amazon overtook Walmart and cloud computing, they have a solid business model, and I doubt even a business that size could pay down that outlay. Are we really saying that by some miracle OpenAI, or Anthropic are going to find a use case that would make places like Amazon and Apple look like relatively small business?

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#464

Post by rester324 »

semiinfinitely wrote: post #280
JCM9 wrote: post #264

Lots of companies spun up giant AI teams over the last 48 months. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if 50+% of these roles are eliminated in the next 48 months. The AI party is coming to an end. Those without clear ROI are ripe for the chopping block.

wishful thinking

I call it reasonable thinking

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#465

Post by zamadatix »

impossiblefork wrote: post #289
zamadatix wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that depends on how optimistic/pessimistic one is on how much more superior the models are going to get. If you're really pessimistic then there isn't all too much one company could do to be 2x or more ahead already. If you're really optimistic then it doesn't matter what anyone is doing today because it's about who finds the next 100x leap.

I don't think it does. The models have increased greatly in capabilities, but the competitors have simply kept up, and it's not apparently that they won't continue to do that. Furthermore, the breakthroughs-- i.e. fundamentally better models, can happen anywhere where people can and do try out new architectures, and that can happen in surprisingly small places. It's mostly about culture and being willing to experimen…

You don't think it does because what you described is only the optimistic take on how much farther LLMs will be able to advance :). The pessimists would look at previous "AI" and point out each new approach quickly rises to prominence and then drastically tapers off in how much more can be squeezed out of it.

I'm somewhere in the middle. I think there is more to squeeze out of LLMs still, but not nearly the kind of growth we had from GPT-2 to multimodal reasoning models. Part of the equation is, as you say, a willingness to experiment on radical ideas. The other part is a willingness to find when the growth curve is slowing rather than bet it will always grow enough for a novel architecture lead to be meaningful.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#467

Post by drivebyhooting »

janderson215 wrote: post #442
criemen wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How should they do that? I hear that phrase, and it's easy to agree to, but how would it look in practice?

Stepping down vs mass layoffs reduces headcount by 1/20th, so the only other solution is to continue floundering until everybody loses their job. These people complaining about layoffs would prefer the whole plant to rot versus pruning a few wilting stems.

I’m not talking about solution. I’m talking about responsibility and aligning incentive.

Management should take a painful paycut or resign to demonstrate some contrition.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#468

Post by danaris »

jpadkins wrote: post #247
monkeynotes wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly, they are burning money with TikSlop, they don't even know how to monetize it, just YOLO'd the product to keep investors interested. Even the porn industry can't seem to monetize AI, so I doubt OpenAI who knows jack shit about this space will be able to. Fact is generative AI is stupidly expensive to run, and I can't see mass adoption at subscription prices that actually allow them to break even. I'm sure folk…

> If consumers are out of work, who the hell is going to keep the economy going? There is a whole field of research called post scarcity economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity tldr; it's not as bad as you think, but the transition is going to be bad (for some of us).

It can only be "not as bad as you think" if the people currently at the top don't continue to hoard all the gains.

If the current system is maintained—the one where if you don't work, you don't earn money, and thus you can't pay for food, shelter, clothing, etc—then it doesn't matter how abundant our stuff is; most people won't have any access to it.

In order for society to reap the benefits of post-scarcity, we must destroy the idea that the people at the top of the corporate pyramid deserve astronomically more money than the people actually doing the work.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#469

Post by SoftTalker »

dekhn wrote: post #424
SoftTalker wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have to contact various groups in the company- the cost center folks to get an approval for spending the money to get the SaaS, the security folk to ensure we're not accidentally leaking IP to the outside world, the legal folks to make sure the contract negotiations go smoothly. I guess I was assuming (maybe wrongly) that you are an engineer/developer of some sort. All of that work sounds like manager work to me.…

I only started managing people recently (and still do some engineering and development, along with various project management- my job title is "Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer - so not really even a management track). I have a lot of experience doing this sort of work (IE, some product management, project management, customer/stakeholder relationships, vendor relationships, telling the industrial contracto…

"Manager" means different things, btw.

Certainly, and its interesting to see your perspective. At most of my jobs, if I needed a subscription to a SaaS (the earlier example) I'd tell my manager, explain my reasons, and they'd deal with purchasing, legal, security, etc. as needed, maybe looping me in if there was a technical question they could not answer.

Re: Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

#470

Post by darepublic »

monkeynotes wrote: post #463
doctorwho42 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just don't understand how smart people think this is going to work out at all. Thats the thing, they arent looking at the big picture or long term. They are looking to get a slice of the pie after seeing companies like Tesla and Uber milk the market for billions. In a market where everything from shelter to food is blowing up in cost, people struggle to provide/have a life similar to their parents.

How can you take the market for billions when you are investing hundreds and hundreds of billions? Amazon overtook Walmart and cloud computing, they have a solid business model, and I doubt even a business that size could pay down that outlay. Are we really saying that by some miracle OpenAI, or Anthropic are going to find a use case that would make places like Amazon and Apple look like relatively small business?

> Are we really saying that by some miracle OpenAI, or Anthropic are going to find a use case that would make places like Amazon and Apple look like relatively small business?

I thought the replacement of all desk jobs was supposed to be that joking not joking usecase

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