"We believe in putting this power in people’s hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives"
Either Zuckerberg has drunk his own Kool Aid, or he is cynically lying to everyone, but neither is a good look.
Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
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Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#722Zuckerberg either doesn't have the resolve for changing the business, or just keeps picking the wrong directions (depending on your biases). First Facebook tried to pivot into mobile, pushed really hard for a short time and then flopped. Then Facebook tried really hard to make the Metaverse a thing, and for a while, but eventually Meta stopped finding it interesting and significantly reduced investment. Then AI was t…
Oh, I'm sure one day he'll chase the next big thing, but like the proverbial dog who chases the car, what will he do once he catches it?
Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#723Zuckerberg either doesn't have the resolve for changing the business, or just keeps picking the wrong directions (depending on your biases). First Facebook tried to pivot into mobile, pushed really hard for a short time and then flopped. Then Facebook tried really hard to make the Metaverse a thing, and for a while, but eventually Meta stopped finding it interesting and significantly reduced investment. Then AI was t…
> Then Facebook tried really hard to make the Metaverse a thing...
An unforced error on the scale of HBO switching to MAX, except likely far more expensive. What is the Metaverse anyway?
Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#724Zuckerberg either doesn't have the resolve for changing the business, or just keeps picking the wrong directions (depending on your biases). First Facebook tried to pivot into mobile, pushed really hard for a short time and then flopped. Then Facebook tried really hard to make the Metaverse a thing, and for a while, but eventually Meta stopped finding it interesting and significantly reduced investment. Then AI was t…
Cory Doctorow has a compelling theory that the megatech companies have to appear to be startups, or else their share price reverts to normal multiples. Hence the continuous string of increasingly over-hyped "game-changing technologies" they all (not just Meta) keep rolling out. VR, blockchain and LLMs have their value, but it's a tiny fraction of the insane amounts of money being pumped into these bubbles. There will…
Indeed, for big valley tech companies it's crucial to have a new business developing in the wings which has plausible potential to be the "next big thing." They're desperate to keep their stock price from being evaluated solely on trailing twelve month revenue, so having a shiny, ephemeral hype-magnet to attract inflated growth expectations is essential.
So far, it appears the psychology of investors allows the new thing to fail to deliver big revenue and be tacitly dropped - as long as there's a new new thing to replace it as the aspirational vehicle. Like any good mark in a con game, tech investors want to believe.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#725Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you used Siri recently ? It's actually amazing how it can be crap at tasks consistently considering underlying tech. 1 in 5 hallucinations would be a welcome improvement. Using ChatGPT voice mode and Siri makes Siri feel like a legacy product.
I don’t think that’s the point. Yes, Siri is crap, but Apple is already working on integrating LLMs at the OS level and those are shipping soon. It’s a quick fix to catch up in the AI game, but considering their track record, they’re likely to eventually retire third party partnerships and vertically integrate with their own models in the future. The incentive is there—doing so will only boost their stock price.
Just because the LLM can access kernel does not miracle make it better. Do you think the problem with Apple AI right now is because they don't have access to OS components?
Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#726Zuckerberg either doesn't have the resolve for changing the business, or just keeps picking the wrong directions (depending on your biases). First Facebook tried to pivot into mobile, pushed really hard for a short time and then flopped. Then Facebook tried really hard to make the Metaverse a thing, and for a while, but eventually Meta stopped finding it interesting and significantly reduced investment. Then AI was t…
Metaverse was a flop maybe, but meta makes something like $1 billion a week from its mobile apps, it'd be crazy to say that is not successful.
The fact that it was so successful, and that zuck picked mobile to be the next big thing before many of his peers and against what managers in the company wanted to do is probably what has made him now overconfident that he can do it again
Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#727Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really difficult to wrap one's head around the cash they're able to deploy.
They “deploy” much more than what they generate. Their cash position has gone from $44bn to $12bn in the first six months of the year and are now getting other people to pay for datacenters https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-taps-pimco-blue-owl-29...
I really hope they told the Louisiana regulators this in the meeting yesterday because the argument was something along the lines of “Meta is worth $2T”
Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#728Zuckerberg either doesn't have the resolve for changing the business, or just keeps picking the wrong directions (depending on your biases). First Facebook tried to pivot into mobile, pushed really hard for a short time and then flopped. Then Facebook tried really hard to make the Metaverse a thing, and for a while, but eventually Meta stopped finding it interesting and significantly reduced investment. Then AI was t…
Metaverse was a flop maybe, but meta makes something like $1 billion a week from its mobile apps, it'd be crazy to say that is not successful. The fact that it was so successful, and that zuck picked mobile to be the next big thing before many of his peers and against what managers in the company wanted to do is probably what has made him now overconfident that he can do it again
By "pivot into mobile" I suspect the other poster is referring to Facebook Home, an ill-fated Android skin and line of smartphones.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
#729I'm somewhere in the middle on this, with regards to the ROI... this isn't the kind of thing where you see immediate reflection on quarterly returns... it's the kind of thing where if you don't hedge some bets, you're likely to completely die out from a generational shift. Facebook's product is eyeballs... they're being usurped on all sides between TikTok, X and BlueSky in terms of daily/regular users... They're comp…
> They're competing with Google, X, MS, OpenAI and others in terms of AI interactions
Am I the only one that find the attempt to jam AI interactions into Meta's products useless and that it only detracts from the product? Like there'll be posts with comedy things and then there are suggested 'Ask Meta AI' about things the comedy mentions with earnest questions - it's not only irrelevant but I guess it's kind of funny how random and stupid the questions are. The 'Comment summaries' are counter-productive because I want to have a chuckle reading what people posted, I literally don't care to have it summarised because I can just skim over a few in seconds - literally useless. It's the same thing with Gemini summaries in YouTube - I feel it actually detracts from the experience of watching the videos so I actively avoid them.
On what Apple is doing - I mean, literally nothing Apple Intelligence offers excites me, but at the same time nothing anybody else is doing with LLMs really does either... And I'm highly technical, general people are not actually that interested apart from students getting LLMs to write their homework for them...
It's all well and good to be excited about LLMs but plenty of these companies' customers just... aren't... If anything, Apple is playing the smart move here - let other spend (and lose) billions training the models and not making any real ROI, and they can license the best ones for whatever turns out to actually have commercial appeal when the dust settles and the models are totally commodified...