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Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#731

Post by ncallaway »

mrandish wrote: post #724
foxylad wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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.

Yea, but it seems like the new new thing needs to get progressively bigger with each cycle, which is why I think the shell game is almost over.

They really can't overpromise much more than they did with the AI hype-cycle.

It feels like a startup valuation in that having a down round is...not favored by investors; I feel like having a step-down in promises would also be problematic.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#733

Post by lotsoweiners »

dehrmann wrote: post #396
htrp wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame short sighted investors asking Sears to "focus"

They weren't wrong. Its core business in what is still a viable-enough sector collapsed. Or if it were truly well-managed, running an ISP and a retailer should have been enough insight to be Amazon.

I worked at Sears at the time when Amazon first started becoming a household name. I for the life of me couldn’t understand why they didn’t make a copycat site called the Sears Catalog Online. But then I think about it and management wanted salesmanship because selling maintenance agreements was their cash cow. Low margin sales won in the long term hence we have Walmart and Amazon as the biggest retailers.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#734

Post by jeremyjh »

mrandish wrote: post #724
foxylad wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Or every investor just expects the other investors will fall for this, but the result is the same: number go up so buy more. It could be no one really falls for it at all.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#735

Post by jeremyjh »

aspenmayer wrote: post #730
kelnos wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your track record includes a lot of losses, the scale points more and more toward "clueless" and away from "4D chess".

Isn’t that already priced in? Shorts exist.

The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#736

Post by SamvitJ »

I'm far from being a fan of the company, but I think this article is substantially overstating the extent of the "freeze" just to drum up news. It sounds like what's actually happening is a re-org [1] - a consolidation of all the AI groups under the new Superintelligence umbrella, similar to Google merging Brain and DeepMind, with an emphasis on finding the existing AI staff roles within the new org.

From Meta itself: “All that’s happening here is some basic organisational planning: creating a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises.”

[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-hiring-freeze-fda6b3c4?s...

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#737

Post by aspenmayer »

jeremyjh wrote: post #735
aspenmayer wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that already priced in? Shorts exist.

The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.

That was my point, if someone thinks that Meta is overvalued, they can put their money where their mouth is. The fact that the share price hasn’t cratered is a kind of collective belief in the opposite.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#738

Post by bryanlarsen »

cyanydeez wrote: post #598
bryanlarsen wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people even figured it out in the 80's. Sears founded and ran Prodigy, a large BBS and eventually ISP. They were trying to set themselves up to become Amazon. Not only that, Prodigy's thing (for a while) was using advertising revenue to lower subscription prices. Your "Netflix over dialup" analogy is more accessible to this readership, but Sears+Prodigy is my favorite example of trying to make the future happen…

the problem is ISP became a Utility, not some fountain of unlimited growth. What you're arguing is that AI is fundamentally going to be a utility, and while that's worth a floor of cash, it's not what investors or the market clamor for. I agree though, it's fundamentally a utility, which means theres more value in proper government authority than private interests.

Sears started Prodigy to become Amazon, not Comcast.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#739

Post by platevoltage »

postalrat wrote: post #697
toephu2 wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The media always says AI is the biggest technological change of our lifetime.. I think it was the internet actually.

I believe it's the biggest change since the Internet but what will be bigger will probably remain subjective.

I’d say that the social media revolution had a bigger effect than AI has at this point.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#740

Post by platevoltage »

daheza wrote: post #614
tracker1 wrote: post #601

I'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…

I think apple is fine. When AI works without 1 in 5 hallucinations then it can be added to their product. Showing up late with features that exists elsewhere but are polished in apple presentation is the way.

True. I mean, how long did it take us to get a right click button.
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