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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

#741

Post by danpalmer »

xuki wrote: post #718
danpalmer wrote: post #706

Zuckerberg 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…

For the past 15 years, mobile has been the main revenue source for Facebook. As big as Facebook is, they're at the mercy of the 2 competitors: Apple and Google. Apple has been very hostile to Facebook, because Facebook make a shitload of money off Apple's platform and they refused to pay a certain percentage to Apple - unlike Google who is paying 20B a year to access iOS users. Apple tried to cut Facebook off with AT…

> For the past 15 years, mobile has been the main revenue source for Facebook. As big as Facebook is, they're at the mercy of the 2 competitors

Before mobile was this big, Facebook tried their own platform and bottled it. This was during the period that the market was still diverse, with Windows phones, Blackberries, etc.

They also tried to make mobile web a thing for a few years past when it was obvious that native apps were the way forward.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#742

Post by ath3nd »

standardUser wrote: post #723
danpalmer wrote: post #706

Zuckerberg 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?

It's the future!

The same as Zuck's bet on VR (remember Oculus?).

Similar to Zuck's promises of superintelligence.

Just one of the many futures wherein Meta poured a lot of money and achieved nothing.

I hope in their real future there is bankruptcy and ruin.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#743

Post by platevoltage »

makeitdouble wrote: post #666
daheza wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In general I don't think Google or Apple need AI. In practice though their platform is closed to any other assistant than theirs, so they have to come up with a competent service (basically Ben Thomson's "strategy tax" playing in full) That question will be moot the day Apple allows other companies to ingest everything's happening on device and operate the whole device in reaction to user's requests, and some company…

You’re right, they don’t need AI. I finally stopped using Google search after they added the AI summary and didn’t add a way to turn it off. I’m just as bothered by Apple’s lack of AI as a am their lack of a touch screen on MacBooks. I use AI when I need AI.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#744

Post by kjellsbells »

jmyeet wrote: post #716
danpalmer wrote: post #706

Zuckerberg 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…

It's important to analyze decisions within the context at the time, not the modern context. When Facebook went into gaming, it was about the time they went public and they were in search of revenue. At the time, FB games were huge. It was the era of Farmville. Some thought that FB and Zynga would be the new Intel and MIcrosoft. This was also long before mobile gaming was really big so gaming wasn't an unreasonable be…

> Meta has a massive corpus of posts, comments, interactions, etc to train AI

I question whether the corpus is of particularly high quality and therefore valuable source data to train on.

On the one hand: 20+ years of posts. In hundreds of languages (very useful to counteract the extreme English-centricity of most AI today).

On the other hand: 15+ years of those posts are clustered on a tiny number of topics, like politics and selling marketplace items. Not very useful unless you are building RagebaitAI I suppose. Reddit's data would seem to be far more valuable on that basis.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#745

Post by ath3nd »

toephu2 wrote: post #632
seu wrote: post #422

These changes in direction (spending billions, freezing hiring) over just a few months show that these people are as clueless as to what's going to happen with AI, as everyone else. They just have the billions and therefore dictate where money goes, but that's it.

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

The media was saying nfts are a reasonable investment and web3 is the future, so I am not sure if they have any remaining credibility.

We are at the awesome moment in history when the AI bubble is popping so I am looking forward to a lot of journalists eating their words (not that anybody is keeping track but they are wrong most of the time) and a lot of LLM companies going under and the domino crash of the stocks of Meta, OpenAI to AWS, Google and Microsoft to Softbank (the same guys giving money to Adam Neumann from WeWork).

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#746

Post by platevoltage »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #704
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…

> they're being usurped on all sides They did it to themselves. Facebook is not the same site I originally joined. People were allowed to people. Now I have to worry about the AI banning me.

I deleted my Facebook account 10 years ago, and I’ve been off Instagram for half a year. I recently tried to create a new Facebook account so that could create a Meta Business account to use the WhatsApp API for my business. Insta-ban with no explanation. No recourse.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#747

Post by quantified »

epolanski wrote: post #563
quantified wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point of the question was to differentiate this person from the average Jane on the Street.

But half the Janes will hold similar views and positions.

You missed my pun on Jane Street.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#748

Post by danpalmer »

foxylad wrote: post #717
danpalmer wrote: post #706

Zuckerberg 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…

This may well be true, but my point is more that Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg seem almost uniquely unable to turn the startups into great new businesses, when compared with the other big tech companies.

Amazon added cloud and prime, Microsoft added cloud, xbox, 365, Google added Chrome, Android, cloud, Youtube, consumer subscriptions, workspace, etc. Netflix added streaming and their own content, Apple added mobile, wearables, subscriptions.

Meta though, they've got an abandoned phone platform from years ago, a half-baked Metaverse that is being defunded, a small hardware business for the Quest, a pro VR headset that got defunded, a crypto business that got deprioritised, and an LLM that's expensive relative to open competitors and underperforms relative to closed competitors... which the tide appears to be turning on as the AI bubble reaches popping point.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#749

Post by ath3nd »

jiveturkey wrote: post #644
jamwil wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like the metaverse?

sometimes you lose

And like VR?

And like...LLAMa?

Maybe also like adding ads in WhatsApp cause we gotta squeeze our users so we can spend on... AI gurus?

Meta has not had a win since they named themselves Meta. It's enjoyable to watch them flail around like clueless morons jumping on every fad and wasting their time and money.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

#750

Post by danpalmer »

jmyeet wrote: post #716
danpalmer wrote: post #706

Zuckerberg 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…

It's important to analyze decisions within the context at the time, not the modern context. When Facebook went into gaming, it was about the time they went public and they were in search of revenue. At the time, FB games were huge. It was the era of Farmville. Some thought that FB and Zynga would be the new Intel and MIcrosoft. This was also long before mobile gaming was really big so gaming wasn't an unreasonable be…

You're right about Instagram, I did forget them. That was a huge get. Was that skill or luck though?
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