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Meta's A.I. exodus: Top talent quits as lab tries to keep pace with rivals
- gumby 5y agoOMG, four, or possibly half a dozen departures. LeCun’s comment comes off as glib the way it is presented in the article, but after reading to the end of this very short article, the comment sounds reasonable.
- randomfool 5y agoIf these are the leads or mentors then it can have a significant cascading effect.
- xnx 5y agoI always assumed AI at Facebook was a vanity division like self-driving at Uber.
- personjerry 5y agoFacebook AI Research (FAIR) is pretty reputable in the the AI/ML world
- Fiahil 5y ago* with a heavy pinch of salt. I work for a big AI consultancy, but we haven't seen relevant work from Meta for a while. Their non-bayesian stuff is "meh" and often seriously misguided in their business approach. (which makes sense, they're not accustomed to work as consultants on setups with limited data)
- SnooSux 5y agoIMO their area of expertise is in software and tooling. The fact that they maintain PyTorch is a big deal and I've used a few of their other libraries like Detectron and torch-points3d and some have become an integral part of my work.
- gumby 5y agoSo if I understand correctly: they are working in a domain different from yours, thus their work isn’t relevant to you, and even though they are not claiming otherwise their reputation is overrated? Maybe you meant something else, but that’s how your statement reads.
- ganzuul 5y agoTheir recent effort to generate training data for spotting stuff that includes unsanctioned narratives comes to mind. https://github.com/facebookresearch/AugLy https://github.com/facebookresearch/AugLy
- oneoff786 5y agoI’m a consultant / data scientist for a big management consulting firm. What the hell is a big AI consultancy? As far as I can tell, these do not exist. Why would you expect to see meta doing consulting work at all?
- whimsicalism 5y agoProbably one of those companies trying to sell SMBs a "data platform." ie. like C3.ai ... It seems snake oil adjacent to me, at least at this point.
- version_five 5y agoThat caught my attention too. I work on AI consulting and have a reasonable sense of the ecosystem. There are certainly big players that claim "AI" as part of their consulting business, e.g. Deloitte, but they are well removed from any of the research and really just selling dashboards or something with a new name. The GP comments is the kind of thing I would expect a consultant working at a place like that to come out with
- whimsicalism 5y agoNo clue what a "big AI consultancy" is, but as someone who works in ML on a big feed-driven social networking site, what you are saying is just not true.
- question_away 5y agoThis isn't even remotely true. wav2vec alone is the most impactful model in speech recognition in a while and their subsequent work in low-resource languages makes it pretty obvious they're working with limited data...
- savant_penguin 5y agoPretty please don't kill pytorch Thanks
- chalst 5y agoWhat would happen to Pytorch if FB did cut their support? Are the people who depend on it seriously incapable of taking up the load?
- gumby 5y ago> Are the people who depend on it seriously incapable of taking up the load? Probably. First of all most are domain experts not at all systems programmers. That’s the main value of such libraries. And even for those who work close to the iron: plenty depend on, say, the Linux kernel without being able to write patches or even diagnose problems. And few, if any kernel developers have submitted patches to, say, GCC.
- chalst 5y agoThere seems to be serious talk about reimplementing the Torchscript core in Julia (i.e., reimplement the C++ part in Julia), something that makes sense to me given the excellent support there already is in Julia for autodiff. Cf. e.g., https://dev-discuss.pytorch.org/t/where-we-are-headed-and-why-it-looks-a-lot-like-julia-but-not-exactly-like-julia/276 https://dev-discuss.pytorch.org/t/where-we-are-headed-and-wh... If these suggestions are credible and don't come from the Facebook team, that might sidestep your concerns.
- grobclaw 5y agoWhile I would love for that to happen. Quite recently (e.g. [1], also discussed on HN, I believe) the Julia community seemed content with more niche applications, quite deliberately choosing not to challenge the biggies (TensorFlow, Torch, etc.) on deep learning, because the amount of mainainers needed to be competitive was just not there. Is there reason to expect this to change? Maintaining something like Torch and keeping it competitive in terms of speed is a HUGE amount of work for systems development, writing insane numbers of GPU kernels, etc. After having read it, I wouldn't quite yet call the tone of the discussion you linked "serious talk"... [1]: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-machine-learning-in-julia https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-machine-learning-...
- it_does_follow 5y agoBeing reputable and being a vanity division are not mutually exclusive. You could argue that at it's peak Bell labs was a vanity division. That research may have changed the world, but very little of it likely ended up benefiting AT&T in any major way financially. It's telling that once AT&T was broken up Bell labs, while existing in some form for years after, was never reestablished.
- freyr 5y agoBell Labs still exists but is owned by Nokia, who now makes cellular infrastructure. AT&T Labs also exists. But the days of telecom research making rapid and monumental advances peaked decades ago. Nokia or AT&T or Huawei or Ericsson could quadruple their R&D spending and it wouldn’t reestablish the impact of Bell Labs of last century, because it’s simply a much more mature field. Whether it was a vanity division or not, it did serve one practical purpose for AT&T: it presented the company as a benevolent monopoly, spending its profits on developing technologies that benefitted the nation. This helped stave off anti-trust action for a long time.
- hprotagonist 5y agonope, they maintain torch, which is a big deal.
- m_ke 5y agoI always wondered how much the pytorch team could make if they quit and forked the project. I'm sure plenty of companies would be willing to sponsor them.
- Jcowell 5y agoAs I see it there’s a difference between sponsor and maintain. Sponsorships help but they don’t help in the same way someone with active knowledge of the domain does. I see it as this, you can throw money at a project to build a new OS but you still need the right people to have an actually good OS.
- m_ke 5y agoI'm saying the team should quit and spin out an open source company to work on pytorch (same for react). They'd get much more buy in from the other big tech companies (like amazon) by being a neutral party and not part of Facebook. There's a ton of companies that would be happy to pay them to keep working on it.
- smhx 5y agocounter-example: CPython, NumPy, SciPy and many critical well-used open-source projects that have tiny volunteer teams and operational budgets that are minuscule compared to something like React / PyTorch
- ma2rten 5y agoI don't think torch is maintained by Meta AI (which is LeCun's devision), but some other part of Meta.
- lostmsu 5y ago
- whoisjuan 5y agoI don’t what are you talking about. Machine Learning is one the fundamental technical pilars of modern Facebook. It’s used in almost every process imaginable in some way or another.
- kspacewalk2 5y agoIf in doubt, users can tell by the no-recourse no-logic no-sense moderation activity.
- dekhn 5y agoI hope some day they apply it to Sponsored Ads, because their targeting is absolutely terrible.
- kerng 5y agoI doubt it would have to be used that much, and results are questionable and even malicious at times. So, not sure if that makes people working at AI at Facebook that great...
- bertil 5y agoNo, they are responsible for optimising the ad targeting. It's a really mature operation, with consideration like faster decisions means more time to run campaigns and less greed algos means more ressources for marginal improvements.
- rwalle 5y agoThis comment is ridiculous. Facebook has some of the best researchers in machine learning and deep learning. And if AI at Facebook were a vanity division, Facebook would never have a viable ad business, and the entire Facebook would have shut down years ago.
- Fricken 5y agoFacebook recorded it's first profit in 2009. FAIR was begun in 2013.
- question_away 5y agoFacebook Earnings 2021 $46.75 B 2020 $32.67 B 2019 $24.83 B 2018 $25.37 B 2017 $20.59 B 2016 $12.52 B 2015 $6.21 B 2014 $4.93 B 2013 $2.81 B 2012 $0.54 B 2011 $1.73 B
- x-n2o 5y agoWhat happened in 2012?
- quantum_magpie 5y agoThey bought insta for 1B
- la64710 5y agoJust for curiosity , can someone please point out what are the AI things that came out of Febu that is now in the public domain and used everywhere? Like for example Tensorflow from google. Edit: never mind I found it https://ai.facebook.com/tools/ https://ai.facebook.com/tools/
- adamnemecek 5y agoPyTorch
- ganzuul 5y agoIs this related to what feels safe when using FB? You avoid machine intelligence's attention by ignoring it?
- qbasic_forever 5y agoSelf driving at Uber was a core part of why investors pumped so much money into them and pushed them public. People expected Uber to roll out self driving cars and completely replace their human driven fleet of cars, thus increasing their profits immensely. It definitely was not a vanity division.
- version_five 5y agoA significant portion of the current tooling and research methods used in AI come from facebook. Not just in adtech either. I work in computer vision and literally have never done a project that didn't rely heavily on something from facebook (even ignoring pytorch). I have a lot of bad things to say about the company and their products, but they and google are almost single (double?) handedly responsible for the advances in ML/AI that we've seen over the last years. (Not to say they are at all the only ones who have contributed, but if you subtracted their contributions we would have a very different world, certainly an average schmoe like me wouldn't be able to fire up world class models with millions or billions of dollars of R&D in them in a free hosted notebook connected to GPU, and actually solve difficult ML problems)
- dougmwne 5y agoThat is significantly incorrect. Facebook is safely the number two AI company in the world. In addition to all of the basic AI research Facebook does, they also have numerous ML components built into their products such as translation, ads, photo recognition, moderation, feeds and recommendations. Plus, with their strong pivot to VR/AR/Metaverse, they use a lot of computer vision and object detection capability, much of which is built into their current VR offerings and running on commodity cameras.
- tintor 5y agoNumber 2, based on what? Among OpenAI, Google, Waymo, DeepMind, Tesla. FB is mostly deploying models developed elsewhere, instead of advancing the frontier of SOTA.
- ericmay 5y agoI'm not entirely sure what the OP meant, though if you asked me "list the top AI companies" as a reflex I'd probably mention Google and Facebook first without any prior evidence. I think it's kind of hard to really compare. Could Tesla AI engineers do the AI work of Facebook? Probably not, and vice-versa. Tesla's AI goals seem to be even more specialized than most other companies (which is ok and not a negative thing). Are we comparing "solve any general AI problem" or "best at solving their specific problem"? No idea. And Does it make sense to separate Waymo and DeepMind out from Google since that's the owner? Idk. Just a thought. But even if they weren't exactly #2, they're probably inarguably top 5 right? That's still pretty amazing. And that's without really considering international companies. I have no idea what the AI capabilities of Chinese tech companies are, for example.
- dougmwne 5y agoYes, that was my thought as well. It's a pretty subjective statement, but Alphabet and its subsidiaries are pretty clearly on top and there are not too many obvious competitors for the silver. OpenAI is quite small and narrow in focus. I have not heard anything from Baidu in a long time and Tesla also has a very narrow focus and does not contribute much to the research or tooling environments. Facebook is extremely active across a range of AI applications, publishes papers, creates tooling and releases products that millions pay for.
- more_corn 5y agolol self driving was supposed to save Uber and make it actually profitable.
- kerng 5y agoSeems about right, their strategy is pay AI people a lot of money to drain the market and prevent innovation - it kinda sucks.
- jdlyga 5y agoHonestly, everyone is quitting everywhere right now. It's a big swap meet
- samspenc 5y agoCurious, is this happening across all of FB / Meta, or some specific orgs like AR/VR, AI/ML, Labs etc?
- it_does_follow 5y agoMy guess is this is ultimately about money. Facebook/Meta stock lost 30% of it's value a few months back and may not recover any time soon. Many of these people are high level, so I'm guessing (based on a quick skim of levels.fyi) about 50% or more of their TC comes from stock. This amounts to an effective 15% pay cut in a year with record inflation. I think most of us would leave our job over a 15% pay cut, especially if we were well established in the field. On top of this it loosens those golden handcuffs quite a bit for anyone who was on the fence about being employed by facebook, but couldn't say no to the comp.
- gumby 5y agoA lot of folks get into a zone where the money no longer matters, as long as it’s in a range where you don’t have to think about it. Still they might leave simply because they’ve been there a while, or want a change, or want to work with some particular people who are at a different organization. Not to say that some might be motivated by money, but at that level I would be surprised if it motivated many.
- thebean11 5y agoI'm not sure, I can't imagine feeling that way. The jump from $500k to $650k, or 1mil to 1.2mil, would still feel pretty significant, in terms of cash hitting your bank account.
- mywittyname 5y agoDepending on levels of investment, those amounts are close to month-to-month portfolio variance.
- esics6A 5y agoWhen these sort of highly sought after researcher and ML/AI talent begin to leave a company in large groups even if it's just a small number of people at first it's a sign that something is profoundly wrong at that company. These people work on the long term big roadmap items and can typically see the the future initiatives clearly. Essentially means that innovation at Meta has slowed to a trickle or has completely dried up.
- losvedir 5y agoI think you're generalizing too much. These are AI/ML researchers, and so you can probably talk about that area at Meta, but it doesn't apply to other departments necessarily. But I think it's kind of obvious that AI/ML is a dicey proposition there. See for example[0] how they decided to stop doing facial recognition. I can easily imagine a lot of AI projects being canned or back-burnered like that now. What's ML used for at Meta? Feed recommendations, social graph inferences, face identification, etc? All those are under heavy scrutiny, and a lot of the work of doing it "right" is not even an ML question at all, but one of policy, regulation, and product. It's not like self-driving cars where people can generally agree that "getting from A to B without crashing" is a good thing, and where the obvious ML and engineering problems line up with product problems. But if you "increase engagement" with your feed recommendations, that could be good or bad in ways that ML can't really tell you. If you get better at identifying people in pictures, people are going to hate you and there will news articles about stalking. If you identify who a potential friend might be, that's a privacy consideration, etc, etc. But what's going on there is pretty independent of the "metaverse" stuff, I think. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29084081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29084081
- esics6A 5y ago> I think you're generalizing too much. > These are AI/ML researchers, and so you can probably talk about that area at Meta, but it doesn't apply to other departments necessarily. When you look at their products as a whole at their root are essentially AI/ML driven or rely on the capability. This is very relevant to and applies to those that are most directly revenue generating like advertising. > I can easily imagine a lot of AI projects being canned or back-burnered like that now. What's ML used for at Meta? Feed recommendations, social graph inferences, face identification, etc? All those are under heavy scrutiny, and a lot of the work of doing it "right" is not even an ML question at all, but one of policy, regulation, and product Correct due to multiple factors there's little growth or innovation possible in the main products that Meta generates revenue from. Right now they only sell a single product which is advertising. Metaverse is a highly speculative venture that may not work and there are companies like Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft Gaming that are better positioned to rely on existing technologies, platforms and synergies that have a major edge here. That's why I would interpret AI/ML researchers leaving as a sign that Meta's best days are behind it and Metaverse is an act of desperation.
- emotional_fool 5y ago
- posharma 5y ago
- exdsq 5y agoWonder how much of this is due to a growing public dislike of Meta due to their Metaverse goals
- electrondood 5y agoThe name change that coincided with the bad whistleblower press... > "Death grip ain't shit..." > "Give another name, because your real name ain't no good."
- Lamad123 5y agoThis shit is meta
- subsubzero 5y agoWhen companies cap their pay increases for existing hires to a 3-4% pay increase a year and inflation on goods is close to 10% yoy and housing is jumping 20% yoy in most markets it makes sense to look for higher pay increases than what your company is locking you in at.
- mywittyname 5y agoDoes Meta cap YoY salary adjustments? I'd be surprised if that's the case for such specialized workers. I know for a fact that at least some places has been giving out double digit salary increases at six month reviews.
- gverrilla 5y agoMesa
- jeffrallen 5y agoRats from a shining ship. Anyone that stayed after the Cambridge Analytica stuff is already tainted as a rat.
- iRonJ_AI 5y agoThey do great work and their leadership works hard to distance themselves from Facebook malefeasance
- joaogui1 5y agoExcept for LeCun that defends Facebook even more than their PR team (denying Facebook's use in the Rohingya genocide even after FB apologized)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rurban 5y agoso who is their new manager there? easy to fix this issue