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We’re on the edge of an AI boom, and our tech giants are cutting rather than investing. This seems like a bad strategy.
by nostromo 4y ago
We’re on the edge of an AI boom, and our tech giants are cutting rather than investing. This seems like a bad strategy.
- femiagbabiaka 4y agoThey're doing both.
- oh_sigh 4y agoI'm ignorantly confident that no one in AI-related divisions/projects are being cut at Meta.
- aiappreciator 4y agoMeta made the dumb decision to invest in VR, rather than AI. Those giant and expensive VR teams (Or the devs who made horizon worlds...) aren't going to easily transition into AI. AI generated content is the real core of metaverses, not VR goggles. Hence Nvidia is actually making the right bet on its 'omniverse' infrastructure. Nvidia has made no layoffs, and I don't expect any within the next 5 years.
- abeppu 4y agoIn FAIRness, their investments in AI research have been significant in absolute terms. What may be lacking is the connection between research and actual products, but I think that's true everywhere. Though I agree VR has been a distraction, I think it's misleading to say the investment was in VR "rather than AI"; it's been in addition to.
- yreg 4y agoMeta had their own successes in AI research. And I wouldn't be so sure the goggles are going to stay irrelevant.
- whiplash451 4y agoVR googles absolutely are core for Meta as they want to own the next (physical) platform. They’ve learned the hard way the cost of not owning the hardware layer.
- candiddevmike 4y agoIronic that their VR goggles run Android
- charcircuit 4y agoAnd Android runs on Linux. It's the platform that is important.
- Pulcinella 4y agoI don’t think it was a completely dumb or unreasonable decision in the abstract, but how they’ve handled it has been very foolish. Facebook has very, very, very little to show for its VR efforts: Destruction of any brand value Occulus had, continued upgrades of their headset product lines (certainly not nothing, but regular spec bumps aren’t going to set the world on fire), and a VR chat app far inferior to VR Chat or even something like Second Life. It’s like Facebook’s VR strategy has just been to keep a large VR team in a holding pattern for years waiting for Apple to release a headset and legitimize AR/VR in the minds of the public at large.
- sneed_chucker 4y agoFacebook also invested in AI. They are running giant A100 clusters and employ dozens of ML researchers
- btown 4y agoI'm reminded about the quote from The Incredibles: "When everyone's super... no one will be." When smaller AI startups start, say, showing more relevant search results than Google does, and more personally relevant posts than Meta - and IMO this is highly likely, since FAANG have much more brand reputation to protect than those startups and will necessarily move cautiously - perceptions will start to rise that they are no longer the superpowers. But their valuation multiples are based on them being the only superpowers in their respective spaces. So if they want to preserve shareholder value, and they can't depend on hype, they'll have to cut aggressively so they can at least show strong earnings per share.
- geodel 4y agoI mean this is the time for companies with great strategy to hire laid off folks. And VCs with great strategy can fund them if companies are startup and lack resources.