6 ms·

I can't imagine what it's like at Meta right now, with the CEO publicly stating that they're firing the bottom 5% of performers and then a week later stating th

by m_ke 2y ago

I can't imagine what it's like at Meta right now, with the CEO publicly stating that they're firing the bottom 5% of performers and then a week later stating that the LLMs that his researchers / engineers are working on will soon be able to replace them. Zuck needs Yann LeCun and other senior researchers at Meta a lot more than they need him. If they were to quit there would be a line out the door to hand them as much money as they want to start a competing open research lab. I bet a ton of top researchers from other labs would be happy to join too, since from what I've heard from friends they're all miserable from dealing with incompetent management. On current trajectory one of Sam Altman / Zuck / Elon will end up having full control over the frontier models that are trained on their huge new clusters. All 3 of them are unaccountable to anyone.

renewiltord 2y ago
[flagged]
- m_ke 2y ago
  Sir, this is a Wendy's
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    [flagged]
- __loam 2y ago
  Nobody except people who value democratic systems of government I guess.
  - busterarm 2y ago
    Engineers still need big paychecks and big funding pools to work on AI things. There are only so many deep pockets out there to fund this.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
GoatInGrey 2y ago
> a week later stating that the LLMs that his researchers / engineers are working on will soon be able to replace them. This is a pessimistic interpretation of Mark's words that has been trumpeted in the media. Which I am appalled to admit. He said that they anticipate the majority of new code to come from AI models rather than human engineers. He then adds that they expect developers to be augmented by these tools. Which tracks as you still need somebody to drive the AI and validate or correct their outputs. https://youtu.be/7k1ehaE0bdU?t=2h8m6s https://youtu.be/7k1ehaE0bdU?t=2h8m6s
- m_ke 2y ago
  I'm talking about this: https://www.threads.net/@zuck/post/DFNf73PJxOQ https://www.threads.net/@zuck/post/DFNf73PJxOQ > "...we'll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts". What do you think will happen when these models are good enough to do 90% of engineering work? He's already putting a squeeze on his employees now (https://africa.businessinsider.com/news/meta-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-tells-employees-to-buckle-up-for-an-intense-year-in-a-leaked/0t2cnv7 https://africa.businessinsider.com/news/meta-ceo-mark-zucker...) > "I think whoever gets there first is going to have a long-term, durable advantage towards building one of the most important products in history," Zuckerberg said, according to the recording. > Zuckerberg also reiterated his belief that this would be the year Meta started seeing AI agents take on work, including writing software. Asked whether this would lead to job cuts, Zuckerberg said it was "hard to know" and that while it may lead to some roles becoming redundant, it could lead to hiring more engineers who can harness artificial intelligence to be more productive.
  - Teever 2y ago
    > What do you think will happen when these models are good enough to do 90% of engineering work? Honestly? I think we'll see a lot of vengeful and technically capable people who are out of work and who are looking to get revenge on the people that laid them off. Some of those people who feel they have nothing to lose will build swarms of small drones that will use machine vision to track down Zuckerberg whoever they feel wronged them and kill them. The future is going to be very, very spicy.
UncleOxidant 2y ago
I'm not sure what's keeping LeCun at Meta at this point. I can imagine he's not happy with Zuck's capitulation. I'm sure you're right that if he decided to leave he'd easily be able to get funding. I'm sure France would be willing to set him up with an AI research lab to get him back there. And there would be plenty of other companies/labs that would be trying to get him.
- m_ke 2y ago
  Yeah he could easily get Hinton (who hates nothing more than Sam Altman) to endorse a new proper open AI lab, similar to what was described in the OpenAI Charter. Karpathy, Alec Radford, and a ton of their old students are practically free agents right now who could probably be convinced to join. There's probably even a chance of someone like Wojciech Zaremba leaving OpenAI to join them. EU would build them CERN style compute clusters to train healthcare, education, climate, etc models. I'm sure there's plenty of people at HuggingFace, Eluther, old Stability AI group who'd also love to get involved.
  - fuzztester 2y ago
    yes ... let's dream on ... until the new openAI becomes just like the old openAI again. human nature will never change. q: what is the definition of an optimist? a: a person with no experience. q; what is the definition of a pessimist? a: an optimist with experience. mine ;)
- sampton 2y ago
  This type of idol worshipping has to stop. LeCun invented CNN but he also said world simulation using diffusion was a deadened, which has been proven very wrong. The money is better spent hiring new grads with open minds and something to prove.
  - meta_x_ai 2y ago
    [dead]
  - sparrc 2y ago
huijzer 2y ago
I just finished a blog post with some thoughts on AI’s future [1] and the surprising conclusion was that most big tech companies probably have much bigger problems than whether researchers leave or not. As Taleb and DeepSeek’s CEO point out, usually when you have a disruptive technology, then the incumbents will be left behind. Cursor AI and DeepSeek are a sign of new players coming out of nowhere and beating the incumbents. [1]: https://huijzer.xyz/posts/ai-learning-rate/ https://huijzer.xyz/posts/ai-learning-rate/
Hatchback7599 2y ago
>All 3 of them are unaccountable to anyone. In what way are they unaccountable to anyone? Their wealth is tied up in stock whose value is tied to the perception, aka the accountability, of the general public. Not being able to personally destroy someone's wealth because you don't like what they're doing is different from being unaccountable. If tomorrow Zuck released an AI model or FB feature that was deeply unpopular, his ventures and personal wealth would dwindle according to the market's reaction. That's accountability. I'm not even a fan of Zuck... he's a slimy weasel who changes his tune to whoever is in power. But public perception directly affects his decision making.
- m_ke 2y ago
  Zuck has majority voting shares, so can't be fired. Sam already proved that nobody at OpenAI can get him out, and the new board makes that even harder. Same for Elon. No matter what happens, all 3 will be billionaires for the rest of their lives.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    Nothing you said refuted the point made.
jmyeet 2y ago
All talk of being about social change or diversity by large companies should now be exposed as purely performative. If you want to work at not just Meta but Google or Microsoft or Amazon because money is good, that's fine. We live in a society where you need money. But you're fooling yourself if you think you're doing something good for society should've shattered long ago. All these big tech companies have done an immediate and total heel turn to get in line with the administration, which isn't even a partisan issue. The interests of large companies is aligned with US domestic and foreign policy. Meta (etc) are now no different to Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman. You are working for a defense contractor. Every day Zuck further exposes himself as being about his own class interest: that of the billionaire class. It's now OK to say that LGBTQ have "mental illness" on Meta platforms [1]. Meta already had a longstanding policy of censoring and downranking Palestine content [2]. It's also why the government was so keen to ban Tiktok: because it doesn't censor [1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-speech-rules-allow-users-call-lgbtq-people-mentally-ill-rcna186700 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee... [2]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-speech-rules-allow-users-call-lgbtq-people-mentally-ill-rcna186700 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee...
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  >All talk of being about social change or diversity by large companies should now be exposed as purely performative It was always understood as purely performative. You think Gay people actually thought Target cared about them? Do you think Trans people actually thought Budweiser was going to go out of their way to support the trans community just because they gave a trans person like $50k? The only people who have ever insisted that corporate "we love the gays" was serious are the people who are yelling about how "woke" companies are. Except at the same time they will also yell about how it's just performative? I can't help but feel what they were asking for was never genuine support of LGBTQ people either, since, uh, who they tend to vote for. Rather, their complaint seems to have come simply from any media, any images, any acknowledgement whatsoever that LGBTQ people are PEOPLE
goldchainposse 2y ago
It's weird. You either stay quiet or be loud and expect to be out of a job. The mindset is "will this help for PSC." I'm not bothered by the free speech policy decisions or Trump political contributions. Especially in light of overreach by the Biden administration, allowing more speech is reasonable, and political contributions to the party in power area always reasonable. What bothers me is dishonesty from leadership about cost cutting, refusing to answer hard questions at the Q&A, and short-sighted decisions causing a lot of churn. When Sheryl left, the adult in the room that would call out Zuck left. No one's there to tell Zuck that the gold chain and million dollar watch isn't a good look. And now Nick Clegg left and Dana White joined the board. I'm sure his UFC experience will prove indispensable. Don't get me started on how much money is wasted on AR/VR. If it weren't for juicy 2023 RSUs and the bad job market, there'd be a lot more turnover.
Aurornis 2y ago
> the CEO publicly stating that they're firing the bottom 5% of performers I understand that people don't like any talk about layoffs and performance management, but I've never worked at a company where being in the bottom 5-10% of performers meant your job was safe. I've also never worked at a big company that didn't have at least 1-in-20 people who were clearly underperforming and everyone around them knew it. I know the real complain is that he said it out loud and people don't like threats. However, Meta employees are highly compensated, especially now that the stock price is extremely high. I don't really think it's unreasonable for a company that compensates well and has generous severance packages to be cutting the bottom 5% of their workforce.
- jedberg 2y ago
  The problem isn't that they are cutting 5%, it's that they use stack ranking. Within a team of 10, you may have the top 10 performers in the whole company, but the manager still has to rank them and assign at least one of them the bottom ranking, or engage in a lengthy battle to defend their high rankings. They're not actually finding the bottom 5%, they're giving managers an excuse to get rid of people the don't like for whatever reason. It's also terrible for morale to do it all at once. Sure, maybe there are some underperformers. Let managers deal with those people individually. Don't do a mass layoff where they have to select someone at a specific time when all their people might be doing well.
  - giantrobot 2y ago
    > They're not actually finding the bottom 5%, they're giving managers an excuse to get rid of people the don't like for whatever reason. More insidious is the rankings are capricious and arbitrary despite haughty claims. Unless you're in the top quintile and know so explicitly you can never feel safe in your position. You can also drop into the bottom quintile of the stack for no other reason than someone else on your team self aggrandized a bit more right before reviews.
  - maxerickson 2y ago
    Vibes strike again.
tgma 2y ago
> Zuck needs Yann LeCun and other senior researchers at Meta a lot more than they need him. Of course not. Quantifiably so. Proof: he can get all of them for comparably measly salary to his net worth. He has. (P.S. Besides, you'd be surprised how replaceable such people are. Often at these companies who can hire high quality talent at lower levels you are going to see impressive people step up when the old wash away, so it might actually be the opposite.)
leishman 2y ago
Actually the top talent wants to work at a company that regularly fires the bottom performers
drewcoo 2y ago
It's Jack Welch's rank and yank but this time with LLMs! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve I wonder if there are future plans to rank and yank LLMs, too. Or whether LLMs will exhibit "morale problems" because of it.

by m_ke 2y ago

renewiltord 2y ago

[flagged]

m_ke 2y ago
Sir, this is a Wendy's
- renewiltord 2y ago
  [flagged]
__loam 2y ago
Nobody except people who value democratic systems of government I guess.
- busterarm 2y ago
  Engineers still need big paychecks and big funding pools to work on AI things. There are only so many deep pockets out there to fund this.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

GoatInGrey 2y ago

> a week later stating that the LLMs that his researchers / engineers are working on will soon be able to replace them. This is a pessimistic interpretation of Mark's words that has been trumpeted in the media. Which I am appalled to admit. He said that they anticipate the majority of new code to come from AI models rather than human engineers. He then adds that they expect developers to be augmented by these tools. Which tracks as you still need somebody to drive the AI and validate or correct their outputs. https://youtu.be/7k1ehaE0bdU?t=2h8m6s https://youtu.be/7k1ehaE0bdU?t=2h8m6s

m_ke 2y ago
I'm talking about this: https://www.threads.net/@zuck/post/DFNf73PJxOQ https://www.threads.net/@zuck/post/DFNf73PJxOQ > "...we'll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts". What do you think will happen when these models are good enough to do 90% of engineering work? He's already putting a squeeze on his employees now (https://africa.businessinsider.com/news/meta-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-tells-employees-to-buckle-up-for-an-intense-year-in-a-leaked/0t2cnv7 https://africa.businessinsider.com/news/meta-ceo-mark-zucker...) > "I think whoever gets there first is going to have a long-term, durable advantage towards building one of the most important products in history," Zuckerberg said, according to the recording. > Zuckerberg also reiterated his belief that this would be the year Meta started seeing AI agents take on work, including writing software. Asked whether this would lead to job cuts, Zuckerberg said it was "hard to know" and that while it may lead to some roles becoming redundant, it could lead to hiring more engineers who can harness artificial intelligence to be more productive.
- Teever 2y ago
  > What do you think will happen when these models are good enough to do 90% of engineering work? Honestly? I think we'll see a lot of vengeful and technically capable people who are out of work and who are looking to get revenge on the people that laid them off. Some of those people who feel they have nothing to lose will build swarms of small drones that will use machine vision to track down Zuckerberg whoever they feel wronged them and kill them. The future is going to be very, very spicy.

UncleOxidant 2y ago

I'm not sure what's keeping LeCun at Meta at this point. I can imagine he's not happy with Zuck's capitulation. I'm sure you're right that if he decided to leave he'd easily be able to get funding. I'm sure France would be willing to set him up with an AI research lab to get him back there. And there would be plenty of other companies/labs that would be trying to get him.

m_ke 2y ago
Yeah he could easily get Hinton (who hates nothing more than Sam Altman) to endorse a new proper open AI lab, similar to what was described in the OpenAI Charter. Karpathy, Alec Radford, and a ton of their old students are practically free agents right now who could probably be convinced to join. There's probably even a chance of someone like Wojciech Zaremba leaving OpenAI to join them. EU would build them CERN style compute clusters to train healthcare, education, climate, etc models. I'm sure there's plenty of people at HuggingFace, Eluther, old Stability AI group who'd also love to get involved.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  yes ... let's dream on ... until the new openAI becomes just like the old openAI again. human nature will never change. q: what is the definition of an optimist? a: a person with no experience. q; what is the definition of a pessimist? a: an optimist with experience. mine ;)
sampton 2y ago
This type of idol worshipping has to stop. LeCun invented CNN but he also said world simulation using diffusion was a deadened, which has been proven very wrong. The money is better spent hiring new grads with open minds and something to prove.
- meta_x_ai 2y ago
  [dead]
- sparrc 2y ago

huijzer 2y ago

I just finished a blog post with some thoughts on AI’s future [1] and the surprising conclusion was that most big tech companies probably have much bigger problems than whether researchers leave or not. As Taleb and DeepSeek’s CEO point out, usually when you have a disruptive technology, then the incumbents will be left behind. Cursor AI and DeepSeek are a sign of new players coming out of nowhere and beating the incumbents. [1]: https://huijzer.xyz/posts/ai-learning-rate/ https://huijzer.xyz/posts/ai-learning-rate/

Hatchback7599 2y ago

>All 3 of them are unaccountable to anyone. In what way are they unaccountable to anyone? Their wealth is tied up in stock whose value is tied to the perception, aka the accountability, of the general public. Not being able to personally destroy someone's wealth because you don't like what they're doing is different from being unaccountable. If tomorrow Zuck released an AI model or FB feature that was deeply unpopular, his ventures and personal wealth would dwindle according to the market's reaction. That's accountability. I'm not even a fan of Zuck... he's a slimy weasel who changes his tune to whoever is in power. But public perception directly affects his decision making.

m_ke 2y ago
Zuck has majority voting shares, so can't be fired. Sam already proved that nobody at OpenAI can get him out, and the new board makes that even harder. Same for Elon. No matter what happens, all 3 will be billionaires for the rest of their lives.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  Nothing you said refuted the point made.

jmyeet 2y ago

All talk of being about social change or diversity by large companies should now be exposed as purely performative. If you want to work at not just Meta but Google or Microsoft or Amazon because money is good, that's fine. We live in a society where you need money. But you're fooling yourself if you think you're doing something good for society should've shattered long ago. All these big tech companies have done an immediate and total heel turn to get in line with the administration, which isn't even a partisan issue. The interests of large companies is aligned with US domestic and foreign policy. Meta (etc) are now no different to Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman. You are working for a defense contractor. Every day Zuck further exposes himself as being about his own class interest: that of the billionaire class. It's now OK to say that LGBTQ have "mental illness" on Meta platforms [1]. Meta already had a longstanding policy of censoring and downranking Palestine content [2]. It's also why the government was so keen to ban Tiktok: because it doesn't censor [1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-speech-rules-allow-users-call-lgbtq-people-mentally-ill-rcna186700 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee... [2]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-speech-rules-allow-users-call-lgbtq-people-mentally-ill-rcna186700 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee...

mrguyorama 2y ago
>All talk of being about social change or diversity by large companies should now be exposed as purely performative It was always understood as purely performative. You think Gay people actually thought Target cared about them? Do you think Trans people actually thought Budweiser was going to go out of their way to support the trans community just because they gave a trans person like $50k? The only people who have ever insisted that corporate "we love the gays" was serious are the people who are yelling about how "woke" companies are. Except at the same time they will also yell about how it's just performative? I can't help but feel what they were asking for was never genuine support of LGBTQ people either, since, uh, who they tend to vote for. Rather, their complaint seems to have come simply from any media, any images, any acknowledgement whatsoever that LGBTQ people are PEOPLE

goldchainposse 2y ago

It's weird. You either stay quiet or be loud and expect to be out of a job. The mindset is "will this help for PSC." I'm not bothered by the free speech policy decisions or Trump political contributions. Especially in light of overreach by the Biden administration, allowing more speech is reasonable, and political contributions to the party in power area always reasonable. What bothers me is dishonesty from leadership about cost cutting, refusing to answer hard questions at the Q&A, and short-sighted decisions causing a lot of churn. When Sheryl left, the adult in the room that would call out Zuck left. No one's there to tell Zuck that the gold chain and million dollar watch isn't a good look. And now Nick Clegg left and Dana White joined the board. I'm sure his UFC experience will prove indispensable. Don't get me started on how much money is wasted on AR/VR. If it weren't for juicy 2023 RSUs and the bad job market, there'd be a lot more turnover.

Aurornis 2y ago

> the CEO publicly stating that they're firing the bottom 5% of performers I understand that people don't like any talk about layoffs and performance management, but I've never worked at a company where being in the bottom 5-10% of performers meant your job was safe. I've also never worked at a big company that didn't have at least 1-in-20 people who were clearly underperforming and everyone around them knew it. I know the real complain is that he said it out loud and people don't like threats. However, Meta employees are highly compensated, especially now that the stock price is extremely high. I don't really think it's unreasonable for a company that compensates well and has generous severance packages to be cutting the bottom 5% of their workforce.

jedberg 2y ago
The problem isn't that they are cutting 5%, it's that they use stack ranking. Within a team of 10, you may have the top 10 performers in the whole company, but the manager still has to rank them and assign at least one of them the bottom ranking, or engage in a lengthy battle to defend their high rankings. They're not actually finding the bottom 5%, they're giving managers an excuse to get rid of people the don't like for whatever reason. It's also terrible for morale to do it all at once. Sure, maybe there are some underperformers. Let managers deal with those people individually. Don't do a mass layoff where they have to select someone at a specific time when all their people might be doing well.
- giantrobot 2y ago
  > They're not actually finding the bottom 5%, they're giving managers an excuse to get rid of people the don't like for whatever reason. More insidious is the rankings are capricious and arbitrary despite haughty claims. Unless you're in the top quintile and know so explicitly you can never feel safe in your position. You can also drop into the bottom quintile of the stack for no other reason than someone else on your team self aggrandized a bit more right before reviews.
- maxerickson 2y ago
  Vibes strike again.

tgma 2y ago

> Zuck needs Yann LeCun and other senior researchers at Meta a lot more than they need him. Of course not. Quantifiably so. Proof: he can get all of them for comparably measly salary to his net worth. He has. (P.S. Besides, you'd be surprised how replaceable such people are. Often at these companies who can hire high quality talent at lower levels you are going to see impressive people step up when the old wash away, so it might actually be the opposite.)

leishman 2y ago

Actually the top talent wants to work at a company that regularly fires the bottom performers

drewcoo 2y ago

It's Jack Welch's rank and yank but this time with LLMs! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve I wonder if there are future plans to rank and yank LLMs, too. Or whether LLMs will exhibit "morale problems" because of it.