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Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy
- duxup 1y agoI guess OpenAI got a good deal at 6.5b for Jony Ive. >Supposedly, Llama 4 did perform well on benchmarks, but the user experience was so bad that people have accused Meta of cooking the books. This is one of those things that I've noticed. I don't understand the benchmarks, and my usage certainly isn't going to be wide ranging as benchmarks, but I hear "OMG this AI and benchmarks" and then I go use it and it's not any different for me ... or I get the usual wrong answers to things I've gotten wrong answers to before, and I shrug.
- theahura 1y agoI think there's basically the benchmarks, and then "the benchmarks". The former is, like, actual stuff you can quantify and game. And the latter is the public response. The former is a leading indicator but it's not always accurate, and the latter is what actually matters. I knew Gemini 2.5 was better than Claude 3.7 based on the Reddit reaction lol
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- niuzeta 1y agoJust out of curiosity, what were the reactions like from what you saw? I had the opposite take from Reddit, which proved to be incorrect. So I'm just curious how you read(more correctly than me) the reactions vis-a-vis Reddit.
- duxup 1y agoI keep meaning to try Gemini for coding but honestly they’ve all gotten reasonably good for my use cases that I don’t think I need to try a lot of new ones / new versions.
- triknomeister 1y agoAny industry that cannot depend on artificial benchmarks, and instead has to depends on user benchmarks is a labor intensive industry. If it turns out that LLMs in their current form do depend a lot on manual user benchmarks, then they will always require human workers. Kind of like how AI means actually Indians.
- dangus 1y agoIn retrospect it’s quite amazing how Jony Ive managed to make a superstar career out of almost directory copying Dieter Rams all the time. I can’t imagine what kind of value he could bring to OpenAI. The dude ruined Apple laptops for 5 years, he really should be an industry castaway.
- krackers 1y agoNot just hardware, he ruined UI design as well. Everything iOS 7+ (which hasleaked into macOS) is basically his doing, or at least had to be approved by him. Trading Scott Forstall for Johnny Ive was probably the the biggest blunder that Cook made, which put Apple on its current trajectory in terms of software & ui decline.
- blackguardx 1y agoI learned to program C in high school on the original iMacs and thanks to OS 9's lack of true multi-tasking and Ive's penchant for lack of buttons, anytime our code crashed or made an infinite loop, we would have to reach around and unplug the computer from the wall. The single power button on the front was a soft button that required CPU cycles to operate. There was also a tiny hole in the front that you could insert a paperclip to reset the machine, but unplugging from the wall was faster.
- moffkalast 1y agoIn retrospect it wasn't really that the models were that bad compared to benchmarks, it was that Meta didn't work with inference engine providers ahead of time to integrate the new architecture like other teams usually do, so it was even more bugged than expected for the first few weeks. The second problem that compounded it was that both L4 models were too large for 99.9% of people to run, so the only opinion most people had of it was what the few that could load it were saying after release. And they weren't saying good things. So after inference was fixed the reputation stuck because hardly anyone can even run these behemoths to see otherwise. Meta really messed up in all ways they possibly could, short of releasing the wrong checkpoint or something.
- paxys 1y agoThe Llama 4 benchmarks published by Meta were proven to be fake immediately after it launched.
- danpalmer 1y agoOpenAI didn’t get Jony Ive though. They bought an existing joint venture, i.e. he cashed out. They have a contract with his design firm for him to keep working on the project, but it’s basically great for him (massive payout, ongoing payments) and not particularly good for OpenAI.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago> I guess OpenAI got a good deal at 6.5b for Jony Ive. Did they? All I know of Ive's work at Apple is negative: too thin laptops that can't be repaired, uncomfortable keyboards, mice that cannot be used when charging, case designs that cause worse performance, abstract and unnecessarily changing UIs, and calculators that may miscalculate if tapping quickly.
- dangus 1y agoThe last two paragraphs sure contorted my face into an…interesting expression. I’m confused at how Zuck has proven himself to be a particularly dynamic and capable CEO compared to peers. Facebook hasn’t had new product success outside of acquisitions in at least a decade. The fact that a newcomer like TikTok came and ate Instagram’s lunch is downright embarrassing. Meta Quest is a cash-bleeding joke of a side quest that Zuck thought justified changing the name of the company. The kind of customer trustworthiness gap between Meta and competitors like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon is astounding, and I would consider it a major failure by Meta’s management that was entirely preventable. [1] Microsoft runs their own social network (LinkedIn) and Google reads all your email and searches and they are somehow trusted more than twice as much as Meta. This trust gap actively prevents Meta from launching new products in areas that require trustworthiness. Personally I don’t think Meta is spending $14B to hire a single guy, they’re spending $14B in hopes of having a stake in some other company that can make a successful new product - because by now they know that they can’t have success on their own. [1] https://allaboutcookies.org/big-tech-trust https://allaboutcookies.org/big-tech-trust
- paulpauper 1y agoFacebook hasn’t had new product success outside of acquisitions in at least a decade. You don't need a 'new trick' when the main business is so frigging profitable and scalable. There is this myth that companies need to keep innovating. At a certain point, when the competition is so weak, you don't. Tobacco stocks have been among the best investment over the past century even though the product never changed. Or Walmart--it's the same type of store, but scaled huge. The fact that a newcomer like TikTok came and ate Instagram’s lunch is downright embarrassing. Not really. Instagram is more popular than ever and much more profitable. It's not all or nothing .Both sites can coexist and thrive, like Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
- dangus 1y agoSure, a lot of companies don’t need to keep innovating. But still, TikTok passed Instagram active users. This would be like if Universal theme parks surpassed Disney Parks in revenue. Sure, they can both coexist, but it’s an embarrassing reflection of mismanagement when a company that is so far ahead is surpassed by a competitor with better management working with fewer resources. And there are a lot of examples like IBM, Kodak, and General Electric where the company appears untouchable with no need to innovate until suddenly they really do need to innovate and it all collapses around them.
- paulpauper 1y agoMeta is so profitable with its ad network it can spend tens of billions of dollars on money-losing losing projects and the stock still keeps going up, and the PE ratio is not that high either. Crazy.
- pragmatic 1y agoIsn't that what they said about Google/alphabet?
- yndoendo 1y agoAmazon does this with Jeff Bezos' project Alexa [0]. We really need to start taxing these companies appropriately. Sad that the US treats business better then their own citizens. A business that goes bankrupt can shed their debt while a person goes bankrupt will retain their debt. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/alexa-had-no-profit-timeline-cost-amazon-25-billion-in-4-years/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/alexa-had-no-profit-...
- nothrowaways 1y ago> Meta is falling behind in the AI race How so?
- spiderfarmer 1y agoHow much revenue do they make with it?
- speedgoose 1y agoI’m not sure revenue is the best measurement of success.
- nradov 1y agoHow would you even begin to calculate that? They use AI to make their products more valuable to advertisers, but there's no way to say how much their revenue would decline if they suddenly eliminated AI.
- analog31 1y agoSame way companies fell behind during the original "dot com" era: By not burning money quickly enough. Disclosure: I work for one of the companies that fell behind.
- triknomeister 1y agoWas that the real reason companues failed? By not burning money, instead of burning through it too fast?
- analog31 1y agoSorry for the late reply. I was being somewhat sarcastic, or maybe not. During the "dot com" era, investors were throwing money at anybody willing to take it, and a start-up was questioned about whether it was maintaining a sufficient "burn rate." In hindsight, it was a speculative bubble. The company that I work for survived that era by not doing those things.
- blobbers 1y agoIt's an interesting take for a guy who's company labels data. Is it a hot dog? Yes, yes it is. 14 BILLIES!
- sh34r 1y agoAt least they could pivot Hotdog or Not into a dick-pic classifier, which was less trivial when that show was airing. $14 billion for a glorified mechanical turk platform is bananas. Between this, the $6 billion Jonny Ive acquisition, and a ChatGPT wrapper for doctors called Abridge having a $5 billion valuation, this AI fraud bubble is making pets.com look like a reasonable investment.
- blobbers 1y agoJony Ive might be a genius, we've yet to see. Tim Cook couldn't get along with him anymore, he didn't respect him the way Jobs made him stand at attention. Can Altman inspire him? Somehow I doubt it, the guy has never built a product in his life. Unclear if he's even a good investor... nobody reads the Altman essays, its PG that built the castle, Altman somehow managed to get the ear of the King.
- DataDaemon 1y agoSomeone remember the Meta Universe? How much money burnt? And now the AI. In the meantime stock going up and up.
- andrewparker 1y agoThis post doesn't quite comprehend why Meta made a 49% investment instead of an acquisition. The path Meta chose avoided global regulatory review. FTC, DOJ, etc and their international counterparts could have chosen to review and block an outright acquisition. They have no authority to review a minority investment. Scale shareholders received a comparable financial outcome to an acquisition, and also avoided the regulatory uncertainty that comes with govt review. It was win/win, and there's a chance for the residual Scale company to continue to build a successful business, further rewarding shareholders (of which Meta is now the largest), which is just like wildcard upside and was never the point of the original deal.
- theahura 1y agoI agree that this is a possible reason. Meta wants to move fast and m&a is too slow for their tastes. I make the case in the article though that the actual acquisition doesn't really make sense for metas core business, but I agree it's possible. I disagree that this is a win/win. Scale stock is still illiquid, and people who remain at scale or have scale stock are now stuck with shares that are actually less valuable -- even though the market price has ostensibly gone up, the people who made the stock valuable are gone
- tibbar 1y agoShareholders retain their stock, but also received a dividend equivalent to selling all their shares at a premium to the previous valuation. It is actually an incredible deal for them. (Source: I'm one of them.)
- theahura 1y agoO shit really? That's a massive update and possibly invalidates a lot of this article. It's also the first I've heard of this -- can you tell me more? Are you saying everyone essentially got bought out? (if you want to dm me in case its still pseudo-private, feel free to at theahura at gmail) ETA: there's now an update header on the article based on this information
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- vagabund 1y agoI'd push back on a couple things here. The notion that Scale AI's data is of secondary value to Wang seems wrong: data-labeling in the era of agentic RL is more sophisticated than the pejorative view of outsourcing mechanical turk work at slave wages to third world workers, it's about expert demonstrations and work flows, the shape of which are highly useful for deducing the sorts of RL environments frontier labs are using for post-training. This is likely the primary motivator. > LLMs are pretty easy to make, lots of people know how to do it — you learn how in any CS program worth a damn. This also doesn't cohere with my understanding. There's only a few hundred people in the world that can train competitive models at scale, and the process is laden with all sorts of technical tricks and trade secrets. It's what made the deepseek reports and results so surprising. I don't think the toy neural network one gets assigned to create in an undergrad course is a helpful comparison. Relatedly, the idea that progress in ML is largely stochastic and so horizontal orgs are the only sensible structure seems like a weird conclusion to draw from the record. Saying Schmidhuber is a one hit wonder, or "The LLM paper was written basically entirely by folks for whom "Attention is All You Need" is their singular claim to fame" neglects a long history of foundational contributions in the case of the former, and misses the prolific contributions of Shazeer in the latter. Alec Radford is another notable omission as a consistent superstar researcher. To the point about organizational structure, OpenAI famously made concentrated bets contra the decentralized experimentation of Google and kicked off this whole race. Deepmind is significantly more hierarchical than Brain was and from comments by Pichai, that seemed like part of the motivation for the merger.
- theahura 1y ago- Could be wrong about Scale. I'm going off folks I know at client companies and at scale itself. - idk I've trained a lot of models in my time. It's true that there's an arcane art to training LLMs, but it's wrong that this is somehow unlearnable. If I can do it out of undergrad with no prior training and 3 months of slamming my head into a wall, so can others. (Large LLMs are imo not that much different from small ones in terms of training complexity. Tools like torch and libraries like megatron make these things much easier ofc) - there are a lot of fantastic researchers and I don't mean to disparage anyone, including anyone I didn't mention. Still, I stand by my beliefs on ml. Big changes in architecture, new learning techniques, and training tips and tricks come from a lot of people, all of whom are talking to each other in a very decentralized way. My opinions are my own, ymmv
- KaiserPro 1y agoMeta has a culture issue. There are three centres of "AI" gravity: GenAI, FAIR & RL-R Fair is fucked, they've been passed about, from standalone, to RL-R then to "production" under industrial dipshit Cox. A lot of people have left, or been kicked out. It was a power house, and PSC (the 6month performance charade killed it) GenAI was originally a nice tight and productive team. Then the facebook disease of doubling the team every 2 months took over. Instead of making good products and dealing with infra scaling issues, 80% of the staff are trying to figure out what they are supposed to be doing. Moreover most of the leadership have no fucking clue how to do applied ML. Also they don't know what the product will be. So the answer is A/B testing what ever coke dream Cox dreamt up that week. RL-R has the future, but they are tied to either Avatars, which is going to bomb. It'll bomb because its run by an prick who wants perfect rather than deliverable. Moreover splats perform way better than the dumbarse fully ML end-to-end system they spend the last 15 billion trying to make. Then there is the hand interaction org, which has burnt through not quite as much cash as Avatars, but relies on a wrist device that has to be so tight it feels like a fucking handcuff. That and they've not managed to deliver any working prototype at scale. The display team promised too much and wildly underdelivered, meaning that orion wasn't possible as a consumer product. Which lets the write team off the hook for not having a comfortable system. Then there is the mapping team who make research glasses that hovers up any and all personal information with wild abandon. RL-R had lots of talent. But the "hire to fire" system means that you can't actually do any risky research, unless you have the personal favour of your VP. Plus, even if you do perfect research. getting it to product is a nightmare.
- rooftopzen 1y agoThe guys comments on AGI do not follow scientific method - my hypothesis is Meta wants to have enough AGI influencers so that they can dictate definition as goalposts change, not quite based on skill set obv.
- eviks 1y agoObviously false, and now that the author knows it > UPDATE: ... much of the $14b did not go to Alexandr why not change the title as well?
- quuxplusone 1y agoThe premise (and headline) isn't that $14 billion went to the one guy; it's that the $14 billion was spent by Meta. It's "Meta spent $14B to...", not "A single guy got paid $14B to..."
- eviks 1y agoYes, if you cut the premise, you'll fail to understand the premise. Just finish the sentence: "to hire a single guy"
- theahura 1y agoI debated changing the title but as the commenters below mention the title is still accurate, as is the rest of the article. Meta was under no obligation to pay that much. Alexandr could have requested that Meta spend $14b on <charity of choice> and the title would still be correct. The only part of the article that I think needs some reworking is an implication in a footnote about how these kinds of deals screw over employees. They do, generally, but not in this case.
- eviks 1y agoI see, so I misunderstood, you simply don't understand how absurd that statement is, then then yeah, the title fits
- big_paps 1y agoThese numbers are completely insane.