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Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dyeje 1y agoAfter reading Careless People and watching Meta’s metaverse and AI moves, Mark comes across as a child chasing the shiny new thing.
- zmmmmm 1y agoit's not really a fair characterisation, because he persisted for nearly 10 years dumping enormous investment into the VR business, and still is to this day. Furthermore, Meta's AI labs predated all the hype and the company was investing and highly respected in the area way before it was "cool". If anything, I think the panic at this stage is arising from the sense of having his lunch stolen after having invested so much and for so long.
- roxolotl 1y agoMaybe this time investors will realize how incompetent these leaders are? How do you go from 250mil contracts to freezes in under a month?
- baq 1y agoBy signing too many 250mil contracts.
- roxolotl 1y agoWell that’s the incompetent piece. Setting out to write giant historical employment contracts without a plan is not something competent people do. And seemingly it’s not that they over extended a bit either since reports claimed the time availability of the contracts was extremely limited; under 30min in some cases.
- FrustratedMonky 1y agoYes. Perhaps it was this: Lets hit the market fast, scoop up all the talent we can before anybody can react, then stop. I don't think there is anybody that would expect they would 'continue' offering 250million packages. They would need to stop eventually. They just did it fast, all at once, and now stopped.
- vasco 1y agoOr enough of them! >=
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bluelightning2k 1y agoSome people actually accepted the contracts before the uno reverse llamabot could activate and block them
- deadbabe 1y agoCould they get their money back?
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoI really don't understand this massive flip flopping. Do I have this timeline correct? * January, announce massive $65B AI spend * June, buy Scale AI for ~$15B, massive AI hiring spree, reportedly paying millions per year for low-level AI devs * July, announce some of the biggest data centers ever that will cost billions and use all of Ohio's water (hyperbolic) * Aug, freeze, it's a bubble! Someone please tell me I've got it all wrong. This looks like the Metaverse all over again!
- boxed 1y agoThe most amusing has to be then Zuckerburg publishes his "thoughts" about how he's betting 100% on AI... written underneath the logo "Meta".
- abxyz 1y agoThe bubble narrative is coming from the outside. More likely is that the /acquisition/ of Scale has led to an abundance of talent that is being underutilised. If you give managers the option to hire, they will. Freezing hiring while reorganising is a sane strategy regardless of how well you are or are not doing.
- prasadjoglekar 1y agoThis. TFA says this explicitly. Alexander Wang, the former Scale CEO is to approve any new hires. They're taking stock of internal staff + new acquisitions and how to rationalize before further steps. Now, I think AI investments are still a bubble, but that's not why FB is freezing hiring.
- dist-epoch 1y ago> How do you go from 250mil contracts to freezes in under a month? Easy, you finished building up a team. You can only have so many cooks.
- apwell23 1y agohow tf do you know when you are "finished"
- rco8786 1y agoThat's not really how that works in the corporate/big tech world. It's not as though Meta set out and said "Ok we're going to hire exactly 150 AI engineers and that will be our team and then we'll immediately freeze our recruiting efforts".
- blibble 1y agodon't forget the 115th Rule of Acquisition greed IS eternal
- BobbyTables2 1y agoSo he be also read the recent article on Sam Altman saying it was a bubble?
- zpeti 1y agoMaybe this time the top posters on HN should stop criticizing one of the top performing founder CEOs of the last 20 years who built an insane business, made many calls that were called stupid at the time (WhatsApp), and many that were actually stupid decisions. Like do people here really think making some bad decisions is incompetence? If you do, your perfectionism is probably something you need to think about. Or please reply to me with your exact perfect predictions of how AI will play out in the next 5, 10, 20 years and then tell us how you would run a trillion dollar company. Oh and please revisit your comment in these timeframes
- brokencode 1y agoI think many people just really dislike Zuckerberg as a human being and Meta as a company. Social media has seriously damaged society in many ways. It’s not perfectionism, it’s a desire to dunk on what you don’t like whenever the opportunity arises.
- butlike 1y agoIt's an entertainment tool. Like a television or playstation. Only a fool would think social media is anything more.
- brokencode 1y agoSure, but society is full of fools. Plenty of people say social media is the primary way they get news. Social media platforms are super spreaders of lies and propaganda.
- rgavuliak 1y agoI don't think it's about perfect predictions. It's more about going all in on Metaverse and then on AI and backtracking on both. As a manager you need to use your resources wisely, even if they're as big as what Meta has at its disposal. The other thing - Peter's principle is that people rise until they hit a level where they can't perform anymore. Zuck is up there as high as you can go, maybe no one is really ready to operate at that level? It seems both him and Elon made a lot of bad decisions lately. It doesn't erase their previous good decisions, but possibly some self-reflection is warranted?
- steve1977 1y agoIMHO Mark Zuckerberg is a textbook case of someone who got lucky once by basically being in the right place at the right time, but who attributes his success to his skill. There’s probably a proper term for this.
- breitling 1y agoTo be fair, buying Instagram so early + WhatsApp were great moves too.
- beagle3 1y agoBut they were less “skill” and more “surveillance”. He had very good usage statistics (which he shouldn’t have had) of these apps through Onavo - a popular VPN app Facebook bought for the purpose of spying on what users are doing outside Facebook.
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoInstagram was acquired before Onavo.
- beagle3 1y agoThat’s true, but I remember rumors at the time that Onavo already supplied analytics to FB at the time of instagram purchase. Google gave me a paywalled link to FTCWatch that supposedly has the details, but I can’t check.
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoYes, they did supply data to FB (under the same contracts as everyone else). However, it was only supplied to the sales org, not the product org. FB acquired IG because it was blowing up in SF and MZ (other leaders too) were looking at how quickly it appeared to be growing and how good it was.
- 1y ago
- Lalabadie 1y agoThis is Meta, named after the fact that the Metaverse is undoubtedly what comes next.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- andrepd 1y agoYes, people who struck it rich are not miraculously more intelligent or capable. Seems obvious, but many people believe they are.
- ludicrousdispla 1y agoBecause you want the ability to low-ball prospective candidates sooner rather than later.
- iLoveOncall 1y agoI'm still waiting for a single proof that there was any contract in the hundreds of millions that was signed.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoThe damage is already done though. If I worked for Meta and did not get millions, I think I would be pretty irate.
- iLoveOncall 1y agoWhich is definitely why Sam Altman started this rumor.
- mlinhares 1y agoWhy are you assuming the investors are competent?
- BoredPositron 1y agoWhat I don't get is that they are gunning for the people that brought us the innovations we are working with right now. How often does it happen that someone really strikes gold a second time in research at such a high level? It's not a sport.
- MichaelRazum 1y agoHow about Ilya
- matusp 1y agoWhat about him?
- koakuma-chan 1y agoRight, what about him? Didn't he start his own company and raised 1 billion a while ago? I haven't heard about them since then.
- scrollop 1y agoDidn't he say their goal is AGI and they will not produce any products until then. I admire that, in this era where CEOs tend to HYPE!! To increase funding (looking at a particular AI company...)
- koakuma-chan 1y ago> Didn't he say their goal is AGI and they will not produce any products until then. Did he specify what AGI is? xD > I admire that, in this era where CEOs tend to HYPE!! To increase funding (looking at a particular AI company...) I think he was probably hyping too, it's just that he appealed to a different audience. IIRC they had a really plain website, which, I think, they thought "hackers" would like.
- MichaelRazum 1y ago
- khoury 1y agohttps://archive.ph/UqHo8 https://archive.ph/UqHo8
- rvz 1y agoOne of the near top signals of this AI bubble. In this hype cycle, you are in late 1999, early 2000.
- pretzellogician 1y agoAll that's missing is an analogue to the pets.com Superbowl ad!
- haute_cuisine 1y agoThey should put AI into a blockchain and have a proper ICO.
- ahartmetz 1y agoSmart contracts sometimes fail because they are executed too literally. Fixing that needs something like judges, but automated - so AI! It will be perfect. /s
- thrown-0825 1y agoyou laugh, but someone actually did that and raised like $300m. https://0g.ai/blog/0g-ecosystem-receives-290m-in-financing-to-develop-world-s-first-decentralized-ai-operating-system https://0g.ai/blog/0g-ecosystem-receives-290m-in-financing-t... its all bullshit obviously, grift really seems like the way to go these days.
- marcusverus 1y agoIt depends on your oracle. According to the Shiller PE of the S&P 500 it's only November '98! [0] [0] https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe
- nabla9 1y agoQuality over quantity. Apparently its better to pay $100 million for 10 people than $1 million for 1000 people.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago1000 people can't get a woman to have a child faster than 1 person. So it depends on the type of problem you're trying to solve. If you're trying to build a bunch of Wendy's locations, it's clearly better to have more construction workers. It's less clear that if you're trying to build SGI that you're better off with 1000 people than 10. It might be! But it might not be, too. Who knows for certain til post-ex?
- lelanthran 1y ago> 1000 people can't get a woman to have a child faster than 1 person. I always get slightly miffed about business comparisons to gestation: getting 9 women pregnant won't get you a child in 1 month. Sure, if you want one child. But that's not what business is often doing, now is it? The target is never "one child". The target is "10 children", or "100 children" or "1000 children". You are definitely going to overrun your ETA if your target is 100 children in 9 months using only 100 women. IOW, this is a facile comparison not worthy of consideration.[1] > So it depends on the type of problem you're trying to solve. This[1] is not the type of problem where the analogy applies. ===================================== [1] It's even more facile in this context: you're looking to strike gold (AGI), so the analogy is trying to get one genius (160+ IQ) child. Good luck getting there by getting 1 woman pregnant at a time!
- earthnail 1y agoThe analogy is a good analogy. It is used to demonstrate that a larger workforce doesn’t always automatically give you better results, and that there is a set of problems that are clear to identify a priori where that applies. For some problems, quality is more important than quantity, and you structure your org respectively. See sports teams, for example. In this case, you want one foundation model, not 100 or 1000. You can’t afford to build 1000. That’s the one baby the company wants.
- shubik22 1y agoThis seems to just be a rewrite of https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-hiring-freeze-fda6b3c4 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-hiring-freeze-fda6b3c4. Can we replace the link?
- mgaunard 1y agoas an outsider, what I find the most impressive is how long it took for people to realize this was a bubble. Has been for a few years now.
- menaerus 1y agoConfirmation bias much?
- jimlawruk 1y agoFrom the Big Short: Lawrence Fields: "Actually, no one can see a bubble. That's what makes it a bubble." Michael Burry: "That's dumb, Lawrence. There are always markers."
- criley2 1y agoAh Michael Burry, the man who has predicted 18 of our last 2 bubbles. Classic broken clock being right, and in a way, perfectly validates the "no one can see a bubble" claim! If Burry could actually see a bubble/crash, he wouldn't be wrong about them 95%+ of the time... (He actually missed the covid crash as well, which is pretty shocking considering his reputation and claims!) Ultimately, hindsight is 20/20 and understanding whether or not "the markers" will lead to a major economic event or not is impossible, just like timing the market and picking stocks. At scale, it's impossible.
- jaccola 1y agoI feel 18 out of 2 isn't a good enough statistic to say he is "just right twice a day". What was the cost of the 16 missed predictions? Presumably he is up over all! Also doesn't even tell us his false positive rate. If, just for example, there were 1 million opportunities for him to call a bubble, and he called 18 and then there were only 2, this makes him look much better at predicting bubbles.
- criley2 1y agoIf you think that predicting economic crash every single year since 2012 and being wrong (Except for 2020, when he did not predict crash and there was one), is good data, by all means, continue to trust the Boy Who Cried Crash.
- obayesshelton 1y agoHey were only get huge options / stock based on the growth of the business. Plus they will of had a vesting schedule Besides the point that it was mental but the dude wanted the best and was throwing money at the problem.
- ojr 1y agoI just did a phone screen with Meta, and the interviewer asked for Euclidean distance between two points; they definitely have some nerds in the building.
- andrepd 1y agoI don't get the joke.
- ojr 1y agono joke, stop pretending like you know the answer to every LeetCode question that utilizes Euclidean distance
- dist-epoch 1y agoThat's basic high school math problem.
- ojr 1y agoThe foundation, like every LeetCode problem, is a basic high school math problem, when the foundation of the problem is trigonometry, way harder than stack, arrays, linked list, bfs, dfs...
- karmakurtisaani 1y agoThat's like 8th grade math, what am misunderstanding about your comment? E: wasn't the only one.
- ojr 1y agoK closest points using Euclidean distance and a heap, is not 8th grade math, although any 8th grade math problem can be transformed into a difficult "adult" question. Sums are elementary, asking to find a window of prefix sums that add up to something is still addition, but a little more tricky
- rogerkirkness 1y ago
- ekianjo 1y ago> Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, has compared hype around AI to the dotcom bubble at the turn of the century Sam is the main one driving the hype, that's rich...
- dist-epoch 1y agoOr now that he has the money he wants people to stop investing in the competition.
- bux93 1y agoBut then, he's purposely comparing it to the .com bubble - that bubble had some underlying merit. He could compare it to NFTs, the metaverse, the South Sea Company. It wouldn't make sense for him to say it's not a bubble when it's patently clear, so he picks his bubble.
- nijave 1y agoFacebook, Twitter, and some others made it out of the social media bubble. Some "gig" apps survived the gig bubble. Some crypto apps survived peak crypto hype Not everyone has to lose which he's presumably banking on
- _heimdall 1y agoRight, he's hoping to be Amazon rather than Pets.com in the sitcom bubble analogy.
- motorest 1y ago> Sam is the main one driving the hype, that's rich... It's also funny that he's been accusing those who accept better job offers as mercenaries. It does sound like the statements try to modulate competition both in the AI race and in acquiring the talent driving it.
- cedws 1y agoNow that you mention it, there's been a very sudden tone shift from both Altman and Zuckerberg. What's going on?
- nova22033 1y agoThe team drew criticism from executives this spring after the release of the latest Llama models underperformed expectations. interesting
- SoftTalker 1y agoNothing would give me a nicer feeling of schadenfreude than to see Meta, Google, and these other frothing-at-the-mouth AI hucksters take a bath on their bets.
- aleph_minus_one 1y agoJust until some month ago, people on HN were shouting people down who argued that spending big money on building an AI might not be a good idea ...
- Lionga 1y agoHow did this get pushed of the front page with over 100 points in less then an hour? YC does not like that kind of articles?
- cyberlimerence 1y ago#comments >>> #points --> flame war detector
- Hammershaft 1y agoCan we try to not turn HN into this? I come to this forum to find domain experts with interesting commentary, instead of emotionally charged low effort food fights.
- dwnw 1y agoyour comment somehow feels more emotionally charged and low effort than the original. here, let's continue that...
- garbawarb 1y agoWhy would that give you a nice feeling?
- SoftTalker 1y agoBecause companies like Google and Meta, which are responsible for so much social damage, deserve a little comeuppance every once in a while.
- TrackerFF 1y agoI really do wonder if any of those rock star $100m++ hires managed to get a 9-figure sign-on bonus, or if the majority have year(s) long performance clauses. Imagine being paid generational wealth, and then the house of cards comes crashing down a couple of months later.
- krona 1y agoTaking rockstar players 'off the pitch' is the best way second-rate competitors can neutralize their opponents' advantage.
- boringg 1y agoIts a great way to kneecap collective growth and development.
- BowBun 1y agoThis has never been the goal of any business, despite what they say.
- chatmasta 1y agoSo wage suppression is good because it’s better for the _collective_?
- boringg 1y agoWage suppression? Its the opposite were talking about here. Pay large amounts of money to make sure people don't work on challenging problems. But sure you cant try and argue that's wage suppression.
- respondo2134 1y agoThis is the Gavin Belson strategy to starve Pied Piper of distributed computing experts; nobody get's to work on his Signature Edition Box 3!
- nijave 1y agoTitle is a bit misleading. Meta freezes hiring after acquiring and hiring a ton while, somewhere else, Altman says it's a bubble. The more obvious reason for a freeze is they just got done acquiring a ton of talent
- adithyassekhar 1y agoDoes this mean the ai companies will start charging more? I only just started figuring this AI thing out.
- frexs 1y agoMay the enshittification begin.
- andrekandre 1y agothey are just following the thiel playbook: race to monopoly position as fast as possible, then extract profits afterwards (which inevitably leads to the inevitable shitnization)
- lm28469 1y agoThey're all bleeding money so yes it's inevitable. It's always the same thing, uber, food delivery, escooter, &c. they bait you with cheap trials and stay cheap until the investors money run out, and once you're reliant on them they jack up the prices as high as they can.
- neuronic 1y agoSomeone needs to finance absurd operational costs if the services are supposed to stick around.
- seatac76 1y agoThe money committed to payroll for these supposed top AI is equivalent to a mid size startup’s payroll, no wonder they had to hit pause.
- srameshc 1y agoIt could be that, beyond the AI bubble, there may be a broader understanding of economic conditions that Meta likely has. Corporate spending cuts often follow such insights.
- battxbox 1y agoTHANK YOU
- neuronic 1y agoGood call in this case specifically, but lord this is some kind of directionless leadership despite well thought out concerns over the true economic impact of LLMs and other generative AI tech. Useful, amazing tech but only for specific niches and not as generalist application that will end and transform the world as we know it. I find it refreshing to browse r/betteroffline these days after 2 years of being bombarded with grifting LinkedIn lunatics everywhere you look.
- YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago>> Mr Zuckerberg has said he wants to develop a “personal superintelligence” that acts as a permanent superhuman assistant and lives in smart glasses. Yann Le Cun has spoken about this, so much that I thought it was his idea. In any case, how's that going to work? Is everyone going to start wearing glasses? What happens if someone doesn't want to wear glasses?
- techpineapple 1y ago“ In any case, how's that going to work? Is everyone going to start wearing glasses? What happens if someone doesn't want to wear glasses?” People probably said the same thing about “what if someone doesn’t want to carry a phone with them everywhere”. If it’s useful enough the culture will change (which, I unequivocally think they won’t be, but I digress)
- butlike 1y ago"grills" are going to come back in a big way
- mindslight 1y agoVery few will not want to wear the glasses. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Game_(episode) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Game_(episode) Last night I had a technical conversation with ChatGPT that was so full of wild hallucinations at every step, it left me wondering if the main draw of "AI" is better thought of as entertainment. And whether using it for even just rough discovery actually serves as a black hole for the motivation to get things done.
- dghlsakjg 1y agoI'm actually a little shocked that AI hasn't been integrated into games more deeply at this point. Between whisper and lightweight tuned models, it wouldn't be super hard to have onboard AI models that you can interact with in much more meaningful ways that we have traditionally interacted with NPCs. When I meet an NPC castle guard, it would be awesome if they had an LLM behind it that was instructed to not allow me to pass unless I mention my Norse heritage or whatever.
- Lionga 1y agoHow did this get pushed of the front page with over 100 points in less then an hour? YC does not like that kind of articles?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- code_for_monkey 1y agowhat happened to the metaverse??? I thought we finally had legs! Seriously why does anyone take this company seriously? Its gotta be the worst of the big tech, besides maybe anything Elon touches, and even then...
- ethbr1 1y ago1. They've developed and open sourced incredibly useful and cool tech 2. They have some really smart people working there 3. They're well run from a business/financial perspective, especially considering their lack of a hardware platform 4. They've survived multiple paradigm shifts, and generally picked the right bets Among other things.
- code_for_monkey 1y agoall of those are basically true for every big tech company
- ethbr1 1y agoSo we agree that Meta is at minimum the equal of every big tech company?
- code_for_monkey 1y agowe agree that at maximum its the equal of every tech company
- ethbr1 1y agoIn what other metrics do other big tech companies exceed it, causing them to be ranked higher?
- jopsen 1y ago0. Many people use Facebook messenger as primary contact book. Even my parents are on Facebook messenger. Convincing people to use signal is not easy, and there are lots of people I talk to whose phone number I don't have.
- morkalork 1y agoReally feels like it went from "AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs forever" to "whoops bubble" in about 6 weeks.
- iab 1y agoNo worries, we’ll be back at the takeover stage in another 6 weeks
- deltarholamda 1y agoIt'll be somewhere in between. A lot of capital will be burned, quite a few marginal jobs will be replaced, and AI will run into the wall of not enough new/good training material because all the future creators will be spoiled by using AI.
- fnordlord 1y agoI feel like it was never a bubble to begin with. It was a hoax.
- moduspol 1y agoEven that came after "AI is going to make itself smarter so fast that it's inevitably going to kill us all and must be regulated" talk ended. Remember when that was the big issue? Haven't heard about that in a while.
- morkalork 1y agoI've seen a few people convince themselves they were building AGI trying to do that, though it looked more like the psychotic ramblings of someone entering a manic episode committed to github. And so far none of their pet projects have taken over the world yet. It's actually kind of reminds me of all those people who snap thinking they've solved P=NP and start spamming their "proofs" everywhere.
- rchaud 1y agoMakes sense. Previously the hype was so all-encompassing that CEOs could simply rely on an implicit public perception that it was coming for our jerbs. Once they have to start explicitly saying that line themselves, it's because that perception is fading.
- lilerjee 1y agoSimilar to my view of AI, there is a huge bubble in current AI. Current AI is nothing more than a second-hand information processing model, with inherent cognitive biases, lagging behind environmental changes, and other limitations or shortcomings.
- akudha 1y agoMust be nice to do whatever he wants, without worrying about consequences…
- scrollop 1y agoMakes you think whether llama progress is not doing too well and/or perhaps we're entering a plateau for llm architecture development.
- butlike 1y agoThe article got me thinking that there's some sort of bottle neck that makes scaling astronomical or the value just not really there. 1. Buy up top talent from other's working in this space 2. See what they produce over say, 6mo. to a year 3. Hire a corpus of regular ICs to see what _they_ produce 4. Open source the model to see if any programmer at all can produce something novel with a pretty robust model. Observe that nothing amazing has really come out (besides a pattern-recognizing machine that placates the user to coerce them into using more tokens for more prompts), and potentially call it on hiring for a bubble.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> Observe that nothing amazing has really come out I wouldn't say so. The problem is rather that some actually successful applications of such AI models are not what companies like Meta want to be associated with. Think into directions like AI boyfriend/girlfriend (a very active scene, and common usage of locally hosted LLMs), or roleplaying (in a very broad sense). For such applications, it matters a lot less if in some boundary cases the LLM produces strange results. If you want to get an impression of such scenes, google "character.ai" (roleplaying), or for AI boyfriend/girlfriend have a look at https://old.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/
- EternalFury 1y agoIs it just me or does it feel like billionaires of that ilk can never go broke no matter how bad their decisions are? The complete shift to the metaverse, the complete shift to LLMs and fat AI glasses, the bullheaded “let’s suck all talents out of the atmosphere” phase and now let’s freeze all hiring. In a handful of years. And yet, billionaires will remain billionaires. As if there are no consequences for these guys. Meanwhile I feel another bubble burst coming that will hang everyone else high and dry.
- pas 1y agothe top100 richest people on the globe can do a lot more stupid stuff and still walk away to a comfortable retirement, whereas the bottom 10-20-.. percent doesn't have this luxury. not to mention that these rich guys are playing with the money of even richer companies with waaay too much "free cash flow"
- seydor 1y agoThat's a man with conviction
- JKCalhoun 1y agoSorry, I was in the metaverse just now. I took my headset off though — could you please repeat that?
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoHaven’t been there in a while, did they figure out how to give people, I don’t know, legs and stuff?
- adastra22 1y agoYou will have no genitals, and you will like it.
- cuckerberg432 1y agoBut genitals is like, the whole point of VR!
- lagniappe 1y agoYes
- BoorishBears 1y agoThe two biggest Metaverse plays have had them since launch! http://fortnite.com/ http://fortnite.com/ http://roblox.com/ http://roblox.com/
- iphone_elegance 1y agothe metaverse push is the perfect analogy cool fun concepts/technology fucked by the worlds most boring people who only have desire to dominate markets and attention.. god forbid anything happen slowly/gradually without it being about them
- ideamotor 1y agoIt sounds like a lot of these big companies are being managed by LLMs and vibes at this point.
- saubeidl 1y agoLLMs are not the way to AGI and it's becoming clearer to even the most fanatic evangelists. It's not without reason GPT-5 was only a minor incremental update. I am convinced we have reached peak LLM. There's no way a system of statistical predictions by itself can ever develop anything close to reasoning or intelligence. I think maybe there might be some potential there if we combined LLMs with formal reasoning systems - make the LLM nothing more than a fancy human language <-> formal logic translator, but even then, that translation layer will be inherently unreliable due to the nature of LLMs.
- butlike 1y agoYup. I agree with you. We're finally reaching the point where it's cost-prohibitive to sweep this fact under the rug with scaling out data centers and refreshing version numbers to clear contexts.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- charliebwrites 1y ago“Man who creates bubble now fears it”
- alsetmusic 1y agoIt almost seems as though the record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI might have been a little shortsighted. A couple of years ago, I asked a financial investment person about AI as a trick question. She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure). I was waiting for her to put her foot in her mouth and buy into the hype.She skillfully navigated the question in a way that won my respect. I personally believe that a lot of investment money is going to evaporate before the market resets. What we're calling AI will continue to have certain uses, but investors will realize that the moonshot being promised is undeliverable and a lot of jobs will disappear. This will hurt the wider industry, and the economy by extension.
- mrits 1y agoI think we will see the opposite. If we made no progress with LLMs we'd still have huge advancements and growth opportunities enhancing the workflows and tuning them to domain specific tasks.
- evilduck 1y agoI think you could both be right at the same time. We will see a large number of VC funded AI startup companies and feature clones vanish soon, and we will also see current or future LLMs continue to make inroads into existing business processes and increase productivity and profitability. Personally, I think what we will witness is consolidation and winner-takes-all scenarios. There just isn't a sustainable market for 15 VS Code forks all copying each other along with all other non-VS Code IDEs cloning those features in as fast as possible. There isn't space for Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, Opencode all doing basically the same thing with their special branding when the thing they're actually selling is a commoditized LLM API. Hell, there _probably_ isn't space for OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Mistral and DeepSeek and Alibaba and whoever else, all fundamentally creating and doing the same thing globally. Every single software vendor can't innovate and integrate AI features faster than AI companies themselves can build better tooling to automate that company's tools for them. It reeks of the 90's when there were a dozen totally viable but roughly equal search engines. One vendor will eventually pull ahead or have a slightly longer runway and claim the whole thing.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nabla9 1y agoBTW: Meta specially denies that the reason is bubble fears and they provide alternate explanation in the article. Better title: Meta freezes AI hiring due to some basic organizational reasons.
- skywhopper 1y agoA hiring freeze is not something you do because you are planning well.
- 4gotunameagain 1y agoThey would deny bubble fears even if leaked emails proved that it was the only thing they talked about. Would anyone seriously take Meta's or any megacorps statements on face value ?
- byyoung3 1y agoclickbait. read the article. they just spent several billion hiring a leadership team. They are doing an all hands to figure out what they need to do.
- willsmith72 1y agoyes, because meta has no incentive to act like there's no bubble
- Capricorn2481 1y agoSo it's not clickbait, even though the headline does not reflect the contents of the article, because you believe the headline is plausible? I think AI is a bubble, but there's nothing in here that indicates they have frozen hiring or that Zuckerberg is cautious of a bubble. Sounds like they are spending even more money per researcher.
- byyoung3 1y ago"there's nothing in here that indicates they have frozen hiring or that Zuckerberg is cautious of a bubble" That's what makes it clickbait my friend
- Capricorn2481 1y agoThat is what I said, yes.
- simianwords 1y agoIts a bit frustrating that most don't read TFA instead vent out their AI angst the first opportunity they get.
- spicybbq 1y agoSince "AI bubble" has become part of the discourse, people are watching for any signs of trouble. Up to this point, we have seen lots of AI hype. Now, more than in the past, we are going to see extra attention paid to "man bites dog" stories about how AI investment is going to collapse.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rudedogg 1y agoMetaverse people: “We’re so back!”
- Hilift 1y agoMETA has only made $78.7 billion operating income in the past 12 months of returns. Time to buckle up! https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META/financials/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META/financials/
- nashashmi 1y agoAn astonishing number
- ipnon 1y agoIt's really difficult to wrap one's head around the cash they're able to deploy.
- kgwgk 1y agoThey “deploy” much more than what they generate. Their cash position has gone from $44bn to $12bn in the first six months of the year and are now getting other people to pay for datacenters https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-taps-pimco-blue-owl-29-billion-data-center-expansion-project-source-says-2025-08-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-taps-pimco-blue-owl-29...
- oblio 1y agoOuch. Other FAANG in a similar position?
- Jagerbizzle 1y agoI guess there's no 'M' in "FAANG" but there's this: https://www.geekwire.com/2025/im-good-for-my-80-billion-what-microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-really-meant-by-his-stargate-zinger/ https://www.geekwire.com/2025/im-good-for-my-80-billion-what...
- qeternity 1y agoFAANG has been replaced by Mag7: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia.
- trumbitta2 1y ago"Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring after he personally offered 250M to a single person and the budget is now gone."
- nashashmi 1y agoMark created the bubble. Other investors saw few opportunities for investment. So they put more Money into a few companies. What we need is more independent and driven innovation. Right right now the greatest obstacle to independent innovation is the massive data bank the bigger companies have.
- lvl155 1y agoHow did he run out of money so fast? Think Zuck is one of those guys who get sucked into hype cycles and no one around him will tell him so. Even investors.
- ChrisArchitect 1y ago[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44968111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44968111
- bilsbie 1y agoI’ve never seen so much evidence for a bubble yet so much potential to be the biggest Thing ever. Just getting a lot of mixed signals right now. Not sure what to think.
- kilroy123 1y agoPersonally, I think it's both! It's a bubble, but it's also going to be something that slowly but steadily transforms the world in the next 10-20 years.
- Insanity 1y agoWe might see another AI winter first, is my assumption. I believe that LLMs are fundamentally the wrong approach to AGI, and that bubble is going to burst until we have a better methodology for AGI. Unfortunately, the major players seem focused on 'getting to AGI pretention through LLM'.
- zmmmmm 1y agoPeople seem very confused thinking that something can't both be valuable AND a bubble. Just look at the internet. The dot com bubble was one of the most widely recognised bubbles in history. But would you say the internet was a fad that went away? That there was no value there? There's zero contradiction at all in it being both.
- crims0n 1y agoDot-com was the same way... the Internet did end up having the potential everyone thought it would, businesses just didn't handle the influx of investment well.
- coffeebeqn 1y agoThere is potential but it does seem like just throwing more money at LLMs is not going to get us to where the bubble expects
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoIt's, like, a vision thing. You know? https://www.threads.com/@professor_neil/post/DNiVLYptCHL/im-beginning-to-think-that-sam-altman-isnt-a-serious-person-or-a-particularly-sm https://www.threads.com/@professor_neil/post/DNiVLYptCHL/im-...
- noisy_boy 1y agoMaybe they are trying to signal to the AI talent in general to temper their expectations while simultaneously chasing rockstars with enormous sums.
- boringg 1y agoNvidia earnings next week. Thats the bell weather -everything else is speculation.
- zeristor 1y agoDidn't Meta invest big into the Metaverse, then back track on that, was it $20 billion. I'd like for these investments to pay off, they're bold but it highlights how deep the pockets are to be able to invest so much.
- coffeebeqn 1y agoThey did indeed - see their current name
- eep_social 1y ago> was it $20 billion more like 40, yes
- asadotzler 1y agoMore like $80B
- rtkwe 1y agoThey didn't just invest they made it core to their identity with the name change and it just fell so so flat because the claims were nonsense hype for crypto pumps. We already had stuff like VR Chat (still going pretty strong) it just wasn't corporate and sanitized for sale and mass monetization.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoThey spent billions on GPUs and were well positioned to enter the LLM wars
- bemmu 1y agoThey're still on it though. The new headset prototypes with high FOV sound amazing, and they are iterating on many designs. They're already doing something like ~$500M/year in Meta Quest app sales. Granted not huge yet after their 30% cut, but sales should keep increasing as the headsets get better.
- benzible 1y ago
- TZubiri 1y agoThe most likely explanation I can think of are drugs. Offering 1B dollar salaries and then backtracking, it's like when that addict friend calls you with a super cool idea at 11pm and then 5 days later they regret it. Also rejecting a 1B salary? Drugs, it isn't unheard of in Silicon Valley.
- vonneumannstan 1y agoDid the board realize Zuck was out of his mind or what?
- dghlsakjg 1y agoDoes it matter? Zuckerberg holds 90% of the class B supershares. There isn't much the board can do when the CEO holds most of the shareholder votes.
- boshalfoshal 1y agoClickbait title and article. There was a large reorg of genai/msl and several other teams, so things have been shuffled around and they likely don't want to hire into the org while this is finalizing. A freeze like this is common and basically just signals that they are ready to get to work with the current team they have. The whole point of the AI org is to be a smaller, more focused, and lean org, and they have been making several strategic hires for months at this point. All this says is that zuck thinks the org is in a good spot to start executing. From talking with people at and outside of the company, I don't have much reason to believe that this is some kneejerk reaction to some supposed realization that "its all a bubble." I think people are conflating this with whatever Sam Altman said about a bubble.
- baby 1y agoThis ^ most of this thread is missing the point
- animitronix 1y agoWhy is he always behind the curve, always?
- shortrounddev2 1y agoHe and his company have not innovated since they created facebook. They bought their success after that
- SkyMarshal 1y agoTo be fair it worked for him the first time. And for Apple too multiple times for that matter.
- xyst 1y agoExplains why AI companies like Windsurf were hunting for buyers to hold the bag
- siliconc0w 1y agoIt never really made sense for Meta to get into AI, the motivations were always pretty thin and it seemed like they just wanted to ride the wave.
- dylan604 1y agoIsn't that what companies are supposed to do by seeing/following/setting trends in a way that increases revenue and profit for the shareholders?
- dghlsakjg 1y agoMeta's business model is to capture attention - largely with "content" - so they can charge lots of money to sprinkle ads amongst that content. I can see a lot of utility for Meta to get deeply involved in the unlimited custom content generating machine. They have a lot of data about what sort of content gets people to spend more time with them. They now have the ability to endlessly create exactly what it is that keeps you most engaged and looking at ads. Frankly, content businesses that get their revenue from ads are one of the most easily monetizable ways to use the outputs of AI. Yes, it will pollute the internet to the point of making almost all information untrustable, but think of how much money can be extracted along the way!
- siliconc0w 1y agoThe whole point is novelty/authenticity/scarcity though, if you just have a machine that generates infinite infinitely cute cat videos then people will cease to be interested in cat videos. And its not like they pay content creators anyway. It's Spain sinking their own economy by importing tons of silver.
- dghlsakjg 1y agoWe have services that will serve you effectively infinite cat videos, and neither cat videos or the websites that do that have ceased to be popular. It is actually the basis for the sites that people tend to spend most of their time and attention on. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok all live on the users that only want to see infinite cat videos (substitute cat video for your favorite niche). Already much of the content is AI generated, and boy does it do numbers. I am not convinced that novelty, authenticity, or scarcity matter in the business model. If they do, AI has solved novelty, has enough people fooled with authenticity, and scarcity... no one wants their cat video feed to stop.
- Pavilion2095 1y ago> Mark Zuckerberg has blocked recruitment of artificial intelligence staff at Meta, slamming the brakes on a multibillion-dollar hiring spree amid fears of an AI bubble. > amid fears of an AI bubble Who told the telegraph that these two things are related? Is it just another case of wishful thinking?
- smrtinsert 1y ago> Pays 100 million for people, wonders if theres a bubble
- ninetyninenine 1y agoI don’t think it’s entirely a bubble. Definitely this is revolutionary technology on the scale of going to the moon. It will fundamentally change humanity. But while the technology is revolutionary the ideas and capability behind building these things aren’t that complicated. Paying a guy millions doesn’t mean shit. So what mark zuckerberg was doing was dumb.
- lm28469 1y ago> on the scale of going to the moon Of all the examples of things that actually had an impact I would pick this one last... Steam engine, internet, personal computers, radios, GPS, &c. but going to the moon ? The thing we did a few times and stopped doing once we won the ussr vs usa dick contest ?
- ninetyninenine 1y agoImpact is irrelevant. We aren’t sure about the impact of AI yet. But the technology is revolutionary. Thus for the example I picked something thats revolutionary but the impact is not as clear.
- cuckerberg432 1y ago... the bubble that he created? After he threw $100,000,000,000 into a VR bubble mostly of his making? What a fucking jackass manchild.
- baxtr 1y agoMake a mistake once, it’s misjudgment. Repeat it, it’s incompetence? Meta nearly doubled its headcount in 2020 and 2021, assuming the pandemic growth would continue. However, Zuckerberg later admitted this was a mistake.
- FlyingBears 1y agoSo did everyone else ...
- baxtr 1y agoApple didn’t
- HDThoreaun 1y agoWhen you hit on 12 in blackjack and go bust is it a mistake or a gamble? No one can tell the future.
- alex1138 1y agoMetaverse (especially) or AI might make more sense if you could actually see your friend's posts (and vice versa), if the feed made sense (which it hasn't for years now) and if you could message people who you aren't friends with yet without it getting lost in some 'other' folder you won't discover until 3 years from now (Gmail has a Spam folder problem... but the difference is you can see you have messages there and you can at least check it out for yourself) What I'm trying to say is make your product the barest minimum usable first maybe? (Also, don't act like, as Jason Calacanis has called it, a marauder, like copying everything from everyone all the time. What he's done with Snapchat is absolutely tasteless and in the case of spying on them - which he's done - very likely criminal)
- duxup 1y agoPrevious articles and comments were "Praise Mark for being brave enough to go all in on AI!" Now we have this ;)
- seu 1y agoThese 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.
- awalsh128 1y agoThis is why I ignore anything that CEOs say about AI in the news. Examples, AGI in a few years, most jobs will be obsolete, etc.
- specialist 1y agoAuthor Ted Chiang is the only celebrity AI kibitzer pundit I wholly agree with. Paraphrasing: Capital will use / is using AI to further bludgeon Labor.
- majewsky 1y agoI like how Cory Doctorow put it (paraphrasing): Every technology exists to solve a problem. AI in its current form is intended to solve the problem of having to pay wages.
- turzmo 1y agoCEO's were never credible to begin with, but what about Nobel laureate in Physics, Geoffrey Hinton, telling us to stop training radiologists? Nothing makes sense anymore.
- thfuran 1y agoWell, clearly he should stick to physics. Even if it's likely that AI would replace them soon, a lot of people would likely die unnecessarily if we ran overly low on radiologists by ending the pipeline too soon. They're already overworked and that can only go so far. It's not a bet we should make.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- me551ah 1y agoScaling AI will require an exponential increase in compute and processing power, and even the current LLM models take up a lot of resources. We are already at the limit of how small we can scale chips and Moore’s law is already dead. So newer chips will not be exponentially better but will be more of incremental improvements, so unless the price of electricity comes down exponentially we might never see AGI at a price point that’s cheaper than hiring a human. Most companies are already running AI models at a loss, scaling the models to be bigger(like GPT 4.5) only makes them more expensive to run. The reason why internet, smartphones and computers have seen exponential growth from the 90s is due to underlying increase in computing power. I personally used a 50Mhz 486 in the 90s and now use a 8c/16t 5Ghz CPU. I highly doubt if we will see the same form of increase in the next 40 years
- aaronblohowiak 1y agoWe are either limited by compute, available training data, or algorithms. You seem to believe we are limited by compute. I've seen other people argue that we are limited by training data. It is my totally inexpert belief that we are substantially limited by algorithms at this point.
- mattnewton 1y agoI think algorithms is a unique limit because it changes how much data or compute you need. For instance, we probably have the algorithms we need to brute force solving more problems today, but they require infeasible compute or data. We can almost certainly train a new 10T parameter mixture of experts that continues to make progress in benchmarks, but it will cost so much to train and be completely undeployable with today’s chips, data, and algorithms. So I think the truth is likely we are both compute limited and we need better algorithms.
- aaronblohowiak 1y agoThere are a few "hints" that suggest to me algorithms will bear a lot more fruit than compute (in terms of flops): 1) there already exist very efficient algorithms for rigorous problems that LLMs perform terribly at! 2) learning is too slow and is largely offline 3) "llms aren't world models"
- noobermin 1y agoAnd just three weeks ago I was suggesting a crash might hurt bad when this very meta announced 250 million dollar salary packages.
- renecito 1y agoMission accomplished: who'd tell disrupting your competition poaching their talent and erasing value (giving it away for free) would make people realize there is no long term value in the core technology itself. Don't get me wrong, we are moving to commoditization, as any new tech it'd be transparent to our lifestyle and a lot of money will be done as an industry, but it'd be hard to compete as a core business competence w/o cheating (and by cheating I mean your FANG company already has a competitive advantage)
- isoprophlex 1y agoWhoa that's actually a brilliant strategy: accelerate the hype first by offering 100M comp packages, then stop hiring and strategically drop a few "yeah bubble's gonna pop soon" rumours. Great way to fuck with your competition, especially if you're meta and you're not in the lead yourself
- 369548684892826 1y agoBut if Meta believe it's a bubble then why not let the competition continue to waste their money pumping it up? How does popping it early benefit Meta?
- wnc3141 1y agoin a few months.."sorry my whims proved wrong again, so we'll take the healthcare and stability away from I guess 10% of you."
- qwertox 1y ago"Now let's make the others doubt that this is a meaningful investment" After phase 1, "the shopping spree".
- lawlessone 1y agoI feel like the giant 100 mil /1 billion salaries could have been better spent just hiring a ton of math, computer science, data science graduates and just forming an an AI skunkworks out of them. Also throw in a ton of graduates from other fields/sciences, arts, psychology, biology, law , finance, or whatever else you can imagine to help create data and red team their fields. Hiring people with creative writing and musical skills to give it more samples of creative writing and song writing, summarization etc And people that are good at teaching and breaking complex problems into easier to understand chunks for different age brackets. Their userbase is big but it's not the same as ChatGTP's, they won't get the same tasks to learn from users that chatgpt does.
- mathverse 1y agoTo me AI is a like phone business. A few companies (Apple,Samsung) will manage to score a homerun and the rest will be destined to offer commoditized products.
- baby 1y agoAnd Meta doesn't want to miss the phone train this time
- Waterluvian 1y agoIs this the stage of the bubble where they burst the bubble by worrying that there’s a bubble?
- caycep 1y agoDear lord can Meta hiring be any more unstable? HR dept must be a revolving door at this point
- awalsh128 1y agoI got an email recently from a Meta recruiter of I'm interested in a non technical leadership position. I'm a programmer.
- sirodoht 1y ago> We are truly only investing more and more into Meta Superintelligence Labs as a company. Any reporting to the contrary of that is clearly mistaken. https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/1958599969151361126?s=46 https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/1958599969151361126?s=46
- antithesizer 1y agoitt: confirmation bias
- rognjen 1y agoOn the other hand, it's been shown time and again that we should do the opposite of whatever Zuck says.
- real_marcfawzi 1y agoall news is being manipulated to short stock and make a ton of money shorting stock, based on perceived bad news
- gusfoo 1y agoA trillion dollars of value disappearing in 2 days. We've still got our NFT metaverse shipping waybill project going on somewhere in the org chart, right? Phew!
- lajetl 1y agoThat's because it was never real to begin with. "Market cap" and "value" are not the same thing. "Value" is "I actually need this and it will dramatically improve my life". "Market cap" is "I can sell this to some idiot".
- StarterPro 1y agoIts almost like nobody asked for the dramatic push of ai, and it was all created by billionaires trying to become even richer at the cost of people's health and the environment.
- snickerbockers 1y agoI still have yet to see it do anything useful. I've seen several very impressive "parlor tricks" which a decade ago i thought were impossible (image generation, text-parsing, arguably passing the turing-test) but I still haven't seen anybody use AI in a way that solves a real problem which doesn't already have an existing solution. I will say that grok is a very useful research assistant for situations where you understand what you're looking at but you're at an impasse because you don't know what its name is and are therefore unable to look it up, but then it's just an incremental improvement over search-engines rather than a revolutionary new technology.
- hinkley 1y agoHow to make a bubble pop: announce a trillion dollar company has stopped hiring in that area.
- tracker1 1y agoI'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 competing with Google, X, MS, OpenAI and others in terms of AI interactions. While there's a lot of value in being the option for communication between friends and family, and the groups on FB don't have a great alternative, the entire market can shift greatly depending on AI research. I look at some of the (I think it was OpenAI) in generated terrain/interaction and can't help but think that's a natural coupling to FB/Meta's investments in their VR headsets. They could potentially completely lose on a platform they largely pioneered. They could wind up like Blackberry if they aren't ready to adapt. By contrast, Apple's lack of appropriate AI spending should be very concerning to any investors... Google's assistant is already quite a bit better than Siri and the gap is only getting wider. Apple is woefully under-invested, and the accountants running the ship don't even seem to realize it.
- malfist 1y agoHow many years of not seeing returns this quarter does it take before its all hype?
- tracker1 1y agoHow long did it take Space-X to catch a rocket with giant chopsticks? It's more than okay for a company with other sources of revenue to do research towards future advancement... it's not risking the downfall of the company.
- throw310822 1y ago"technology too expensive to be offered at a profit (yet)" != hype
- malfist 1y agoIs it too expensive? Or not a valid solution to real problems?
- tamimio 1y agoI think I have said it before here (and in real life too) that AI is just another bubble, let alone AGI which is a complete joke, and all I got is angry faces and responses. Tech always had bubbles and early adopters get the biggest slice, and try as much as possible to keep it alive later to maximize that cut. By the time the average person is aware of it and is talking about it, it's over already. Previous tech bubbles: internet, search engines, content makers, smartphones, cybersecurity, blockchain and crypto, and now generative AI. By the way, AI was never new and anyone in the field knows this. ML was already part of some tech before generative AI kicked in. Glad I personally never jumped on the hype and still focused on what I think is the big thing, but until I get enough funds to be the first in the market, I will keep it low.
- freeopinion 1y agoIf AI really is a bubble and somehow imploded spectacularly for the rest of this year, universities would continue to spit out AI specialists for years to come. Mr. Z. will keep hiring them into every opening that comes up whether he wants to or not.
- snickerbockers 1y agoSilicon Valley has never seen a true bubble burst, even the legendary dot-com bubble was a minor setback from which the industry was fully recovered in about 5-10 years. I have been saying for at least 15 years now that eventually Silly Valley will collapse when all these VCs stop funding dumb startups by the hundreds in search of the elusive "unicorns", but I've been wrong at every turn as it seems that no matter how much money they waste on dumb bullshit the so-called unicorns actually do generate enough revenue to make funding dumb startup ideas a profitable business model....
- smeeger 1y agoIf there is a path to AGI then ROI is going to be enormous literally regardless of how much was invested. hopefully this is another bubble. i would really rather not have my lifes work vaporized by the singularitt
- disposition2 1y agoI can see the value in actual AI. But it seems like in many instances how it is being utilized or applied is more related to terrible search functionality. Even for the web, it seems like we’re using AI to provide more refined search results, rather than just fixing search capabilities. Maybe it’s just easier to throw ‘AI’ (heavy compute of data) at a search problem, rather than addressing the crux of the problem…people not being provided with the tools to query information. And maybe that’s the answer but it seems like an expensive solution. That said, I’m not an expert and could be completely off base.
- nomel 1y ago> is more related to terrible search functionality If you looked at $ spent/use case, I would think this is probably the bottom of the list, probably with the highest use of that being in the free tiers.
- zmmmmm 1y agoThe problem with sentiment driven market phenomena is they lack fundamental support. When they crash, they can really crash hard. And as much as I see real value in the progress in AI, 95% of the investment I see happening is all based on sentiment right now. Actually deploying AI into real operational scenarios to unlock the value everyone is talking about is going to take many years and it will look like a sink hole of cost well before that. Buckle up.
- beambot 1y agoMoving fast or sheep-like behavior?
- mv4 1y agoThat's how Zuck is. Gets excited and overhires. I saw this during COVID and we were hiring like crazy.
- danpalmer 1y agoZuckerberg 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 the big thing and Meta put a huge amount of money into it, chasing after other companies, with an arguably novel approach compared to the rest of big tech... but now seems to be backing out or at least messaging less commitment. Oh and I think there was some crypto in there too at one point? I'm not saying that they should have stuck with any of these. The business may not have worked in each case, and that's fine, but spending billions on each one seems like a bad idea. Zuckerberg is great at chasing the next big thing, but seemingly bad at landing the next big thing. He either needs to chase them more tentatively, investing far less, or he needs to stick with them long enough to work out all the issues and build the growth over the long term.
- DanHulton 1y agoDon't forget gaming back in the day! Facebook games started taking off, then Facebook decided that the _only_ way you could get paid on the Facebook platform was with Facebook Credits, and to incentivize Facebook as the gaming platform of choice, Facebook would give out free Credits to players to spend on Facebook games. Of course, if your game was the one they chose to spend those Credits on, you wouldn't actually get paid, not with promotional credits, what, are you crazy? No, I'm not still bitter from that era, why do you ask?
- jmyeet 1y agoIt'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 bet. Waht really killed FB Gaming was not having a mobile platform. They tried. But they failed. We could live in a very different world if FB partnered with Google (who had Android) but both saw each other as an existential threat. After this, Zuckerberg paid $1 billion for Instagram. This was a 100x decision, much like Google buying Youtube. But in the last 5-10 years the company has seemed directionless. FB itself has fallen out of favor. Tiktok came out of nowhere and has really eaten FB's lunch. The Metaverse was the biggest L. Tends of billions of dollars got thrown at this before any product market fit was found. VR has always been a solution looking for a problem. Companies have focused on how it can benefit them but consumers just don't want headsets strapped to their heads. It's never grown beyond a niche and never shown signs that it would. This was so disastrous that the company lost like 60%+ of its value and seemingly it's been abandoned now. Meta also dabbled with cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Also abandoned. Social media really seems to have settled into a means of following public figures. Individuals generally seem to interact with each other via group texts. Meta has a massive corpus of posts, comments, interactions, etc to train AI. But what does Meta do with AI? Can they build a moat? It's never been clear to me what the end goal is.
- IAmGraydon 1y agoWhile I think LLMs are not the pathway to AGI, this bubble narrative appears to be a concerted propaganda campaign intended to get people to sell, and it all started with Altman, the guy who was responsible for always pumping up the bubble. I don't know who else is behind this, but the Telegraph appears to be a major outlet of these stories. Just today alone: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/20/ai-report-triggering-panic-and-fear-on-wall-street/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/20/ai-report-tr... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/21/we-may-be-facing-dotcom-bubble-2/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/21/we-may-be-fa... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/21/zuckerberg-freezes-ai-hiring-amid-bubble-fears/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/21/zuckerberg-f... Other media outlets are also making a massive push of this narrative. If they get their way, they may actually cause a massive selloff, letting everyone who profited from the giant bubble they created buy everything up cheap.
- chris_wot 1y ago"We believe in putting this power in people’s hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives" Either Zuckerberg has drunk his own Kool Aid, or he is cynically lying to everyone, but neither is a good look.
- SamvitJ 1y agoI'm far from being a fan of the company, but I think this article is substantially overstating the extent of the "freeze" just to drum up news. It sounds like what's actually happening is a re-org [1] - a consolidation of all the AI groups under the new Superintelligence umbrella, similar to Google merging Brain and DeepMind, with an emphasis on finding the existing AI staff roles within the new org. From Meta itself: “All that’s happening here is some basic organisational planning: creating a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises.” [1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-hiring-freeze-fda6b3c4?st=M55RmA https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-hiring-freeze-fda6b3c4?s...
- BLACKCRAB 1y agoIf Mark had any questions about what would sell the idea around the world and stick with focused future and a team worth the time in AI neuroscience.combine_with_ai_entities to accepting my proposal in marketing ideas to partnership in Lumina Google Cloud sentient_being global with Meta AI X Framework Protection my name is Kevin Pierson piersonkevin290@gmail.com
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hamelcubsfan 1y agoSelective Freeze? Frank Chu seems to have broken through the ice if so: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/22/apple-loses-another-key-ai-leader-to-meta/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/22/apple-loses-another-key...
- bentt 1y agoI genuinely believe SamA has directed GPT5 to be nerfed to speedrun the bubble. Watch, he’ll let the smoking embers of the AI market cool and then reveal the next big advancement they are sitting on right now.
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago>...and then reveal the next big advancement they are sitting on right now. Anyone got any predictions?
- johnnienaked 1y agoThis shit is fucking hilarious