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Zuckerberg’s AI hires disrupt Meta with swift exits and threats to leave
- Frummy 1y agoWow what could possibly be so bad that multiple people leave after just some days
- agilob 1y agoWhen the first names were announced I read some comments on r/LocalLLaMA that they assembled a team with too many high egos and this was going to fall apart, because of general soft-skills issues. I know nothing about the situation, but that comment was strangely specific
- baobabKoodaa 1y agoI vaguely recall reading the same or similar comment and I thought at the time it sounds like a very likely outcome.
- kingstnap 1y agoTeething pains are surely expected. But the egos of some of these people have to be inflated worse than ai wrapper valuations.
- alwa 1y ago> Meta said this allegation was “manufactured tension without basis in fact that’s clearly being pushed by dramatic, navel-gazing busybodies.” Was this bombastic, “nyah-nyah,” “I know you are but what am I” style of public communication a thing before the current president hired spokespeople who behave this way? If it’s at all indicative of how things work inside that company, I’d be out the door on the first day too, no matter how many absurd millions were supposedly on offer…
- chaps 1y agoAt least in my experience when doing investigative journo stuff, it's rare but it happens. The spokespeople who've done it towards me have been around for long enough that it's not unknown behavior.
- alwa 1y agoI mean, I guess if the all of the substantive facts are against you, it makes sense that your only move is to kick up dust this way. I just don’t see how it helps: they just come off looking desperate. Then again I don’t use the socials, maybe that’s what I’m missing.
- chaps 1y agoDoesn't quite work that way unfortunately. Spokespeople don't really care when the "substantive facts are up against [them]". Fundamentally, they're not the target of the reporting, especially at big orgs/agencies. But just like HR -- their job is to protect the entity over all else. And they're quite good at it, despite what might initially come off as desperate.
- SonOfKyuss 1y agoIt definitely has that petty, defensive vibe similar to the current administration as well as Elon Musk companies. Narcissistic leadership seems to be the common characteristic
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tempodox 1y ago> “manufactured tension without basis in fact that’s clearly being pushed by dramatic, navel-gazing busybodies.” A spokesperson who said things like that would get fired immediately from any civilized company. Draw your own conclusions.
- rsynnott 1y agoI feel like it's kind of counterproductive; it comes across as "what you are saying is true, but we are not happy about, and also how very dare you say it", in a way that the more conventional "[blah] declined to comment", or a simple denial, does not. Like, it's hard to see how it's a _good_ media relations strategy.
- TrackerFF 1y agoMaybe Zuck’s “Just keep throwing money at it” strategy ain’t all that.
- baobabKoodaa 1y agoOr maybe - just hear me out - maybe he just hasn't thrown enough money at it (yet).
- jsheard 1y agoWhat do you mean, it worked so well with his Metaverse initiative. $70 billion spent for $10 billion in revenue to date, and quarterly losses trending even worse as time goes on, you just can't argue with these results.
- serial_dev 1y agoHonestly I’m kind of surprised they made 10B in revenue. There should be a web extension that adds a warning to every article or tweet that are by journalists trying to hype the metaverse. That stuff was so obviously going to fail.
- jsheard 1y ago> Honestly I’m kind of surprised they made 10B in revenue. Much of that is from the hardware, a very conservative estimate of (Quests sold by mid-2023) * (typical ~$300 MSRP) gets you to $6 billion revenue by itself. The problem is they're selling the hardware at a loss, and their attach rate is abysmal so that gamble isn't being offset by software sales. Most Quests ended up gathering dust.
- fcatalan 1y agoI have a Quest 3 and use it daily, but it's still a failure for Meta: I just click past their risible Horizons crap and use it exclusively for simracing, hooked to my PC. When I get another headset it will be a PC-VR dedicated one, because my use case is clearly not what they intend. Their Link app is an abysmal experience and updates tend to break things and just make it worse. A third party app, Virtual Desktop, is plain better in every aspect, but still hampered by the general poor UX.
- JCM9 1y agoThe problem with trying to just throw money at a problem to hire a bunch of “top” talent and “leading visionaries” is that those egos rarely play well together under the same roof. Culture, or the lack thereof, eats your unlimited budget for lunch. There are indeed problems that money can’t solve. That’s playing out painfully at Meta right now.
- startupsfail 1y agoIt's notable that one of the more successful AI products (GitHub Copilot) was not built with throwing the money at a problem or a large team. It was built by a small team, in a right place of a large company. And they were periodically re-assessing if the machine learning was "there yet". And the technology itself (codex) was created by a mix of Google Research / Academia (NIPS) and OpenAI/YC attempt to connect that research with products. It wasn't done on giant budgets and compensation was at the FANG levels or below.
- achatham 1y ago> “While TBD Labs is still relatively new, we believe it has the greatest compute-per-researcher in the industry, and that will only increase,” Meta said. Well, two ways to make that true!
- baobabKoodaa 1y ago> Avi Verma, a former OpenAI researcher, went through Meta’s onboarding process but never showed up for his first day, according to a person familiar with the matter. I don't get it. You voluntarily choose to leave a very highly paid job in favor of an extremely high paid job, and then you... just don't show up to work? What could possibly go so wrong between the time of signing the job contract and showing up to work on day 1?
- bpodgursky 1y agoCounteroffer, obviously
- jedberg 1y agoCounteroffer, or after the onboarding you realize that Meta is a huge corporation and that's just not for you. As someone who has worked at both the biggest corps and the smallest startups (and in between), I can see how going from OpenAI to Meta could hit you like a truck after you do onboarding.
- krackers 1y agoIn such cases, would the person still get the signing bonus? Or are these contracts always written with some contingency that the person has to remain for a period? Either way if a company is willing to throw money to hire you, you probably have enough leverage to get them to write a custom contract in your favor.
- mrcwinn 1y agoThey would not. And most of these flashy numbers are paid in options, which typically do not begin vesting for 1 year. That bit is negotiable depending on the stock plan, but in any event, certainly no value is given to the employee on day -1 or 0.
- jedberg 1y agoUsually the way it works is you get signing bonus with your first paycheck, and then you have to return a prorated amount if you leave before the first year. It's possible they negotiated something better, but unlikely. Amazon avoids this problem altogether by paying the signing bonus 1/52 with each bi-weekly paycheck for the first two years. They also do the proration on five workdays in a week when it's in their favor, but seven days in a week when it's in your favor, so they win either way.
- xnx 1y agoWhat's the argument for Facebook pursuing AI at all? Is it mainly because they have a lot of money they don't know what to do with?
- el_benhameen 1y agoMy sense is that they know that legacy FB is no longer a growth product, the regulatory environment has been hostile to their previous strategy of buying products in new markets (instagram, whatsapp), and they know they need to come up with _something_ to stay relevant and keep growing if and when growth from those products starts to wane. I guess the regulatory environment in the US has shifted a little, but populist politics even on the right aren’t super friendly to conglomeration, and the EU has only grown more hostile to it.
- bdangubic 1y agoyou should read their earnings report carefully - it will clear up the confusion about “FB is no longer a growth product” and things like that :)
- el_benhameen 1y agoSure, I know that their revenue is still mind boggling. But I also think it’s pretty clear that FB blue or whatever is no longer front of mind in the zeitgeist. Things are fine now but they’re trying to figure out how to keep that going.
- bdangubic 1y agoas does every other company, 24/7
- el_benhameen 1y agoI’m not sure what your point is here? The question was why Meta has an interest in developing an independent AI offering. I’m replying with one possible answer to that question, and your contention is … that the answer is wrong because other business think the same way?
- crazystar 1y agoMoney can't buy culture.
- chvid 1y agoMoney also can’t buy maturity it appears.
- mturmon 1y agoThe apparent shift in strategy/philosophy away from releasing open models seems noteworthy, and might have caused confusion/dissent.
- NitpickLawyer 1y agoThere's 0 chance they stop releasing open stuff. They are still way behind, so they have all the same incentives they had before to release models - brand recognition, devs engaged with their stack, slow down competition and so on. They will keep some models internal, or further train them on different datasets (internal?) for their own product use, but the "small" models (1-200ish B params) will be released in open weights for the foreseeable future.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45067961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45067961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45063326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45063326
- energy123 1y agoI hope they fail. Meta and Zuck can't be trusted after years of making the world a worse place to live.
- retnuhllort 1y agoYa lets just have china do this stuff instead. /s
- DougN7 1y agoAt this point could they do worse?
- rand593843 1y agothink in terms of openweight and what will we get benefit from. Go deepseek. Go llama. Nay grok.
- mathiaspoint 1y agoIt's a shame Grok quit publishing their weights. I really love huggingface's fully reproducible models.
- serial_dev 1y agoI hear you, but would you trust Sam / OpenAI or Elon / X? Same same same.
- lambdasquirrel 1y agoWe can hope that they both fail. :o)
- monch1962 1y agoRight now, DeepSeek feels like it comes from the most trustworthy source, which is not something I would've said a few months ago. In the short term I'll keep using OpenAI, Llama, Claude and Perplexity for what each does best. In the mid term, I'm looking for replacements for all 4
- Bengalilol 1y agoThe side question to this article, imho, is "when will the current bubble burst?"
- joduplessis 1y agoHow are people still on FB or Insta? I've been absent for a few years now, but whenever I read about FB it seems worse than ever.
- tempodox 1y agoAnd there’s your answer. If past scandals haven’t made the remaining users leave, then what will?
- dotcoma 1y agoI’d love to goof around in a dept. named “To Be Determined” for a year or three.