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It's kinda funny, Meta has long had some of the best in the field, but left them untapped. I really think if they just took a step back and stop being so metric
by godelski 1y ago
It's kinda funny, Meta has long had some of the best in the field, but left them untapped. I really think if they just took a step back and stop being so metric focused and let their people freely explore then they'd be winning the AI race. But with this new team, I feel like meta mostly hired the people who are really good at gaming the system. The people that care more about the money than the research.
A bit of this is true at every major lab. There's tons of untapped potential. But these organizations are very risk adverse. I mean why not continue with the strategy that got us to the point we're at in the first place. Labs used to hire researchers and give them a lot of free reign. But those times ended and AI progress also slowed down. Maybe if you want to get ahead you gotta stop thinking like everyone else
Well meta... you can "hold me hostage" for a lot cheaper than those guys. I'm sure this is true for hundreds of passionate ML researchers. I'd take a huge pay cut to have autonomy and resources. I know for a fact there's many working at Mets right now that would do the same. Do maybe if you're going to throw money at the problem, diversify a bit and look back at what made SV what it is today and what made AI take leaps forward
- bboygravity 1y agoAI progress has slowed down?! By what metric? Quite the statement for anybody who follows developments (without excluding xAI).
- bobxmax 1y agoI thought Alex Wang was a very curious choice. There are so many foundational AI labs with interesting CEOs... I get that Wang is remarkable in his own right, but he basically just built MTurk and timed the bubble. Doesn't really scream CEO of AGI to me.
- thereitgoes456 1y agoThe reportings at the time said that he was Mark’s 5th choice or similar. It is fairly clear he would prefer Ilya, Murati, Mark Chen, and perhaps others, but they said no, and Alex Wang was the first one to say yes.
- tsunamifury 1y agoWhy in the world would he want Murati? She has absolutely no technical chops and was not functionally CTO of OpenAI.
- shuckles 1y agoBecause she was CTO of OpenAI.
- CuriouslyC 1y agoPretty ironic when access to trade secrets and people skills is seen as more important in a technical field than technical competence.
- shuckles 1y agoFor the record, I doubt the CTO of OpenAI is the best person to fund if you're looking for trade secrets on training and deploying SOTA LLMs. They are two levels too far from reality to know anything useful.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago> was not functionally CTO of OpenAI. Why do you say that?
- tsunamifury 1y agoHer history was entirely non technical up until openAI.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoI think that's total BS, based on this article about her, https://fortune.com/2025/10/03/mira-murati-career-ai-thinking-machines-goldman-sachs-tesla-leap-openai/ https://fortune.com/2025/10/03/mira-murati-career-ai-thinkin... 1. She has 2 BAs, one in math and one in mechanical engineering. 2. She was an "Advanced Concepts Engineer at Zodiac Aerospace from 2012 to 2013". 3. She was a product manager at Tesla on the Model X 4. She was VP of product and engineering at Leap Motion. Going from that fact that she wasn't a deep learning researcher to "her history was entirely non technical up until Open AI" is plain false. And plus, the job of CTO is 90%+ people management, and she appears more than smart enough and experienced enough to evaluate technical decisions of her team.
- godelski 1y agoA lot of people also don't know that many of the well known papers are just variations on small time papers with a fuck ton more compute thrown at the problem. Probably the strongest feature that correlates to successful researcher is compute. Many have taken this to claim that the GPU poor can't contribute but that ignores so many other valid explanations... and we wonder why innovation has slowed... It's also weird because if compute was all you need then there's a much cheaper option than Zuck paid. But he's paying for fame.
- rhetocj23 1y agoFrankly this is the reason why Im not convinced the current movement of LLMs will yield anything close to the dream. The right people to deliver immense progress dont exist right now.
- godelski 1y ago> The right people to deliver immense progress dont exist right now. I wouldn't go this far. But I would say that we're not giving them a good shot. The people are always there, you just need to find them and enable them. How do you manage genius? You don’t. — Mervin Kelly
- BobbyTables2 1y agoIt’s funny. I learnt the hard way that communications/image/signal processing research basically doesn’t care about Computer Architecture at the nuts and bolts level of compiler optimization and implementation. When they encounter a problem whose normal solution requires excessive amounts of computation, they reduce complexity algorithmically using mathematical techniques, and quantify the effects. They don’t quibble about a 10x speed up, they reduce the “big O()” complexity. They could care less whether it was implemented in interpreted Python or hand-optimized assembly code. On one hand, I know there’s a lot of talent in AI today. But throwing hardware at the problem is the dumbest way forward. WiFI adapters would be wheeled luggage if we had the same mentality during their development.
- 1y ago
- tsunamifury 1y agoAlexandr Wang is not interesting and a few steps short of a fraud that Mark had to bail out because he was so co invested. Shareholders should be livid if they knew a single thing about what was going on.
- typpilol 1y agoTell me more
- tsunamifury 1y agoScale promised cutting-edge data pipelines and model-training infra but mostly sold outsourced labeling with a tech veneer. Great margins, weak moat — classic Valley overclaim, not outright fraud.
- didip 1y agoI always wonder about that. Those $100m Mathematicians... how can they have rooms to think under Meta's crushing IMPACT pressure?
- trhway 1y agoFor just 10% of those money a $100M mathematician can hire 10 $1M mathematicians or a whole math dept in some European university to do the work and the thinking for them and thus beat any pressure while resting and vesting on the remaining 90%.
- rhetocj23 1y ago"Maybe if you want to get ahead you gotta stop thinking like everyone else" Well for starters you need a leader who can rally the troops who "think(s) different" - something like a S Jobs. That person doesnt seem to exist in the industry right now.
- ProofHouse 1y agowinning the AI race? Meta? Oh that was a good one. Zuck is a follower not a leader. It is in his DNA
- hamasho 1y agoMy theory is that as more people compete, the top candidates become those who are best at gaming the system rather than actually being the best. Someone has probably studied this. My only evidence is job applications for GAFAM and Tinder tho.
- godelski 1y ago> Someone has probably studied this There's even a name for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- julienreszka 1y agoIt’s a false law tho. Collapses under scrutiny
- godelski 1y agoSorry, remind me; how many cobras are there in India?
- bandrami 1y agoThe Zoological Survey of India would like to know but hasn't figured out a good way to do a full census. If you have any ideas they would love to hear them. Naja naja has Least Concern conservation status, so there isn't much funding in doing a full count, but there are concerns as encroachment both reduces their livable habitat and puts them into more frequent contact with humans and livestock.
- oblio 1y agoThe comment was a joke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
- epwr 1y agoCould you elaborate or link something here? I think about this pretty frequently, so would love to read something!
- contrarian1234 1y ago> Labs used to hire researchers and give them a lot of free reign. I can't think of it ever really paying off. Bell Labs is the best example. Amazing research that was unrelated to the core business off the parent company. Microsoft Research is another great one. Lots of interesting research that .. got MS some nerd points? But has materialized into very very few actual products and revenue streams. Moving AI research doesn't help Meta build any motes or revenue streams. It just progresses our collective knowledge. On the "human progress" scale it's fantastic to put lots of smart people in a room and let them do their thing. But from a business perspective it seems to almost never pay off. Waiting on the irrational charity of businesses executive is probably not the best way to structure thing. I'd tell them to go become academics.. but all the academics I know are just busy herding their students and attending meetings
- whiplash451 1y agoIndeed. And it feels like there is this untold in-between where if you belong to an unknown applied AI team, you don’t have to deal with academia’s yak shaving, you don’t have to deal with Meta’s politics and you end up single handedly inventing TRMs.
- Gigachad 1y agoPerhaps these companies just end up with so much money that they can't possibly find ways to spend all of it rationally for purely product driven work and just end up funding projects with no clear business case.
- trenchpilgrim 1y agoOr they hire researchers specifically so a competitor or upstart can't hire them and put them to work on something that disrupts their cash cow.
- godelski 1y ago> I can't think of it ever really paying off Sure worked for Bell Labs Also it is what big tech was doing until LLMs hit the scene So I'm not sure what you mean by it never paying off. We were doing it right up till one of those things seemed to pay off and then hyper focused on it. I actually think this is a terrible thing we frequently do in tech. We find promise in a piece of tech, hyper focus on it. Specifically, hyper focus on how to monetizing it which ends up stunting the technology because it hasn't had time to mature and we're trying to monetize the alpha product instead of trying to get that thing to beta. > But from a business perspective it seems to almost never pay off. So this is actually what I'm trying to argue. It actually does pay off. It has paid off. Seriously, look again at Silicon Valley and how we got to where we are today. And look at how things changed in the last decade... Why is it that we like off the wall thinkers? That programmers used to be known as a bunch of nerds and weirdos. How many companies were started out of garages (Apple)? How many started as open source projects (Android)? Why did Google start giving work lifestyle perks and 20% time? So I don't know what you're talking about. It has frequently paid off. Does it always pay off? Of course not! It frequently fails! But that is pretty true for everything. Maybe the company stocks are doing great[0], but let's be honest, the products are not. Look at the last 20 years and compare it to the 20 years before that. The last 20 years has been much slower. Now maybe it is a coincidence, but the biggest innovation in the last 20 years has been in AI and from 2012 to 2021 there were a lot of nice free reign AI research jobs at these big tech companies where researchers got paid well, had a lot of autonomy in research, and had a lot of resources at their disposal. It really might be a coincidence, but a number of times things like this have happened in history and they tend to be fairly productive. So idk, you be the judge. Hard to conclude that this is definitely what creates success, but I find it hard to rule this out. > I'd tell them to go become academics.. but all the academics I know are just busy herding their students and attending meetings Same problem, different step of the ladder [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45555175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45555175
- zer0zzz 1y ago> I really think if they just took a step back and stop being so metric focused and let their people freely explore then they'd be win.. This is very true, and more than just in ai. I think if they weren’t so metric focused they probably wouldn’t have hit so much bad publicity and scandal too.
- RataNova 1y agoThe money chase is real. You can kind of tell who's in it for the comp package vs. who'd be doing the same work on a laptop in their garage if that's what it took