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What I find most interesting with this is that it shows they believe there is nothing unique at Meta related to AI. There is no resource, people and computing p

What I find most interesting with this is that it shows they believe there is nothing unique at Meta related to AI. There is no resource, people and computing power, that they can't get elsewhere for whatever they believe would be more interesting for them. I mention this because it feels analogous to military research, where people "dream" of how advanced the military is, how forward they are compared to public research... and yet, it seems to be a recurring myth they love to sustain. So the signal I get here is AI "labs" in BigTech have nothing worth waiting for around the corner, it's just more of the same and boring for people who stick there.

rtpg 1y ago
I don't think that's the read? Guy says he wants to work on something small. If you want to work on something big you probably want to be in a big corp to have the resources to do the big thing. Also absolutely unknown if the "new thing" is AI-related at all!
- utopiah 1y ago
  Well he left so whatever is coming next, AI related or not, "small" or not (small for them might be reaching just a million people, he wrote that he "lead the software layer that powers the entire AI industry." so his notion of scale is probably unlike mine, maybe yours too) is more exciting to him that whatever he could do next with all of Meta's resources. Edit: to be clear, I didn't mean to imply their next thing is AI related, solely that they obviously know more about AI at Meta than e.g. XR at Meta, just because that's their expertise.
  - hombre_fatal 1y ago
    Your assumption is a bad read because it only works if his set of life priorities contains nothing else but maximizing his impact in the world of AI. If he has just one other priority in that set (which could still include a robotic min/max of AI impact), then your assumption fails.
- radicalbyte 1y ago
  It reads to me as if he was the victim of office politics and decided to say "fuck it" instead of being transferred to something else within Meta.
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    > It reads to me as if he was the victim of office politics and decided to say "fuck it" instead of being transferred to something else within Meta. It looks like he'd already been transferred once (to Infra) and maybe didn't want to do it again.
  - sheepscreek 1y ago
    Pretty crazy/bizarre that a VP/Fellow engineer would have such little say in what they do at Meta. In my mind, companies would do everything possible to retain them. They are a special and rare breed.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  > If you want to work on something big you probably want to be in a big corp to have the resources to do the big thing. If anything, the reverse seems to be true, if you want to work on something big, you want to be in a small company, sufficiently funded, filled with great people, yet not "big", that's when "something big" seems to be more likely to happen. In contrast, as far as I can think, the bigger a company gets, the less likely they are to actually come up with "something big", it seems like most of the times you need (creative) constraints in order for the results to end up being actually innovative, otherwise you end up like IBM and Meta, throwing money on stuff and getting some results, but nothing really out of the ordinary considering what's happening elsewhere in their ecosystems.
jansan 1y ago
> I mention this because it feels analogous to military research, where people "dream" of how advanced the military is, how forward they are compared to public research... and yet, it seems to be a recurring myth they love to sustain. I don't think that you can read this from the blog post at all, but it gives me a chuckle to think how the quest for AGI at Meta may be "The Men Who Stare at Goats" all over again.
- utopiah 1y ago
  I'm totally speculating. I have no extra information there. It just makes me think of all the staff, technical staff, that left OpenAI recently. Altman was making grand claims about what was coming next. Well, we know what followed, namely I don't think any researcher who left knowing what was in the pipeline feel like they missed much in terms of access.
- utopiah 1y ago
  Just checked BTW and ... premise looks fun but the score is too low https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/men_who_stare_at_goats https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/men_who_stare_at_goats was it actually good as movie, not just the idea behind it?
  - jansan 1y ago
    It's more the idea behind it. Considering the great cast, the movie could have been much better.
    - vintermann 1y ago
      The non-fiction book behind it is probably better comparison than the film adaptation, if you think Meta are doing goat-staring (I don't think they're especially bad on this issue compared to their rivals).
reactordev 1y ago
Negative, what you shave taken away is it’s the people. He mentions standing up clusters. Small shops can’t afford clusters. Ignore the technical aspect of this article and read it for what it’s for. A thank you note to the people he has worked with on amazing projects. Research in a bubble of 1 isn’t very useful. Research in a small team with Meta Budget is extremely useful. With the right people.
anupj 1y ago
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nrjames 1y ago
If you can afford to support yourself, which I’m sure he can, there’s a serenity to working on small projects that are nothin the public eye. It may simply be that he craves some quiet time that enables him to focus on his family and himself.
ErroneousBosh 1y ago
> where people "dream" of how advanced the military is If you've ever worked on "advanced military grade" equipment, you'd know better. It tends to be what you'd euphemistically call "well-proven technology", built down to a price by the lowest bidder, by comparatively unskilled labour. The most shocking thing about the "captured" Russian drones is they use name-brand Raspberry Pis inside. I'm prepared to bet the American versions use whatever AliExpress crap is on special this week. The UK stuff definitely does.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  Isn't that exactly the point parent was trying to make? Maybe I misunderstood their comment, but it seems like you're repeating what they said.
  - ErroneousBosh 1y ago
    Post cup-of-tea (not NATO-spec, just black thanks, tea with just tea in it) I realise you're correct.
  - utopiah 1y ago
    You read it right, I think they agree. Maybe when I wrote "dream" in quotes the irony was lost.
- esseph 1y ago
  I mean, these things do exist. There are always tons of big and small tech projects floating around in the special operations community. Cutting-edge sets of hybrid night/thermal vision. Classified helicopters. Hand-built rifled with custom cartridges. Classified medical tech. Advanced fixed wing aircraft with unique capabilities. Advanced dive gear. So on. "Big Army" doesn't see that stuff for decades, if ever, and mostly never due to cost. And I'm not even getting into classified submarine and nuclear tech, fixed wing drones and aircraft flying at night out of known test facilities, etc. There's tons of actually advance tech out there in military circles.
  - 1y ago
oxfordmale 1y ago
I think you might be reading a bit too much into this. He’s been with Meta for 11 years and is likely in a very comfortable financial position, given the substantial stock options he’s received over that time. He also mentioned the arrival of a new child, and it’s well known that Meta's work-life balance isn’t always ideal. On top of that, Meta, like many major tech companies, has been shifting its focus toward LLM-based AI, moving away from more traditional PyTorch use cases. Considering all of this, it seems like a natural time for him to move on and pursue new, more exciting opportunities.
- ralusek 1y ago
  > toward LLM-based AI, moving away from more traditional PyTorch use cases Wait, are LLMs not built with PyTorch?
  - gordonhart 1y ago
    GP is likely saying that “building with AI” these days is mostly prompting pretrained models rather than training your own (using PyTorch).
    - SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
      Everyone is fine-tuning constantly though. Training an entire model in excess of a few billion parameters. It’s pretty much on nobody’s personal radar, you have a handful of well fundedgroups using pytorch to do that. The masses are still using pytorch, just on small training jobs. Building AI, and building with AI.
      - gordonhart 1y ago
        Fine-tuning is great for known, concrete use cases where you have the data in hand already, but how much of the industry does that actually cover? Managers have hated those use cases since the beginning of the deep learning era — huge upfront cost for data collection, high latency cycles for training and validation, slow reaction speed to new requirements and conditions.
HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
> What I find most interesting with this is that it shows they believe there is nothing unique at Meta related to AI Whether or not this is the case, I don't get this as being the reason for Sousmith leaving - it sounds as if he is just ready for a change. Still, it is noticeable that with many of the AI companies claiming that their version of "AGI" is just around the corner, developers and staff don't appear to be particularly excited about this (I assume they realize it is just hype, not some momentous advance around the corner), and leave to pursue different things, such as Mira Murati starting a fine-tuning company, Karpathy going back to education, others switching ship (typically from OpenAI to Anthropic), etc.
- moron4hire 1y ago
  "Ready for change" is just the polite way to say, "I can't stand it here anymore. I'd rather roll the dice on a new place because reversion-to-mean means it's probably going to be better than whatever this has become." There are a lot of things I don't like about my current job, but not enough for it to make sense to gamble on a new place. It's easier to push for change from my current position than to count on any new place being any better. But if it gets worse and I do leave, I'll definitely be telling the interviewer, "I was just ready for a change."
  - embedding-shape 1y ago
    > is just the polite way to say Can be*, that's not necessarily always true. I've quit jobs plenty of times without having any plan for the future or particular drama-reason for leaving, just "It's not as fun here anymore, despite this being a great place to work", I'm sure I'm not the only one who does so. What I've never done though, is leaving a place without being 100% honest exactly why I'm leaving. I won't say "I was just ready for change" if that wasn't the reason, I have no reason not to be honest about why I'm leaving.
    - ghaff 1y ago
      I've generally had 10+ year tenures other than a return to school that was basically always in my plan and dot-bomb (leaving a company I wasn't really a fit with anyway). But, yeah, I've always been ready to move on at about that ten year point which is actually fairly long by a lot of people's standards in the tech industry. I do disagree though that, unless there's some actionable change that would specifically benefit you like more money, my answer outside of private conversations with people I know well is going to be some variant of "time for a change." Anything else just invites arguments and conversations I don't want to have.
KaiserPro 1y ago
I don't think thats what is being said. Having friends who are at or near both FAIR and other AI parts of meta, reosurces are not the issue, anymore at least. (there had been a massive squeeze for the last two years though) But pytorch and FAIR use(d) a AWS based cluster. (however pytorch is used everywhere else inside facebook though. well not everywhere...) There is/are plenty of interesting things happening at big tech, and Meta specifically. If you like computer vision, then Meta is pretty much still the world leader. Much as it pains me to say it.
GuB-42 1y ago
About the military, from my limited experience, they are significantly behind the civilian state of the art, except for technology that has has few applications outside of the military, like stealth. In fact everything secret tends to be behind. Secrecy is a huge burden, and seriously limits all forms of collaboration. In addition, because military projects are often big and highly politicized you get all the inefficiencies that goes with that. Classification is also convenient for hiding screwups and corruption.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
  Post Cold War, most militaries shifted to COTS and less boutique development. Turns out, you only need to put resources in a few places to stay ahead (stealth, sensing and measuring, space, hypersonics, drones, etc). It's MUCH cheaper and quicker.
- dmix 1y ago
  I just assume all government software is poorly written by huge consulting companies, like the famous FBI one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File > a 318-page report [...] said the SAIC software was incomplete, inadequate and so poorly designed that it would be essentially unusable under real-world conditions. Even in rudimentary tests, the system did not comply with basic requirements I figured the reason Palantir was so successful was because it was a SV software company instead of a defense contractor dabbling in IT or specialized government consultancy.
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  The military doesn't have the luxury of things being unreliable. It puts a pressure on them that corporations don't necessarily have: they'd rather have a less-effective but proven system than a potentially-more-effective but riskier system (especially since each system they have comes with massive logistics support). Ironically, corporations can afford to take more risks of failure (financially and project-wise) than militaries because failure for them doesn't mean actual human death (and when it can, you see processes come in that look a lot more like military processes).
groundzeros2015 1y ago
Or he just takes for granted the resources he has.
oofbey 1y ago
Nothing unique? Totally disagree. Unlimited compute resources aren’t literally unique but there are only a small handful of places in the world that have that. Vast quantities of private data, especially text communications and images. Very few places have that. Coupled with a culture that puts zero privacy protections on that data. Even Google likes to think they’re doing the right thing, so I think that makes Meta unique.
- utopiah 1y ago
  Yes but that's my point, he's willing to give up on that and I believe that's more meaningful that the money (that other highlighted) specifically in a field where it does matter. It's not what you or I believe, it's what he believe. The fact that he's ready to give up on something unique means he professionally can't predict from what he knows internally anything interesting enough in a timeframe sufficient for him to want to stay.
  - mpaepper 1y ago
    He might already have enough money, so doesn't care if he gets the absolute best resources.
anthem2025 1y ago
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rtpg 1y ago

I don't think that's the read? Guy says he wants to work on something small. If you want to work on something big you probably want to be in a big corp to have the resources to do the big thing. Also absolutely unknown if the "new thing" is AI-related at all!

utopiah 1y ago
Well he left so whatever is coming next, AI related or not, "small" or not (small for them might be reaching just a million people, he wrote that he "lead the software layer that powers the entire AI industry." so his notion of scale is probably unlike mine, maybe yours too) is more exciting to him that whatever he could do next with all of Meta's resources. Edit: to be clear, I didn't mean to imply their next thing is AI related, solely that they obviously know more about AI at Meta than e.g. XR at Meta, just because that's their expertise.
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  Your assumption is a bad read because it only works if his set of life priorities contains nothing else but maximizing his impact in the world of AI. If he has just one other priority in that set (which could still include a robotic min/max of AI impact), then your assumption fails.
radicalbyte 1y ago
It reads to me as if he was the victim of office politics and decided to say "fuck it" instead of being transferred to something else within Meta.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  > It reads to me as if he was the victim of office politics and decided to say "fuck it" instead of being transferred to something else within Meta. It looks like he'd already been transferred once (to Infra) and maybe didn't want to do it again.
- sheepscreek 1y ago
  Pretty crazy/bizarre that a VP/Fellow engineer would have such little say in what they do at Meta. In my mind, companies would do everything possible to retain them. They are a special and rare breed.
embedding-shape 1y ago
> If you want to work on something big you probably want to be in a big corp to have the resources to do the big thing. If anything, the reverse seems to be true, if you want to work on something big, you want to be in a small company, sufficiently funded, filled with great people, yet not "big", that's when "something big" seems to be more likely to happen. In contrast, as far as I can think, the bigger a company gets, the less likely they are to actually come up with "something big", it seems like most of the times you need (creative) constraints in order for the results to end up being actually innovative, otherwise you end up like IBM and Meta, throwing money on stuff and getting some results, but nothing really out of the ordinary considering what's happening elsewhere in their ecosystems.

jansan 1y ago

> I mention this because it feels analogous to military research, where people "dream" of how advanced the military is, how forward they are compared to public research... and yet, it seems to be a recurring myth they love to sustain. I don't think that you can read this from the blog post at all, but it gives me a chuckle to think how the quest for AGI at Meta may be "The Men Who Stare at Goats" all over again.

utopiah 1y ago
I'm totally speculating. I have no extra information there. It just makes me think of all the staff, technical staff, that left OpenAI recently. Altman was making grand claims about what was coming next. Well, we know what followed, namely I don't think any researcher who left knowing what was in the pipeline feel like they missed much in terms of access.
utopiah 1y ago
Just checked BTW and ... premise looks fun but the score is too low https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/men_who_stare_at_goats https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/men_who_stare_at_goats was it actually good as movie, not just the idea behind it?
- jansan 1y ago
  It's more the idea behind it. Considering the great cast, the movie could have been much better.
  - vintermann 1y ago
    The non-fiction book behind it is probably better comparison than the film adaptation, if you think Meta are doing goat-staring (I don't think they're especially bad on this issue compared to their rivals).

reactordev 1y ago

Negative, what you shave taken away is it’s the people. He mentions standing up clusters. Small shops can’t afford clusters. Ignore the technical aspect of this article and read it for what it’s for. A thank you note to the people he has worked with on amazing projects. Research in a bubble of 1 isn’t very useful. Research in a small team with Meta Budget is extremely useful. With the right people.

anupj 1y ago

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nrjames 1y ago

If you can afford to support yourself, which I’m sure he can, there’s a serenity to working on small projects that are nothin the public eye. It may simply be that he craves some quiet time that enables him to focus on his family and himself.

ErroneousBosh 1y ago

> where people "dream" of how advanced the military is If you've ever worked on "advanced military grade" equipment, you'd know better. It tends to be what you'd euphemistically call "well-proven technology", built down to a price by the lowest bidder, by comparatively unskilled labour. The most shocking thing about the "captured" Russian drones is they use name-brand Raspberry Pis inside. I'm prepared to bet the American versions use whatever AliExpress crap is on special this week. The UK stuff definitely does.

embedding-shape 1y ago
Isn't that exactly the point parent was trying to make? Maybe I misunderstood their comment, but it seems like you're repeating what they said.
- ErroneousBosh 1y ago
  Post cup-of-tea (not NATO-spec, just black thanks, tea with just tea in it) I realise you're correct.
- utopiah 1y ago
  You read it right, I think they agree. Maybe when I wrote "dream" in quotes the irony was lost.
esseph 1y ago
I mean, these things do exist. There are always tons of big and small tech projects floating around in the special operations community. Cutting-edge sets of hybrid night/thermal vision. Classified helicopters. Hand-built rifled with custom cartridges. Classified medical tech. Advanced fixed wing aircraft with unique capabilities. Advanced dive gear. So on. "Big Army" doesn't see that stuff for decades, if ever, and mostly never due to cost. And I'm not even getting into classified submarine and nuclear tech, fixed wing drones and aircraft flying at night out of known test facilities, etc. There's tons of actually advance tech out there in military circles.
- 1y ago

oxfordmale 1y ago

I think you might be reading a bit too much into this. He’s been with Meta for 11 years and is likely in a very comfortable financial position, given the substantial stock options he’s received over that time. He also mentioned the arrival of a new child, and it’s well known that Meta's work-life balance isn’t always ideal. On top of that, Meta, like many major tech companies, has been shifting its focus toward LLM-based AI, moving away from more traditional PyTorch use cases. Considering all of this, it seems like a natural time for him to move on and pursue new, more exciting opportunities.

ralusek 1y ago
> toward LLM-based AI, moving away from more traditional PyTorch use cases Wait, are LLMs not built with PyTorch?
- gordonhart 1y ago
  GP is likely saying that “building with AI” these days is mostly prompting pretrained models rather than training your own (using PyTorch).
  - SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
    Everyone is fine-tuning constantly though. Training an entire model in excess of a few billion parameters. It’s pretty much on nobody’s personal radar, you have a handful of well fundedgroups using pytorch to do that. The masses are still using pytorch, just on small training jobs. Building AI, and building with AI.
    - gordonhart 1y ago
      Fine-tuning is great for known, concrete use cases where you have the data in hand already, but how much of the industry does that actually cover? Managers have hated those use cases since the beginning of the deep learning era — huge upfront cost for data collection, high latency cycles for training and validation, slow reaction speed to new requirements and conditions.

HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago

> What I find most interesting with this is that it shows they believe there is nothing unique at Meta related to AI Whether or not this is the case, I don't get this as being the reason for Sousmith leaving - it sounds as if he is just ready for a change. Still, it is noticeable that with many of the AI companies claiming that their version of "AGI" is just around the corner, developers and staff don't appear to be particularly excited about this (I assume they realize it is just hype, not some momentous advance around the corner), and leave to pursue different things, such as Mira Murati starting a fine-tuning company, Karpathy going back to education, others switching ship (typically from OpenAI to Anthropic), etc.

moron4hire 1y ago
"Ready for change" is just the polite way to say, "I can't stand it here anymore. I'd rather roll the dice on a new place because reversion-to-mean means it's probably going to be better than whatever this has become." There are a lot of things I don't like about my current job, but not enough for it to make sense to gamble on a new place. It's easier to push for change from my current position than to count on any new place being any better. But if it gets worse and I do leave, I'll definitely be telling the interviewer, "I was just ready for a change."
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  > is just the polite way to say Can be*, that's not necessarily always true. I've quit jobs plenty of times without having any plan for the future or particular drama-reason for leaving, just "It's not as fun here anymore, despite this being a great place to work", I'm sure I'm not the only one who does so. What I've never done though, is leaving a place without being 100% honest exactly why I'm leaving. I won't say "I was just ready for change" if that wasn't the reason, I have no reason not to be honest about why I'm leaving.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    I've generally had 10+ year tenures other than a return to school that was basically always in my plan and dot-bomb (leaving a company I wasn't really a fit with anyway). But, yeah, I've always been ready to move on at about that ten year point which is actually fairly long by a lot of people's standards in the tech industry. I do disagree though that, unless there's some actionable change that would specifically benefit you like more money, my answer outside of private conversations with people I know well is going to be some variant of "time for a change." Anything else just invites arguments and conversations I don't want to have.

KaiserPro 1y ago

I don't think thats what is being said. Having friends who are at or near both FAIR and other AI parts of meta, reosurces are not the issue, anymore at least. (there had been a massive squeeze for the last two years though) But pytorch and FAIR use(d) a AWS based cluster. (however pytorch is used everywhere else inside facebook though. well not everywhere...) There is/are plenty of interesting things happening at big tech, and Meta specifically. If you like computer vision, then Meta is pretty much still the world leader. Much as it pains me to say it.

GuB-42 1y ago

About the military, from my limited experience, they are significantly behind the civilian state of the art, except for technology that has has few applications outside of the military, like stealth. In fact everything secret tends to be behind. Secrecy is a huge burden, and seriously limits all forms of collaboration. In addition, because military projects are often big and highly politicized you get all the inefficiencies that goes with that. Classification is also convenient for hiding screwups and corruption.

FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
Post Cold War, most militaries shifted to COTS and less boutique development. Turns out, you only need to put resources in a few places to stay ahead (stealth, sensing and measuring, space, hypersonics, drones, etc). It's MUCH cheaper and quicker.
dmix 1y ago
I just assume all government software is poorly written by huge consulting companies, like the famous FBI one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File > a 318-page report [...] said the SAIC software was incomplete, inadequate and so poorly designed that it would be essentially unusable under real-world conditions. Even in rudimentary tests, the system did not comply with basic requirements I figured the reason Palantir was so successful was because it was a SV software company instead of a defense contractor dabbling in IT or specialized government consultancy.
shadowgovt 1y ago
The military doesn't have the luxury of things being unreliable. It puts a pressure on them that corporations don't necessarily have: they'd rather have a less-effective but proven system than a potentially-more-effective but riskier system (especially since each system they have comes with massive logistics support). Ironically, corporations can afford to take more risks of failure (financially and project-wise) than militaries because failure for them doesn't mean actual human death (and when it can, you see processes come in that look a lot more like military processes).

groundzeros2015 1y ago

Or he just takes for granted the resources he has.

oofbey 1y ago

Nothing unique? Totally disagree. Unlimited compute resources aren’t literally unique but there are only a small handful of places in the world that have that. Vast quantities of private data, especially text communications and images. Very few places have that. Coupled with a culture that puts zero privacy protections on that data. Even Google likes to think they’re doing the right thing, so I think that makes Meta unique.

utopiah 1y ago
Yes but that's my point, he's willing to give up on that and I believe that's more meaningful that the money (that other highlighted) specifically in a field where it does matter. It's not what you or I believe, it's what he believe. The fact that he's ready to give up on something unique means he professionally can't predict from what he knows internally anything interesting enough in a timeframe sufficient for him to want to stay.
- mpaepper 1y ago
  He might already have enough money, so doesn't care if he gets the absolute best resources.

anthem2025 1y ago

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