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Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company
- jqpabc123 10mo ago[dead]
- pinewurst 10mo agohttps://archive.is/jWJw0 https://archive.is/jWJw0
- andy99 10mo agoThat team, called TBD Lab (for “to be determined”), was placed in a siloed space next to Mr. Zuckerberg’s office at the center of Meta’s Silicon Valley headquarters, surrounded by glass panels and sequoia trees. Hooli XYZ? Silicon Valley was over 10 years ago and it seems to have aged pretty well. I wonder if this is going to be like “Yes Minister” that is close to 50 and still completely on point.
- paulbjensen 10mo agoHBO's Silicon Valley was on point - they did their homework on nailing some of the absurdities of the industry.
- atonse 10mo agoWhen I read that the dude was asked to take $2b from reality labs and spend it on AI, I was shocked… that they were still spending $2b on virtual reality nonsense in 2025. That said, from what I understand, X is working on using grok to improve the algorithm. Why can’t fb do the same and coexist?
- loeg 10mo agoBro they spend $4B on RL every quarter.
- leptons 10mo agoWell it's probably nowhere near the size of the money-pit that "AI" currently is in.
- dingnuts 10mo ago[dead]
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- nl 10mo agoYou realize that AI is driving huge advertising growth at Meta, right? > Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, reported strong second-quarter 2025 earnings, driven primarily by robust advertising revenue growth. Total revenue reached US$47.52 billion, up 22% from last year, with advertising accounting for $46.56 billion, an increase of 21%, surpassing Wall Street expectations. The growth was fuelled by an 11% rise in ad impressions across Meta’s Family of Apps and a 9% increase in the average ad price. Net income climbed 36% to $18.34 billion, marking ten consecutive quarters of profit outperformance. The Family of Apps segment generated $47.15 billion in revenue and $24.97 billion in operating income, while Reality Labs posted a $4.53 billion operating loss. > Much of this growth is credited to Meta’s AI advancements in its advertising offerings, such as smarter ad recommendations and campaign automation. Currently, over 4 million advertisers use the AI-powered Advantage+ campaigns, achieving a 22% improvement in returns. Building on this success, Meta plans to enable brands to fully create and target ads using AI by the end of 2026. (emphasis mine) https://www.campaignasia.com/article/metas-q2-ad-revenue-beats-expectations-as-zuckerberg-says-ai-superintelligence/503946 https://www.campaignasia.com/article/metas-q2-ad-revenue-bea...
- leptons 10mo agoYou realize that Zuck is trying to produce AGI, which is a money pit deeper than anything he's ever thrown money away on.
- apercu 10mo agoMeta prints money as an ad company but clearly resents being one. VR was a ~$100B+ attempt to buy pivot, and it’s generated ~single-digit billions in revenue. The tech worked maybe, but the vibe sucked, and the problem was that people don’t want to live or work there. Also, Meta leadership personalities are toxic to a lot of people. Now they’re doing the same thing with AI e.g., throw money at it, overpay new talent, and force an identity shift from the top. Longterm employees are still well paid, just not AI gold rush paid which is gunna create fractures. The irony is Meta already had what most AI companies don’t in distribution, data, and monetization. AI could have been integrated into revenue products instead of treated as a second escape from ads. You can’t typically buy your way out of your business model. Especially with a clear lack of vision. Yes, dood got lucky in a couple acquisitions, but so would you if you were throwing billions around.
- ribosometronome 10mo ago>clearly resents being one. Do they? It seems to me that they're just aware that social media and the internet is trendy and they need to be out there ready to control the next big thing if they want to put ads on it. Facebook has been dying for years. Instagram makes them more ad revenue per user than FB but it's not the most popular app of its class.
- lotsofpulp 10mo agoI imagine Whatsapp contains a lot of potential revenue.
- matthewdgreen 10mo agoA lot of potential revenue to be exploited by agentic AI, if you do things exactly right.
- apercu 10mo agoI may attribute this to a single individual in charge. I think he is very mad that he is an advertiser.
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- lawlessone 10mo ago>from what I understand, X is working on using grok to improve the algorithm. >Why can’t fb do the same and coexist? I'm sorry ,but what does this mean? Like are they prompting grok for suggestions on improvements? or having it write code? or something else?
- laweijfmvo 10mo agoif you think Meta RL loses money wait until OpenAI goes public
- qingcharles 10mo agoI still don't think Meta is wrong about VR. It's just still not the year for it. (I know the market has been saying that for 30 years)
- Sol- 10mo ago> TBD Lab’s researchers have come to view many Meta executives as interested only in improving the social media business That cannot have been a surprise to anyone joining.
- mullingitover 10mo agoMeta doesn’t really have a social media business, they have an ad business that’s driven by a massive dumping operation in social media.
- MangoToupe 10mo agoWhat is the difference between the two? What kind of social media business is there other than selling ads?
- mullingitover 10mo agoI know we're so defeated as consumers that we can hardly imagine it, but you could just...charge for the customers' access to social media network. Kinda like every other service that charges money. It would have the side effect of making the whole business less ghoulish and manipulative, since the operators wouldn't be incentivized to maximize eyeball hours. It's impossible to imagine this because government regulation is so completely corrupted that a decades-long anticompetitive dumping scheme is allowed to occur without the slightest pushback.
- jeromegv 10mo agoIt's basically Mastodon. The infrastructure is paid by its owner and often relies on donations from their users.
- zeroonetwothree 10mo agoIs Mastodon a business?
- moralestapia 10mo agoEven if both "sides" really wanted to get along, working with someone making 100x (if not 1,000x) more than you is poised to be a weird interaction. It must also be massively demoralizing, particularly if you're an engineer who has been there for 10+ years and has pushed features which directly bring in revenue, etc... Btw, >But Mr. Wang, who is developing the model, pushed back. He argued that the goal should be to catch up to rival A.I. models from OpenAI and Google before focusing on products, the people said. That would be a massive mistake. Wang is either a one-trick pony or someone who cares more about his other venture than Meta's, sad.
- haliskerbas 10mo agosame is true in many startups
- hkt 10mo agoTrue enough, but do you think the usual level of disparity is so vast that it ends up on the front page of international press outlets? I'm thinking the $100m pay offers etc
- ralph84 10mo agoHappens with professional sports teams all of the time. I guess the difference is with professional sports the criteria for receiving the monster pay packages is a bit more objective.
- zeroonetwothree 10mo agoThere was a similar dynamic when FB bought WhatsApp. Although I think people kind of forgot about it after a year or two.
- micromacrofoot 10mo agoHe's not wrong, you can't compete against blue sky R&D if you're focused on making something profitable. It's the innovators dilemma.
- zkmon 10mo agoMeta should replace Mr Z with a bit sane person. At this point, he is like a mad emperor.
- wslh 10mo agoWould it be a successful business? That is what matters in the market.
- bloppe 10mo agoZuck has unilateral majority voting power. This was probably a good thing during the financial crisis, but appears to be more of a liability these days.
- seizethecheese 10mo agoPerhaps, yet it’s a $1.6T company nonetheless.
- PaulHoule 10mo agoManagement can’t kill a company that dominates a two-sided market no matter how hard it tries —- this phenomena needs a catchy name, the ‘zombie dillemma’ isn’t quite good enough.
- Ragnarockooo 10mo agoZuck having unilateral majority voting power is a core reason why Facebook is a $1T+ company.
- yieldcrv 10mo agoAs someone that pivoted to agentic work and quit the job that tried to get the existing team to do agentic work: All companies are structuring like this, and some are more equipped to do it than others Basically the executive team realizes the corporate hierarchy is too rigid for the lowly engineers to surface any innovation or workflow adjustments above the AI anxiety riddled middle management and bandwagon chaser’s desperate plea for job security, and so the executive creates a team exempt from it operating in a new structure Most agentic work impacts organizations that are outside of the tree of that software/product team, and there is no trust in getting the workflow altered unless a team from upon high overwrites the targeted organization we are at that phase now, I expect this to accelerate as executives catch on through at least mid-summer 2026
- bgwalter 10mo agoSounds like DOGE, a resounding success!
- dingnuts 10mo agoHonestly the comment is so poorly written I can't figure out what the GP is trying to say. They think agent coding is going to replace all existing coding because the only reason manual coding is hanging on is because engineers can't convince middle management to let them use it? in my experience it's management forcing agent workflows on reluctant senior engineers who are afraid to speak up about how poor the tools are, as it would be career suicide to argue that agentic workflows are anything less than the inevitable future. Isn't there something wrong with that? I have extreme suspicion towards any tech or movement that is forced top down. How can we know the effectiveness of these tools if only praising voices are allowed? Why is the inevitability of this tech a foregone conclusion? The critical voices are self censoring
- yieldcrv 10mo agoyes, exactly like DOGE, even named a such within some orgs Lots of siloed processes tied together in a simple way neglected for decades solely because the political capital and will didn’t exist
- elzbardico 10mo agoMr Z. pays engineers well, that's what counts in my book, I like Mr. Z.
- Y-bar 10mo agoDoctors and chemists were paid handsomely by Marlboro Tobacco and Philip Morris. Didn’t make me like the C-suite at those companies any better.
- dialectical 10mo ago[flagged]
- game_the0ry 10mo agoWith the exception of instagram fb marketplace, meta just looks and feels like a chaotic, sloppy mess of a company. Between the incoherent and buggy garbage that is ads manager (something I have used for my own business) and zuck saying he laid off poor performers (effectively screwing those people for no reason), it all looks like poor business operations. So its no surprise they can't figure out AI even with all the ads profits and brain power. An adult needs to show up, put zuck back in a corner and right the ship.
- twodave 10mo ago> zuck saying he laid off poor performers (effectively screwing those people for no reason) Were they not actually performing poorly, then? Maybe I'm missing some context, but laying off poor performers is a good thing last I checked. It's identifying them that's difficult the further removed you are from the action (or lack thereof).
- BoorishBears 10mo agoYou're replying to someone (rightfully) pointing out that you can layoff poor performers without proclaiming it with one of the farthest reaching voices in the industry. Anyone who's worked in a large org knows there's absolutely zero chance that those layoffs don't touch a single bystander or special case.
- PaulHoule 10mo agoAny kind of stack ranking privileges people who are good in presentation of self and high in pathological narcissism.
- chihuahua 10mo agoFrom what I heard, Eric Lippert was one of the layoff victims. I find it unlikely that he was actually a poor performer, since he's an industry legend.
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- KaiserPro 10mo agoAs someone who's startup got bought out by facebook, many years ago, its not surprising to read. The politics surrounding zuck is wild. Cox left then came back, mainly because hes not actually that good, and has terrible judgement when it comes to features and how to shape effective teams (just throw people at it, features should be purely metric based, or a straight copy of competitors products. There is no cohesive vision of what a meta product should be. Just churn out microchanges until something sticks) Zuck also has pretty bad people instincts. He is surrounded by egomangics, and Boz is probably the sanest out of all of them. Its a shame he doesn't lead engineering that well (ie getting into fights with plebs in the comments about food and shuttle timings) He also is very keen on flashy new toys, and features, but has no instinct for making a product. He still thinks that incremental slightly broken features, but rapidly released is better than a product that works well, is integrated and has a simple well tested UI pathway for everything. Common UI language? Pah, thats for android/apple. I want that new shiny feature, I want it now. What do you mean its buggy? just pull people off that other project to fix it. No, the other one. Schrep also was an in insightful and good leader. Sheryl is a brilliant actor that helped shape the culture of the place. However there was always a tinge of poison, which was mostly kept in check until about 2021. She went full politician and started building her own brand, and generally left a massive mess. Zuck went full bro and decided that empathy made shit products and decided that he like the taste of engineer's tears. but back to TBD. The problem for them is that they have to work collaboratively with other teams in facebook to get the stuff the need. The problem is, the teams/orgs they are fighting against have survived by competing against others ruthlessly. TBD doesn't have the experience to fight the old timers, they also don't really have experience in making frontier models. They are also being swamped by non-ML engineers looking to ride the wave of empire building. this generates lots of alignment meetings and no progress.
- chis 10mo agoAll facts in this post. FB management always had such a shockingly different tone than other big tech companies. It felt like a bunch of friends who’d been there from the start and were in a bit over their heads with way too much confidence. I have a higher opinion of zuck than this though. He nailed a couple of really important big picture calls - mobile, ads, instagram - and built a really effective organization. The metaverse always felt like the beginning of the end to me though. The whole company kinda lived or died by Zuck’s judgement and that was where it just went off the rails, I guess boz was just whispering in his ear too much.
- dazamarquez 10mo agoIs Wang even able to achieve superintelligence? Is anyone? I'm unable to make sense of Wang's compensation package. What actual, practical skills does he bring to the table? Is this all a stunt to drive Meta's stock value?
- ActionHank 10mo agoWang is able to accurately gauge zuck’s intelligence.
- this_user 10mo agoThe way it sounds, Zuckerberg believes that they can, or at the very least has people around him telling him that they can. But Zuckerberg also though that the Metaverse would be thing. LeCun obviously thinks otherwise and believes that LLMs are a dead-end, and he might be right. The trouble with LLMs is that most people don't really understand how they work. They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart. But that may have created the illusion the true artificial intelligence is much closer than it really is in the minds of many people including Zuckerberg. And obviously, there now exists an entire industry that relies on that idea to raise further funding. As for Wang, he's not an AI researcher per se, he basically built a data sweatshop. But he apparently is a good manager who knows how to get projects done. Maybe the hope is that giving him as many resources as possible will allow him to work his magic and get their superintelligence project on track.
- setgree 10mo agoI'm as ready to hate on Meta as anyone but this article is a bit of a nothingburger. So there are disagreements about resource allocation among staff. That's normal and healthy. The CEO's job is to resolve those disagreements and it sounds like Zuck is doing it. The suggestion to train Meta's products on Instagram and Facebook data was perfectly reasonable from the POV of the needs of Cox's teams. You'd want your skip-level to advocate for you the same way. It was also fine for AW to push back. >. On Thursday, Mr. Wang plans to host his annual A.I. holiday party in San Francisco with Elad Gil, a start-up investor...It’s unclear if any top Meta executives were invited. Egads, they _might_ not get invited to a 28-year-old's holiday party? However will they recover??
- WhyOhWhyQ 10mo agoCan somebody explain to me how giving a 28 year old kid 250 million (or was it 1 billion) to run your AI lab is a good idea? Or is it actually a dumb idea? I think it is a dumb idea, but maybe somebody can make it make sense.
- rhines 10mo agoWell Wang used to live with Altman. What value that actually provides, I don't know. But it seems to be why he's worth this much.
- setgree 10mo agowell if the expected value of developing AGI is 100 quadrillion dollars -- 1000X bigger than the entire global economy -- and you think this person has a .01% chance of getting there in any given year, you should pay him 10 trillion dollars a year :)
- WhyOhWhyQ 10mo agoI think a surprisingly good AI will come into existence and one of the lessons will be that we greatly overvalue intelligence over basic distribution. Giving a single kid millions and billions is symbolic of the actual problem (the distribution one). Also, there's basically 0% chance this kid is one of the top 1000 most knowledgeable people in the world on this technology.
- storus 10mo agoSo FAIR has been effectively disbanded, LeCun is moving out, Wang is doing 996 and teams are hiring to fire to insulate people who need to vest their stock. How long until the company accumulates enough stress to rupture completely?
- magnitudes 10mo agoLecun did not run almost anything at FAIR, he was basically an IC. FAIR has grown, not shrunk.
- almostgotcaught 10mo agoAgree with the first part > he was basically an IC Disagree with this part - ICs have to write code. He literally did nothing except meetings and WP posts.
- octaane 10mo agoI feel like many of the comments are focused on the trees and not on the forest. The new head of Facebook AI is 28 years old? That's not OK, that's too young. Too inexperienced and not worldwise enough by a long shot. No shit they're having problems. Can you imagine being a facebook lifer, or one of the LLM pros they've bribed/hired over to the company, to be bossed around by someone with very little life experience? No shit it isn't going well.
- prng2021 10mo agoThat’s much older than when Zuckerberg founded Facebook. Also older than when Bill Gates founded Microsoft, Steve Jobs founded Apple, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. We’re talking about running a tech company, not being a politician. Clearly there’s no need to be 50+ and have a bunch of “life experiences” to be successful.
- hokumguru 10mo agoFounding a faang and growing it provides a very different set of life experiences than being a startup owner thrust into it.
- yujzgzc 10mo agoWhen these companies were founded, they had nowhere near the scale and resources in the hands of the current set of folks. Zuckerberg at 28 was riding a bike and this is a rocketship (pointed up or down, is not clear)
- contrast 10mo agoYou’re comparing being the founder and CEO, to being an employee hired to run a fraction of an organisation?
- futuraperdita 10mo ago> The new head of Facebook AI is 28 years old? That's not OK, that's too young. Too inexperienced and not worldwise enough by a long shot. This is ageist in the way I don't usually expect from the Valley. Plenty of entrepreneurs have built successful or innovative concepts in their 20s. It is OK to state that Wang is incompetent, but that has little to do with his age and more to do with his capability.
- user3939382 10mo agoI know more about AI than any of these people.