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Meta’s chaotic AI strategy
- madhacker 4mo agofunny when they're being dog food their product suddenly it's not cool, woe is me. u reap what u sow facebookers!
- kajman 4mo agoIt sounds like these people would otherwise be laid off if they were not parked in this department instead. I imagine they are quite unhappy, but getting paid 200k+ to do tasks that are usually gig work is hardly the most heart wrenching story in this tech market.
- nik282000 4mo agoPlenty of entry level positions looking for the experience these 'engineers' claim to have.
- loeg 4mo agoEh, maybe. It's not clear that some won't be returned to their old roles eventually. Personally, I think I'd prefer the layoff with severance over this kind of transfer.
- epgui 4mo agoI think everyone deserves to participate in meaningful and dignified work.
- Dylan16807 4mo agoThey can all get that if they want it! At a very nice but not as high wage.
- inopinatus 4mo agoThat is why I have no sympathy to spare for anyone who chose to work for Zuckerberg's social toilet.
- ComplexSystems 4mo agoYes, they certainly should have taken one of the many other jobs that are widely available right now.
- conception 4mo agoAfter Meta you can get a job at any normal org pretty easily. After Meta’s “AI department “ doubly so.
- coherentpony 4mo agoIf your comment is intended to convey sympathy on these workers, I think you're going to have a difficult time finding folks that align with you. If your comment is intended to remind folks that these workers can simply resign of their own free will to find meaningful and dignified work at a different employer, I think you're going to have an easy time finding folks that align with you.
- metaletadf 4mo ago[dead]
- yallpendantools 4mo agoFrom the article, it seems to me they've been "relegated" to coming up with Leetcode problems for AI. Which, let's face it, a bunch of them probably already did before for their SWE interview circus. I can see why they may feel under-employed/under-utilized but aside from the dystopian data gathering, I really find it hard to see what they are complaining about. The article even admits that their current tasks are easier than before. For the same paycheck! For 200K I will dredge through the most obscure IMO/Leetcode/ICPC problems and the palm of my hands will remain delicately smooth, in danger only of drying from the air conditioning. If there is no meaning and dignity in that I'm sure I'll have plenty leftover from that comp to find meaning and dignity elsewhere be it a side gig, charity work, or heck even just good times with my family and my social circle. A lot of people "just do a job" for much, much less and still live rich inner lives. Really, an orchestra of small violins playing while I read this one.
- ethbr1 4mo ago> From the article, it seems to me they've been "relegated" to coming up with Leetcode problems for AI. Which, let's face it, a bunch of them probably already did before for their SWE interview circus. It is a grim irony. 1. Human trains on leetcode to land AOGMX SWE job 2. Job forces them into new role writing leetcode to train AI 3. ... 4. AI eats human, inherits the earth
- bluedevil2k 4mo agoWoah…they’re paid WAY more than $200k for this.
- jqpabc123 4mo agoSounds like the Metaverse is moving right along according to plan.
- DropkickM16 4mo agoI wish these losers the worst. Working for zuck is its own reward.
- hsuduebc2 4mo agoIndeed. Zero sympathy for someone helping creating this man his slop machine. It's kinda funny that their main problem is that they don't have enough work. >“It's literally the gulag,” one of the employees claims. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week." >Across the company, more than 1,600 employees have signed a petition demanding that Meta stop a recently launched initiative to monitor US employees’ clicks and keystrokes to generate AI training data. >Some employees are being asked to finish two tasks per week. These involve generating complex software coding problems to help AI scientists better train and evaluate the performance of the latest frontier models. That's how I imagine the Gulag too of course.
- bombcar 4mo agoThe Gulag AIpeono is such a letdown compared to the original. At least they have the decency to not compare themselves to chattel slaves.
- SilverElfin 4mo agoI assume that’s a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago
- simianwords 4mo ago> Indeed. Zero sympathy for someone helping creating this man his slop machine I don't get these kind of accusations. They are working to build the AI model so that it is not slop anymore. > It's kinda funny that their main problem is that they don't have enough work. Why is this funny? Do people not want to have good work?
- kirubakaran 4mo ago
- altbdoor 4mo agohttps://archive.is/NndS8 https://archive.is/NndS8
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- bravetraveler 4mo agoBirds of a feather flock together. My management (not Meta) is choosing to bribe people to complete their 'mandated' training. I suppose I shouldn't be so torn up, could clearly be worse.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- fullshark 4mo agoSo they "draft" their own workers to create toy examples to train/evaluate LLAMA performance? Is this a temporary role/rotation? That seems goofy.
- Avicebron 4mo agoIs the child they hired for 250 million dollars still there?
- wmf 4mo agoWho do you think created the "gulag"?
- JKCalhoun 4mo agoIt feels like, when the history of Facebook is written, it will be clear that the company destroyed itself.
- ethbr1 4mo agoIt feels like Facebook will be written as a warning business case in allowing a single person to retain too much decision making control. Zuckerberg had 2.5 good ideas: Facebook (shared), prioritizing mobile early, and buying competing social platforms with high growth Everything else they've thrown big money at has been a dumpster fire.
- JKCalhoun 4mo agoWorst still, they destroyed social media, perhaps even contributed to destroying mobile (destroyed in the sense that, well, they became dumpster fires).
- ethbr1 4mo agoI'm not sure a growth-obsessed Facebook could have done anything other than destroy social media, in the same way that a growth-obsessed Google couldn't have done anything other than destroy the web. The only plausible alternate reality I can see would have been one where US anti-trust was vigorously enforced and kept Instagram and WhatsApp from being bought. But that would have required expansions of US anti-trust law to allow for more proactive deployment.
- rbanffy 4mo ago> But that would have required expansions of US anti-trust law to allow for more proactive deployment. A nice hint for legislators to come.
- antonvs 4mo agoThe problem is, what were their other options? They made a ridiculous amount of money on a social network. Where do you go from there? VR and AI were and are attempts to remain relevant, but not every company succeeds in doing that, and Facebook is particularly unsuited to it - you don’t just pivot from web dev to innovating in new fields. One of the common private equity playbooks recognizes this - they’ll often jettison anything resembling an R&D department from a new acquisition, and run the company as a cash cow. If its market dies, so be it. Leave the innovation to the startups who are focused on it. The problem with Facebook is that the founders have ambitions beyond their capabilities (apparently).
- HotGarbage 4mo agoStop glamorizing the grind and start glamorizing whatever this is.
- add-sub-mul-div 4mo agoWe just came out of a period in which solving CRUD apps and cat pictures at high scale chose winners of the whole economy. Now we're in a big mess with them thinking they're capable of doing much more difficult things.
- JSR_FDED 4mo ago“I joined this fine company to help accelerate the destruction of society, and now instead I’m expected to help it destroy society in a _different way_ by creating puzzles for AI. Now my morale is low. Poor me. “
- nik282000 4mo agoSign me up, I will gladly give up my blue collar hell to torture an AI to failure.
- iammrpayments 4mo agoThis alone should keep anyone away from using React.
- bluedevil2k 4mo agoReact, the web framework that’s now 100% independent of Facebook/Meta. Not sure anyone should listen to this suggestion.
- simianwords 4mo agoThis comment is funny because it has nothing to do with the post and the situation but just there to "boycott". The only issue here is that Zuck is giving some marginally bad work to employees and they don't have much work to do. And your response is... social activism to boycott React which is not even a part of Meta anymore?
- xnx 4mo ago> “It's literally the gulag,” one of the employees claims. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week." May I be blessed with a life so comfortable that I would be able to complain in such a way.
- SilverElfin 4mo agoYea isn’t that basically all “normal” work? You do tasks and have little ownership or fun. It’s also obviously not “literally” the gulag. Do these children know what a gulag is and what happens there? It’s quite offensive to equate their luxurious spoiled lives with people getting tortured and murdered over politics.
- nemomarx 4mo agoYou do usually get to interact with coworkers at some points if the day though? Are they isolating them during breaks or something weird here
- shakna 4mo agoThey're taking people who were skilled in product dev, employed to be product dev, and then assigning them data entry and telling them to suck it up or get leave. They're not isolated... But they're no longer doing what they were trained to do, what they were employed to do, or what they can eek some satisfaction out of. Sure, they're talking with explosive terms - but they're also social media employees. That goes with the territory.
- TheTaytay 4mo agoI was never sentenced to the Gulag, but based on what little I know, it's pretty different than one these people are experiencing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
- sumeno 4mo agoThe emphatic literally has been in use for over 300 years, it's time to let it go
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- JSR_FDED 4mo agoThey should rotate all employees between divisions. When done creating AI puzzles they can enjoy a stint in the Content Review team.
- nik282000 4mo agoThey should spend one day working at a McDonalds or as a last mile delivery driver. Ill bet playing with a chat bot looks a lot better after that.
- 6stringmerc 4mo ago[dead]
- brcmthrowaway 4mo agoTBT to one of the best comments about the Meta situation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47881678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47881678
- jcgrillo 4mo agoFor real, though. Why in the fuck do you still work at Facebook? Just quit.
- tjwebbnorfolk 4mo agoSame reason any of us work: money.
- qwerpy 4mo agoIf I had taken a Reddit/HN approved job instead of working at FAANGs for 20 years, I’d be looking at another 20 years of soul crushing work. Instead, I’m retired. Sure you have to roll your eyes at the corporate nonsense sometimes but I’m happy I made that trade-off.
- tjwebbnorfolk 4mo agoYea this idea that I should provide less for my family in order to pass some HN morality smell test is a luxury belief that those of us in the real world sneer at.
- jcgrillo 4mo agoNothing wrong with that in principle, I just can't imagine it. I've never worked at FAANGs, but I have at some pretty closely adjacent outfits (swarming with ex-FAANGs) and 3-4yr is just about the most I can stand before I have to quit (or get myself fired) for a while and reset. Whenever push comes to shove between the medieval politicking and just.. engineering fact, I just can't bring myself to throw what I know to be true and accurate under the wheels of petty nonsense. Surely there must be some middle ground, where companies can grow beyond O(100) people and not lose the plot entirely?
- qwerpy 4mo agoI don't know. I've always worked at the big companies and they all had slightly different variants of the same nonsense. New companies may begin with mission-driven people but once it grows beyond a certain point, enough money/power-driven people join that the company irrevocably changes. Seems inescapable. Given that, and the fact that being mission-driven doesn't pay for my kid's piano lessons as well as FAANG did, I held my nose and compartmentalized work into the working hours as best as I could. There's less corporate backbiting in the less glamorous parts of a FAANG (test/QA, internal tools, etc.) but the pay is just as good, so that's where I always gravitated.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- dabedee 4mo agoSoul-crushing work for a soul-crushing company. Hard to feel much sympathy.
- hsuduebc2 4mo agoThe "soul's crushing work" they are crying about is actually not enough of work or not enough interesting work. Not the sole volume. They sound like angry kids.
- simianwords 4mo ago> Hard to feel much sympathy. I think these comments are incurious and coming from more of an emotional and activist place than anything.
- dwb 4mo agoMaybe some of us direct our curiosity in more worthwhile directions, and have already figured out our worldview with regard to situations like this.
- newtonianrules 4mo ago> It's literally the gulag,” one of the employees claims. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week." Another employee describes some of the tasks—generating puzzles to test how reliably AI models from Meta and other companies can solve them—as easy compared to the software development work they had been doing previously. But the new projects feel menial, and “almost all” employees seem unhappy, they say. “Most people find the work soul-crushing,” the third employee says. Then quit your fucking jobs you entitled assholes. You’d be shocked how many people would gladly do that for $300k/year.
- fmajid 4mo agoSo basically they built an in-house version of Mercor, the sleazy company that hires desperate people on a freelancer basis to train LLMs so they can be replaced.
- sys_64738 4mo ago"We don't know what it is so it must be art."
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo agoAlternative to archive.is No CAPTCHA, no Javascript, no geo-blocking, no DDoS shenanigans cr=$(echo x|tr x '\r') nl=$(echo x|tr x '\n') curl https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-meta-employee-meeting-interrupt-ai/ \ |sed "1s/^/HTTP 1.0 200 OK$cr$nlContent-Security-Policy: default-src: 'none';$cr$nl$cr$nl/" > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm #links https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-meta-employee-meeting-interrupt-ai/ Text-only curl https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-meta-employee-meeting-interrupt-ai/ \ |egrep -o '(articleBody.*isBasedOn)|(>Someone.*shit.)' \ |sort \ |sed "1{s/>//; s/<\/span>//; s/<a.*Meta<\/a>/Meta/; s/<a.*Meta AI<\/a>/Meta AI/; s/"/\"/; s/'/'/;}; 2{s/articleBody\":\"//; s/\\\n/@@/g; s/\"\".*//; s/\",\".*//; s/\\\//; s/@\{3,5\}/@/g;}" \ |tr @ '\n' \ |fmt > 1.txt less 1.txt #links -dump https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-meta-employee-meeting-interrupt-ai/|less
- rbanffy 4mo agoEngineers are a fun group. Usually, when a job isn’t interesting, we carve it into something interesting. Be it that we “need” some kind of automation framework so that the work is “easier”, shifting the actual boring work to whatever tool they “need” and is more interesting to build. In this specific case, maybe a formal language to define the tests and their optimal solutions so that they can be “rendered” to multiple programming languages and the solutions can be measured against the definition automatically. As for Zuckerberg’s employees not deserving sympathy, I think we all found ourselves in abusive relationships with companies thanks to stock options and other sorts of handcuffs that aren’t easy to get rid of. I have twice quit jobs for moral divergence with company goals and I can tell you it’s not as easy as some people paint it. The first time was the hardest.