I really wonder how Zuckerberg will be looked back on. It's seemed obvious that he's an incredible CEO given the growth we saw with Facebook, but maybe he was just in the right place at the right time and had a cash cow that was difficult to mess up? Because when I look at the Metaverse and I look at this AI stuff... I dunno. Feels like throwing spaghetti at the wall.
He got on top because he has no ethics as evidenced by his actions from the start.
He stayed on top by having the foresight to buy up anyone he could that even smelled like a competitor and had the luxury of still being under the radar at that time.
I’m not sure either one makes him a great CEO but it did make him rich.
"He stayed on top by having the foresight to buy up anyone he could that even smelled like a competitor and had the luxury of still being under the radar at that time."
While it's easy to shit on such a strategy, that does in-fact make him a great CEO.
I think he’ll be looked back as one hit wonder, lacking any ethics to grow his company. He pumped a whole bunch of money in VR that didn’t seem to go anywhere and now AI seems like a fine direction to go in, copying the herd, with dangerous disregard to ethics.
>I think he’ll be looked back as one hit wonder, lacking any ethics to grow his company.
I can't take this seriously - it reeks of hindsight bias. Zuckerberg's "one hit" was thefacebook.com. After facebook.com went public he, seemingly immediately, decided to buy Instagram and go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobile would come crashing down. We can see, in hindsight, that it was a prescient move - one that many others missed, or were late to. (e.g. Google and Microsoft).
I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg. I understand he's not a likable guy, and neither are are his products. The only facebook product I use is arguably React - I've deactivated my facebook long ago, and I no longer have instagram. I don't even have Whatsapp. But if you look at the metrics they aren't deniable. Facebook figured out how to print money in social media while every other social media company struggles to have a quarter of the profitability. A lot of people point to "he just bought Instagram", without seriously interrogating the fact that many apps have been bought and squandered.
I'd say he's got lucky in the being evil game too, because ethically speaking whatever he does in social and AI is largely overshadowed by Elon Musk's X and Grok.
4. buying out or building feature parity with competitors that took FB from its IPO market share of $104 billion to today's market cap of $1.89 trillion.
Has he innovated successfully since the o.g. thefacebook? Not really. Metaverse fell flat on its face. Hardware efforts over two decades have gained no meaningful traction. AI is a mess.
Zuck didn’t get the people he wanted despite literally offering billions. He then attached MSL to his other failed GenAI org which was already an astounding failure of leadership from the now triple headed team (wang, nat and zuck) which resulted in people fighting for budget, scope and prestige.
Meanwhile you have 1000x comp inequality among ICs and in some cases people getting 10x higher offers than others just because they happened to finish interviews a week later.
These people couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery, good luck with AGI.
Yeah I mean I know these are experienced AI experts, but they could be faking or coasting. We better give a twentysomething Sr. Software Engineer veto power over these hires just to be sure./s
> The new team has discussed making Meta’s next A.I. model “closed,” which would be a major departure from the company’s longtime philosophy of “open sourcing” its models. A closed model keeps its underlying code secret, while an open-source A.I. model can be built upon by other developers.
Gotta assume this was the plan all along. And would have been plan A if they weren't caught flat footed by chatgpt
I don't think that's fair. It's R&D for a potential infinite money/effort hack. Unless you're in the camp that thinks only meat can be intelligent, depending on your perspective, it can be considered somewhere between useful research and critical research, including for the pursuit of things like "housing".
Maybe all the learnings of the specific architectures/implementations will be thrown out in the end, but that's not some rare occurrence with R&D/progression.
If you think their goal is to make chatbots, then maybe this won't make sense to you.
I follow him on LinkedIn: he works on the things that will come in 10 years, not on the products that Meta ships in 1-2 years. LeCunn is going to be there for some time.
Readit News
He stayed on top by having the foresight to buy up anyone he could that even smelled like a competitor and had the luxury of still being under the radar at that time.
I’m not sure either one makes him a great CEO but it did make him rich.
While it's easy to shit on such a strategy, that does in-fact make him a great CEO.
I can't take this seriously - it reeks of hindsight bias. Zuckerberg's "one hit" was thefacebook.com. After facebook.com went public he, seemingly immediately, decided to buy Instagram and go all in on mobile. At the time, people thought he had way too much power due to the stock structure and many people thought his bet on mobile would come crashing down. We can see, in hindsight, that it was a prescient move - one that many others missed, or were late to. (e.g. Google and Microsoft).
I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg. I understand he's not a likable guy, and neither are are his products. The only facebook product I use is arguably React - I've deactivated my facebook long ago, and I no longer have instagram. I don't even have Whatsapp. But if you look at the metrics they aren't deniable. Facebook figured out how to print money in social media while every other social media company struggles to have a quarter of the profitability. A lot of people point to "he just bought Instagram", without seriously interrogating the fact that many apps have been bought and squandered.
VR/AR Threads AI
Probably missing some more..
And all the copycat divisions that melted away once the "template" companies he was copying, were bought out.
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1. thefacebook
2. transition from desktop to mobile
3. building the machine that facebook became
4. buying out or building feature parity with competitors that took FB from its IPO market share of $104 billion to today's market cap of $1.89 trillion.
Has he innovated successfully since the o.g. thefacebook? Not really. Metaverse fell flat on its face. Hardware efforts over two decades have gained no meaningful traction. AI is a mess.
Some of what you're remembering was Sheryl Sandberg's doing.
but if you illegally slurp up data and make tons of money, you're the best at what?
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Zuck didn’t get the people he wanted despite literally offering billions. He then attached MSL to his other failed GenAI org which was already an astounding failure of leadership from the now triple headed team (wang, nat and zuck) which resulted in people fighting for budget, scope and prestige.
Meanwhile you have 1000x comp inequality among ICs and in some cases people getting 10x higher offers than others just because they happened to finish interviews a week later.
These people couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery, good luck with AGI.
Gotta assume this was the plan all along. And would have been plan A if they weren't caught flat footed by chatgpt
Maybe all the learnings of the specific architectures/implementations will be thrown out in the end, but that's not some rare occurrence with R&D/progression.
If you think their goal is to make chatbots, then maybe this won't make sense to you.
TBD (LLMs / "super-intelligence")
FAIR (LeCun - JEPA and other long-term research)
Productization
Infrastructure
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