These changes in direction (spending billions, freezing hiring) over just a few months show that these people are as clueless as to what's going to happen with AI, as everyone else. They just have the billions and therefore dictate where money goes, but that's it.
This is a structural problem with our economy, much larger than just Facebook. Due its large scale concentration, the allocation of capital in the economy as a whole has become far less efficient over the last 20 years.
CEO's were never credible to begin with, but what about Nobel laureate in Physics, Geoffrey Hinton, telling us to stop training radiologists? Nothing makes sense anymore.
The media was saying nfts are a reasonable investment and web3 is the future, so I am not sure if they have any remaining credibility.
We are at the awesome moment in history when the AI bubble is popping so I am looking forward to a lot of journalists eating their words (not that anybody is keeping track but they are wrong most of the time) and a lot of LLM companies going under and the domino crash of the stocks of Meta, OpenAI to AWS, Google and Microsoft to Softbank (the same guys giving money to Adam Neumann from WeWork).
That's one interpretation, but nobody really knows. It's also possible that they got a bunch of big egos in a room and decided they didn't need any more until they figured out how to organize things.
Yes, yes I do. How much practical experience does someone with billions of dollars have with the average person, the average employee, the average job, and the kind of skills and desires that normal people possess? How much does today's society and culture and technology resemble society even just 15 years ago? Being a billionaire allows them to put themselves into their own social and cultural bubble surrounded by sycophants.
At the current price of $107,586 per kilo of gold, that is 731,507 kilos of gold per year. A rail box car has a load limit of 92,500 kilos. Eight full box cars, or 16 half full box cars of gold currently represents the annual output of META.
The financials from the link to not specifically call out Depreciation Expense. But Operating Income should take into account Depreciation Expense.
The financials have a line below Net Income Line called "Reconciled depreciation" with about $16.7 billion. I do not know what that means (maybe this is how they get to the EBITDA metric) but maybe this is the metric you are looking for.
Zuckerberg either doesn't have the resolve for changing the business, or just keeps picking the wrong directions (depending on your biases).
First Facebook tried to pivot into mobile, pushed really hard for a short time and then flopped. Then Facebook tried really hard to make the Metaverse a thing, and for a while, but eventually Meta stopped finding it interesting and significantly reduced investment. Then AI was the big thing and Meta put a huge amount of money into it, chasing after other companies, with an arguably novel approach compared to the rest of big tech... but now seems to be backing out or at least messaging less commitment. Oh and I think there was some crypto in there too at one point?
I'm not saying that they should have stuck with any of these. The business may not have worked in each case, and that's fine, but spending billions on each one seems like a bad idea. Zuckerberg is great at chasing the next big thing, but seemingly bad at landing the next big thing. He either needs to chase them more tentatively, investing far less, or he needs to stick with them long enough to work out all the issues and build the growth over the long term.
For the past 15 years, mobile has been the main revenue source for Facebook. As big as Facebook is, they're at the mercy of the 2 competitors: Apple and Google. Apple has been very hostile to Facebook, because Facebook make a shitload of money off Apple's platform and they refused to pay a certain percentage to Apple - unlike Google who is paying 20B a year to access iOS users. Apple tried to cut Facebook off with ATT on iOS 14, but it didn't work.
Because of this, Zuckerberg has to be incredibly paranoid about controlling his company destiny, to stop relying on others' platforms to deliver ads. It would be catastrophic for Facebook to not be a main player for the next computing platform, and they're currently making a lot of money from their other businesses. Zuckerberg is ruthless and he is paranoid, he has total control of Facebook and he will use all the resources to control the next big thing. I think it comes down to this: Zuckerberg believes it's cheaper to be wrong than to miss out on the next platform, and Facebook can afford to be wrong (to a certain extend).
> For the past 15 years, mobile has been the main revenue source for Facebook. As big as Facebook is, they're at the mercy of the 2 competitors
Before mobile was this big, Facebook tried their own platform and bottled it. This was during the period that the market was still diverse, with Windows phones, Blackberries, etc.
They also tried to make mobile web a thing for a few years past when it was obvious that native apps were the way forward.
Don't forget gaming back in the day! Facebook games started taking off, then Facebook decided that the _only_ way you could get paid on the Facebook platform was with Facebook Credits, and to incentivize Facebook as the gaming platform of choice, Facebook would give out free Credits to players to spend on Facebook games. Of course, if your game was the one they chose to spend those Credits on, you wouldn't actually get paid, not with promotional credits, what, are you crazy?
No, I'm not still bitter from that era, why do you ask?
Cory Doctorow has a compelling theory that the megatech companies have to appear to be startups, or else their share price reverts to normal multiples. Hence the continuous string of increasingly over-hyped "game-changing technologies" they all (not just Meta) keep rolling out.
VR, blockchain and LLMs have their value, but it's a tiny fraction of the insane amounts of money being pumped into these bubbles. There will be tears before bedtime.
Indeed, for big valley tech companies it's crucial to have a new business developing in the wings which has plausible potential to be the "next big thing." They're desperate to keep their stock price from being evaluated solely on trailing twelve month revenue, so having a shiny, ephemeral hype-magnet to attract inflated growth expectations is essential.
So far, it appears the psychology of investors allows the new thing to fail to deliver big revenue and be tacitly dropped - as long as there's a new new thing to replace it as the aspirational vehicle. Like any good mark in a con game, tech investors want to believe.
> Cory Doctorow has a compelling theory that the megatech companies have to appear to be startups, or else their share price reverts to normal multiples.
This may well be true, but my point is more that Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg seem almost uniquely unable to turn the startups into great new businesses, when compared with the other big tech companies.
Amazon added cloud and prime, Microsoft added cloud, xbox, 365, Google added Chrome, Android, cloud, Youtube, consumer subscriptions, workspace, etc. Netflix added streaming and their own content, Apple added mobile, wearables, subscriptions.
Meta though, they've got an abandoned phone platform from years ago, a half-baked Metaverse that is being defunded, a small hardware business for the Quest, a pro VR headset that got defunded, a crypto business that got deprioritised, and an LLM that's expensive relative to open competitors and underperforms relative to closed competitors... which the tide appears to be turning on as the AI bubble reaches popping point.
Maybe he can work on making Facebook not be such a piece of shit. I feel like he got his one lucky break and should just give up on trying to make more money. He already has billions. Is he proud of Facebook as a product? Because as a user it feels sluggish, buggy, inconsistent, and just full of low quality trash. I would be embarrassed if I was him.
Metaverse was a flop maybe, but meta makes something like $1 billion a week from its mobile apps, it'd be crazy to say that is not successful.
The fact that it was so successful, and that zuck picked mobile to be the next big thing before many of his peers and against what managers in the company wanted to do is probably what has made him now overconfident that he can do it again
Call me classic and old school. But I call a company succuessfull if it actually does make more money than it spends. Everything else is just driving dept and economy but no actual success
>Then Facebook tried really hard to make the Metaverse a thing, and for a while, but eventually Meta stopped finding it interesting and significantly reduced investment.
That's a charitable description of a massive bonfire of cash and credibility for an end product that looks worse than a 1990s MMORPG and has fewer active users than a small town sports arena.
Compared to other recent bubbles (crypto, nfts, and ai), its practically quaint and lovable by comparison. About the only person it hurt is mark Zuckerberg and the marketing grifters that tried to start companies around it.
I think Meta's real talent is to make niche tech mainstream, and then as a result they get their ass kicked in that sector. They're getting pretty good at that.
It's important to analyze decisions within the context at the time, not the modern context.
When Facebook went into gaming, it was about the time they went public and they were in search of revenue. At the time, FB games were huge. It was the era of Farmville. Some thought that FB and Zynga would be the new Intel and MIcrosoft. This was also long before mobile gaming was really big so gaming wasn't an unreasonable bet.
Waht really killed FB Gaming was not having a mobile platform. They tried. But they failed. We could live in a very different world if FB partnered with Google (who had Android) but both saw each other as an existential threat.
After this, Zuckerberg paid $1 billion for Instagram. This was a 100x decision, much like Google buying Youtube.
But in the last 5-10 years the company has seemed directionless. FB itself has fallen out of favor. Tiktok came out of nowhere and has really eaten FB's lunch.
The Metaverse was the biggest L. Tends of billions of dollars got thrown at this before any product market fit was found. VR has always been a solution looking for a problem. Companies have focused on how it can benefit them but consumers just don't want headsets strapped to their heads. It's never grown beyond a niche and never shown signs that it would.
This was so disastrous that the company lost like 60%+ of its value and seemingly it's been abandoned now.
Meta also dabbled with cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Also abandoned.
Social media really seems to have settled into a means of following public figures. Individuals generally seem to interact with each other via group texts.
Meta has a massive corpus of posts, comments, interactions, etc to train AI. But what does Meta do with AI? Can they build a moat? It's never been clear to me what the end goal is.
> Meta has a massive corpus of posts, comments, interactions, etc to train AI
I question whether the corpus is of particularly high quality and therefore valuable source data to train on.
On the one hand: 20+ years of posts. In hundreds of languages (very useful to counteract the extreme English-centricity of most AI today).
On the other hand: 15+ years of those posts are clustered on a tiny number of topics, like politics and selling marketplace items. Not very useful unless you are building RagebaitAI I suppose. Reddit's data would seem to be far more valuable on that basis.
> Social media really seems to have settled into a means of following public figures. Individuals generally seem to interact with each other via group texts.
He, as many other billionaires, confused luck for skill. Just because they were at the right time in the right place to launch something, doesn't mean their other ideas are solid or make sense.
It almost seems as though the record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI might have been a little shortsighted.
A couple of years ago, I asked a financial investment person about AI as a trick question. She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure). I was waiting for her to put her foot in her mouth and buy into the hype.She skillfully navigated the question in a way that won my respect.
I personally believe that a lot of investment money is going to evaporate before the market resets. What we're calling AI will continue to have certain uses, but investors will realize that the moonshot being promised is undeliverable and a lot of jobs will disappear. This will hurt the wider industry, and the economy by extension.
I have an overwhelming feeling that what we're trying to do here is "Netflix over DialUp."
We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do, just like many VOD, smartphone and grocery delivery companies of the 90s did with the internet. The groundwork has been laid, and it's not too hard to see the shape of things to come.
This tech, however, is still far too immature for a lot of use cases. There's enough of it available that things feel like they ought to work, but we aren't quite there yet. It's not quite useless, there's a lot you can do with AI already, but a lot of use cases that are obvious not only in retrospect will only be possible once it matures.
Some people even figured it out in the 80's. Sears founded and ran Prodigy, a large BBS and eventually ISP. They were trying to set themselves up to become Amazon. Not only that, Prodigy's thing (for a while) was using advertising revenue to lower subscription prices.
Your "Netflix over dialup" analogy is more accessible to this readership, but Sears+Prodigy is my favorite example of trying to make the future happen too early. There are countless others.
> We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do
Are we though? Aside from a narrow set of tasks like translation, grammar, and tone-shifting, LLMs are a dead end. Code generation sucks. Agents suck. They still hallucinate. If you wouldn't trust its medical advice without review from an actual doctor, why would you trust its advice on anything else?
Also, the companies trying to "fix" issues with LLMs with more training data will just rediscover the "long-tail" problem... there is an infinite number of new things that need to be put into the dataset, and that's just going to reduce the quality of responses.
For example: the "there are three 'b's in blueberry" problem was caused by so much training data in response to "there are two r's in strawberry". it's a systemic issue. no amount of data will solve it because LLMs will -never- be sentient.
Finally, I'm convinced that any AI company promising they are on the path to General AI should be sued for fraud. LLMs are not it.
Or maybe not. Scaling AI will require an exponential increase in compute and processing power, and even the current LLM models take up a lot of resources. We are already at the limit of how small we can scale chips and Moore’s law is already dead.
So newer chips will not be exponentially better but will be more of incremental improvements, so unless the price of electricity comes down exponentially we might never see AGI at a price point that’s cheaper than hiring a human.
Most companies are already running AI models at a loss, scaling the models to be bigger(like GPT 4.5) only makes them more expensive to run.
The reason why internet, smartphones and computers have seen exponential growth from the 90s is due to underlying increase in computing power. I personally used a 50Mhz 486 in the 90s and now use a 8c/16t 5Ghz CPU. I highly doubt if we will see the same form of increase in the next 40 years
> The groundwork has been laid, and it's not too hard to see the shape of things to come.
The groundwork for VR has also been laid and it's not too hard to see the shape of things to come. Yet VR hasn't moved far beyond the previous hype cycle 10 years ago, because some problems are just really, really hard to solve.
As someone who was a customer of Netflix from the dialup to broadband world, I can tell you that this stuff happens much faster than you expect. With AI we're clearly in the "it really works, but there are kinks and scaling problems" of, say, streaming video in 2001 -- whereas I think you mean to indicate we're trying to do Netflix back in the 1980s where the tech for widespread broadband was just fundamentally not available.
> We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do
I think this is one of the major mistakes of this cycle. People assume that AI will scale and improve like many computing things before it, but there is already evidence scaling isn't working and people are putting a lot of faith in models (LLMs) structurally unsuited to the task.
Of course that doesn't mean that people won't keep exploiting the hype with hand-wavy claims.
I'm starting to agree with this viewpoint. As the technology seems to solidify to roughly what we can do now, the aspirations are going to have to get cut back until there's a couple more breakthroughs.
I'm not convinced that the immaturity of the tech is what's holding back the profits. The impact and adoption of the tech are through the roof. It has shaken the job market across sectors like I've never seen before. My thinking is that if the bubble bursts, it won't be because the technology failed to deliver functionally; it will be because the technology simply does not become as profitable to operate as everyone is betting right now.
What will it mean if the cutting edge models are open source, and being OpenAI effectively boils down to running those models in your data center? Your business model is suddenly not that different from any cloud service provider; you might as well be Digital Ocean.
> A couple of years ago, I asked a financial investment person about AI as a trick question. She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure)
If you had actually invested in AI pure players and Nvidia, the shovel seller, a couple years ago and were selling today, you would have made a pretty penny.
The hard thing with potential bubbles is not entirely avoiding them, it’s being there early enough and not being left at the end holding the bag.
Financial advisors usually work on wholistic plans not short term ones. It isn't about timing markets its about a steady hand that doesn't panic and makes sure you don't get caught with your pants down when you need cash.
Are you bearish on the shovel seller? Is now the time to sell out? I'm still +40% on nvda - quite late to the game but people still seem to be buying the shovels.
It boggles the mind that this kind of management is what it takes to create one of the most valuable companies in the world (and becoming one of the world's richest in the process).
Past a certain point, skill doesn't contribute to the magnitude of success and it becomes all luck. There are plenty of smart people on earth, but there can only be 1 founder of facebook.
Giving 1.5 million salary is nothing for these people.
It shouldn’t be mind boggling. They see revolutionary technology that has potential to change the world and is changing the world already. Making a gamble like that is worth it because losing is trivial compared to the upside of success.
You are where you are and not where they are because your mind is boggled by winning strategies that are designed to arrive at success through losing and dancing around the risk of losing.
Obviously mark is where he is also because of luck. But he’s not an idiot and clearly it’s not all luck.
When you start to think about who exactly determines what makes a valuable company, and if you believe in the buffalo herd theory, then it makes a little bit of sense.
It all makes much more sense when you start to realize that capitalism is a casino in which the already rich have a lot more chips to bet and meritocracy is a comforting lie.
The answer is fairly straightforward. It's fraud, and lots of it.
A honest businessman wouldn't put their company into a stock bubble like this. Zuckerberg runs his mouth and tells investors what they want to hear, even if it's unbacked.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this valuable because so much of the value is derived from ad-fraud that Facebook is both party to and knows about.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this big because it's growth relied extensively on crushing all competition through predatory pricing, illegal both within the US and internationally as "dumping".
Bear in mind that these are all bad as they're unsustainable. The AI bubble will burst
and seriously harm Meta. They would have to fall back on the social media products they've been filling up with AI slop. If it takes too long for the bubble to burst, if zuckerberg gets too much time to shit up Facebook, too much time for advertisers to wisen up to how many of their impressions are bots, they might collapse entirely.
The rest of Big Tech is not much better. Microsoft and Google's CEOs are fools who run their mouth. OpenAI's new "CEO of apps" is Facebook's pivot-to-video ghoul.
I'll differ from the siblingposters who compare it to the luck of the draw, essentially explaining this away as the excusable randomness of confusion rather than the insidious evil of stupidity; while the "it's fraud" perspective presumes a solid grasp of which things out there are not fraud besides those which are coercion, but that's not a subject I'm interested in having an opinion about.
Instead, think of whales for a sec. Think elephants - remember those? Think of Pando the tree, the largest organism alive. Then compare with one of the most valuable companies in the world. To a regular person's senses, the latter is a vaster and more complex entity than any tree or whale or elephant.
Gee, what makes it grow so big though? The power of human ambition?
And here's where I say, no, it needs to be this big, because at smaller scales it would be too dumb to exist.
To you and me it may all look like the fuckup of some Leadership or Management, a convenient concept beca corresponding to a mental image of a human or group of humans. That's some sort of default framing, such as can only be provided to boggle the mind; considering that they'll keep doing this and probably have for longer than I've been around. The entire Internet is laughing at Zuckerberg for not looking like their idea of "a person" but he's not the one with the impostor syndrome.
For ours are human minds, optimized to view things in term of person-terms and Dunbar-counts; even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped. But last time I checked my hand wasn't shaped anything like the invisible network of cause and effect that the metaphor represents; instead
I would posit that for an entity like Facebook, to perform an action that does not look completely ridiculous from the viewpoint of an individual observer, is the equivalent an anatomical impossibility. It did evolve after all from American college students
See also: "Beyond Power / Knowledge", Graeber 2006.
I think we will see the opposite. If we made no progress with LLMs we'd still have huge advancements and growth opportunities enhancing the workflows and tuning them to domain specific tasks.
I think you could both be right at the same time. We will see a large number of VC funded AI startup companies and feature clones vanish soon, and we will also see current or future LLMs continue to make inroads into existing business processes and increase productivity and profitability.
Personally, I think what we will witness is consolidation and winner-takes-all scenarios. There just isn't a sustainable market for 15 VS Code forks all copying each other along with all other non-VS Code IDEs cloning those features in as fast as possible. There isn't space for Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, Opencode all doing basically the same thing with their special branding when the thing they're actually selling is a commoditized LLM API. Hell, there _probably_ isn't space for OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Mistral and DeepSeek and Alibaba and whoever else, all fundamentally creating and doing the same thing globally. Every single software vendor can't innovate and integrate AI features faster than AI companies themselves can build better tooling to automate that company's tools for them. It reeks of the 90's when there were a dozen totally viable but roughly equal search engines. One vendor will eventually pull ahead or have a slightly longer runway and claim the whole thing.
I agree with this, but how will these companies make money? Short of a breakthrough, the consumer isn't ready to pay for it, and even if they were, open source models just catch up.
My feelings are that most of the "huge advancements" are not going to benefit the people selling AI.
I'd put my money on those who sell the pickaxes, and the companies who have a way to use this new tech to deliver more value.
I don't see how this works, as the costs of running inference is so much higher than the revenues earned by the frontier labs. Anthropic and OpenAI don't continue to exist long-term in a world where GPT-5 and Claude 4.1 cost-quality models are SOTA.
>It almost seems as though the record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI might have been a little shortsighted.
Everything zuck has done since the "dawn of AI" has been to intentionally subvert and sabotage existing AI players, because otherwise Meta would be too far behind. In the same way that AI threatens Search, we are seeing emergently that AI is also threatening social networks -- you can get companionship, advice, information, emotional validation, etc. directly from an AI. People are forming serious relationships with these things in as much a real way as you would with anyone else on Facebook or Instagram. Not to mention, how long before most of the "people" on those platforms are AI themselves?
I believe exactly 0 percent of the decision to make Llama open-source and free was done altruistically as much as it was simply to try and push the margins of Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. downward. Indeed, I feel like even the fearmongering of this article is also strategically intended to devalue AI incumbents. AI is very much an existential threat to Meta.
Is AI currently fulfilling the immense hype around it? In my opinion, maybe not, but the potential value is obvious. Much more obvious than, for example, NFTs and crypto just a few years ago.
Or, this knowingly could not be sustained. So they scooped up all the talent they wanted before anybody could react, all at once, with big carrots. And then hit pause button to let all that new talent figure out the next step.
The line was to buy Amazon as it was undervalued a la IBM or Apple based on its cloud computing capabilities relative to the future (projected) needs of AI.
As someone using LLMs daily, it's always interesting to read something about AI being a bubble or just hype. I think you're going to miss the train, I am personally convinced this is the technology of our lifetime.
You are welcome to share how AI has transformed a revenue generating role. Personally, I have never seen a durable example of it, despite my excitement with the tech.
In my world, AI has been little more than a productivity boost in very narrowly scoped areas. For instance, generating an initial data mapping of source data against a manually built schema for the individual to then review and clean up. In this case, AI is helping the individual get results faster, but they're still "doing" data migrations themselves. AI is simply a tool in their toolbox.
I'll say it again since I've said it a million times, it can be useful and a bubble. The logic of investors before the last market crash was something like "houses are useful, so no amount of hype around the housing market could be a bubble"
How are you using it? The execs and investors believe the road to profit is by getting rid of your role in the process. Do you think that’d be possible?
If you really think this, `baby` is an apt name! Internet, Smartphones, and social media will all be more impactful than LLMs could possibly be... but hey, if you're like 18 y/o then sure, maybe LLMs is the biggest.
Also disagree with missing the train, these tools are so easy to use a monkey (not even a smart one like an ape, more like a Howler) can effectively use them. Add in that the tooling landscape is changing rapidly; ex: everyone loved Cursor, but now it's fallen behind and everyone loves Claude Code. There's some sense in waiting for this to calm down and become more open. (Why are users so OK with vendor lock-in??? It's bothersome)
The hard parts are running LLMs locally (what quant do I use? K/V quant? Tradeoffs? Llama.cpp or ollama or vllm? What model? How much context can I cram in my vram? What if I do CPU inference? Fine tuning? etc..) and creating/training them.
> It almost seems as though the record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI might have been a little shortsighted.
If AI is going to be integral to society going forward, how is it shortsighted?
> She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure).
So you prefer a 2x gain rather than 10X gain from the likes of Nvidia or Broadcom? You should check how much better META has done compared to MSFT the past few years. Also a "financial investment person"? The anecdote feels made up.
> She skillfully navigated the question in a way that won my respect.
She won your respect by giving you advice that led to far less returns than you could have gotten otherwise?
> I personally believe that a lot of investment money is going to evaporate before the market resets.
But you believe investing in MSFT was a better AI play than going with the "hype" even when objective facts show otherwise. Why should any care what you think about AI, investments and the market when you clearly know nothing about it?
I really do wonder if any of those rock star $100m++ hires managed to get a 9-figure sign-on bonus, or if the majority have year(s) long performance clauses.
Imagine being paid generational wealth, and then the house of cards comes crashing down a couple of months later.
I'm sure everyone is doing just fine financially, but I think it's common knowledge that these kind of comp packages are usually a mix of equity and cash earned out over multiple years with bonuses contingent on milestones, etc. The eye-popping top-line number is insane but it's also unlikely to be fully realized.
Supposedly, all people that join meta are on the same contract. They also supposedly all have the same RSU vesting schedules as well.
That means that these "rockstars" will get a big sign on bonus (but its payable back inside 12 months if they leave) then ~$2m every 3 months in shares
It's not even in RSUs. No SWEs/researchers are getting $100M+ RSU packages. Zuck said the numbers in the media were not accurate.
If you still think they are, do you have any proof? any sources?
All of these media articles have zero sources and zero proof. They just ran with it because they heard Sam Altman talk about it and it generates clicks.
I have never heard of anyone getting a sign on bonus that was unconditional. When I have had signing bonuses they were owed back prorated if my employment ended for any reason in the first year.
Are most people that money hungry? I wouldn't expect someone like Zuckerberg to understand, but if I ever got to more than a couple million dollars, I'm never doing anything else for the sake of making more money again.
I was a startup where someone got an unconditional signing bonus. It wasn't deliberate, they just kept it simple because it was a startup and they thought they trusted the guy because he was an old friend of the CEO.
The guy immediately took leave to get some medical procedure done with a recovery time, then when he returned he quit for another job. He barely worked, collected a big signing bonus, used the company's insurance plan for a very expensive procedure, and then disappeared.
From that point forward, signing bonuses had the standard conditions attached.
Is it imminent? Reading the article, the only thing that's actually changed is that the CEO has stopped hand-picking AI hires and has placed that responsibility on Alexandr Wang instead. The rest is just fluff to turn it into an article. The tech sector being down is happening in concert with the non-tech sector sliding too.
If we're actually headed for a "house of cards" AI crash in a couple months, that actually makes their arrangement with Meta likely more valuable, not less. Meta is a much more diversified company than the AI companies that these folks were poached from. Meta stock will likely be more resilient than AI-company stock in the event of an AI bubble bursting. Moreover, they were offered so much of it that even if it were to crash 50%, they'd still be sitting on $50M-$100M+ of stock.
I am very certain that AI will slowly kill the rest of "social" in the social web outside of closed circles. And they made their only closed circle app (WhatsApp) unusable and ad invested. Imo either way to are still in the process of slowly killing themselves
I'm somewhere in the middle on this, with regards to the ROI... this isn't the kind of thing where you see immediate reflection on quarterly returns... it's the kind of thing where if you don't hedge some bets, you're likely to completely die out from a generational shift.
Facebook's product is eyeballs... they're being usurped on all sides between TikTok, X and BlueSky in terms of daily/regular users... They're competing with Google, X, MS, OpenAI and others in terms of AI interactions. While there's a lot of value in being the option for communication between friends and family, and the groups on FB don't have a great alternative, the entire market can shift greatly depending on AI research.
I look at some of the (I think it was OpenAI) in generated terrain/interaction and can't help but think that's a natural coupling to FB/Meta's investments in their VR headsets. They could potentially completely lose on a platform they largely pioneered. They could wind up like Blackberry if they aren't ready to adapt.
By contrast, Apple's lack of appropriate AI spending should be very concerning to any investors... Google's assistant is already quite a bit better than Siri and the gap is only getting wider. Apple is woefully under-invested, and the accountants running the ship don't even seem to realize it.
I think apple is fine. When AI works without 1 in 5 hallucinations then it can be added to their product. Showing up late with features that exists elsewhere but are polished in apple presentation is the way.
Have you used Siri recently ? It's actually amazing how it can be crap at tasks consistently considering underlying tech. 1 in 5 hallucinations would be a welcome improvement.
Using ChatGPT voice mode and Siri makes Siri feel like a legacy product.
In practice though their platform is closed to any other assistant than theirs, so they have to come up with a competent service (basically Ben Thomson's "strategy tax" playing in full)
That question will be moot the day Apple allows other companies to ingest everything's happening on device and operate the whole device in reaction to user's requests, and some company actually does a decent job at it.
Today Google is doing a decent job and Apple isn't.
They did it to themselves. Facebook is not the same site I originally joined. People were allowed to people. Now I have to worry about the AI banning me.
I deleted my Facebook account 10 years ago, and I’ve been off Instagram for half a year. I recently tried to create a new Facebook account so that could create a Meta Business account to use the WhatsApp API for my business. Insta-ban with no explanation. No recourse.
> They're competing with Google, X, MS, OpenAI and others in terms of AI interactions
Am I the only one that find the attempt to jam AI interactions into Meta's products useless and that it only detracts from the product? Like there'll be posts with comedy things and then there are suggested 'Ask Meta AI' about things the comedy mentions with earnest questions - it's not only irrelevant but I guess it's kind of funny how random and stupid the questions are. The 'Comment summaries' are counter-productive because I want to have a chuckle reading what people posted, I literally don't care to have it summarised because I can just skim over a few in seconds - literally useless. It's the same thing with Gemini summaries in YouTube - I feel it actually detracts from the experience of watching the videos so I actively avoid them.
On what Apple is doing - I mean, literally nothing Apple Intelligence offers excites me, but at the same time nothing anybody else is doing with LLMs really does either... And I'm highly technical, general people are not actually that interested apart from students getting LLMs to write their homework for them...
It's all well and good to be excited about LLMs but plenty of these companies' customers just... aren't... If anything, Apple is playing the smart move here - let other spend (and lose) billions training the models and not making any real ROI, and they can license the best ones for whatever turns out to actually have commercial appeal when the dust settles and the models are totally commodified...
I was thinking about this.. if you look at (I think OpenAI) the scene generation and interaction demos, it's a pretty natural fit for their VR efforts. Not that I'm sold on VR social networks, but definitely room for VR/AR enhancements... and even then AI has a lot of opportunities, beyond just LLM integration into FB/Groups.
Aside, groups is about the only halfway decent feature in FB, and they seem to be trying to make it worse. The old chat integration was great, then they remove it, and now you get these invasive messenger rooms instead.
How long did it take Space-X to catch a rocket with giant chopsticks?
It's more than okay for a company with other sources of revenue to do research towards future advancement... it's not risking the downfall of the company.
Deja vu, Zuck has already scaled down their AI research team a few years as I remember, because they didn't deliver any tangible results. Meta culture likes improving metrics like retention/engagement, and promotes managers if they show some improvement in their metrics. No one cares about long shots generally, and a research team is always the long shot.
Facebook - 12 billion!?
TikTok - 1.59 billion
X - 611 million
Bsky - 38 million
That's according to DemandSage ... I'm not sure I can trust the numbers, FB jumped up from around 3b last year, which again I don't trust. 12b is more than the global population, so it's got to be all bots. And even the 3b number is hard to believe (at close to half the global population), no idea how much of the population of earth has any internet access.
From Grok:
Facebook - 3.1 billion
TikTok - 1.5-2 billion
X - 650 million
Bsky - 4.1 million
Looks like I'm definitely in a bubble... I tend to interact 1:1 as much on X as Facebook, which is mostly friends/family and limited discussions in groups. A lot of what I see on feeds is copy/pasta from tiktok though.
That said, I have a couple friends who are die hard on Telegram.
I'm far from being a fan of the company, but I think this article is substantially overstating the extent of the "freeze" just to drum up news. It sounds like what's actually happening is a re-org [1] - a consolidation of all the AI groups under the new Superintelligence umbrella, similar to Google merging Brain and DeepMind, with an emphasis on finding the existing AI staff roles within the new org.
From Meta itself: “All that’s happening here is some basic organisational planning: creating a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises.”
Readit News
Boy am I tired of that one. We desperately need more smaller companies and actual competition but nobody seems to even be trying
Paraphrasing: Capital will use / is using AI to further bludgeon Labor.
We are at the awesome moment in history when the AI bubble is popping so I am looking forward to a lot of journalists eating their words (not that anybody is keeping track but they are wrong most of the time) and a lot of LLM companies going under and the domino crash of the stocks of Meta, OpenAI to AWS, Google and Microsoft to Softbank (the same guys giving money to Adam Neumann from WeWork).
I do however think that this is a business choice that at the very least was likely extensively discussed.
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https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META/financials/
Their cash position has gone from $44bn to $12bn in the first six months of the year and are now getting other people to pay for datacenters https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-taps-pimco-blue-owl-29...
The financials have a line below Net Income Line called "Reconciled depreciation" with about $16.7 billion. I do not know what that means (maybe this is how they get to the EBITDA metric) but maybe this is the metric you are looking for.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GxIeCe7bkAEwXju?format=jpg&name=...
First Facebook tried to pivot into mobile, pushed really hard for a short time and then flopped. Then Facebook tried really hard to make the Metaverse a thing, and for a while, but eventually Meta stopped finding it interesting and significantly reduced investment. Then AI was the big thing and Meta put a huge amount of money into it, chasing after other companies, with an arguably novel approach compared to the rest of big tech... but now seems to be backing out or at least messaging less commitment. Oh and I think there was some crypto in there too at one point?
I'm not saying that they should have stuck with any of these. The business may not have worked in each case, and that's fine, but spending billions on each one seems like a bad idea. Zuckerberg is great at chasing the next big thing, but seemingly bad at landing the next big thing. He either needs to chase them more tentatively, investing far less, or he needs to stick with them long enough to work out all the issues and build the growth over the long term.
Because of this, Zuckerberg has to be incredibly paranoid about controlling his company destiny, to stop relying on others' platforms to deliver ads. It would be catastrophic for Facebook to not be a main player for the next computing platform, and they're currently making a lot of money from their other businesses. Zuckerberg is ruthless and he is paranoid, he has total control of Facebook and he will use all the resources to control the next big thing. I think it comes down to this: Zuckerberg believes it's cheaper to be wrong than to miss out on the next platform, and Facebook can afford to be wrong (to a certain extend).
Before mobile was this big, Facebook tried their own platform and bottled it. This was during the period that the market was still diverse, with Windows phones, Blackberries, etc.
They also tried to make mobile web a thing for a few years past when it was obvious that native apps were the way forward.
No, I'm not still bitter from that era, why do you ask?
VR, blockchain and LLMs have their value, but it's a tiny fraction of the insane amounts of money being pumped into these bubbles. There will be tears before bedtime.
So far, it appears the psychology of investors allows the new thing to fail to deliver big revenue and be tacitly dropped - as long as there's a new new thing to replace it as the aspirational vehicle. Like any good mark in a con game, tech investors want to believe.
Meta's P/E is about the same as S&P 500.
Amazon added cloud and prime, Microsoft added cloud, xbox, 365, Google added Chrome, Android, cloud, Youtube, consumer subscriptions, workspace, etc. Netflix added streaming and their own content, Apple added mobile, wearables, subscriptions.
Meta though, they've got an abandoned phone platform from years ago, a half-baked Metaverse that is being defunded, a small hardware business for the Quest, a pro VR headset that got defunded, a crypto business that got deprioritised, and an LLM that's expensive relative to open competitors and underperforms relative to closed competitors... which the tide appears to be turning on as the AI bubble reaches popping point.
The fact that it was so successful, and that zuck picked mobile to be the next big thing before many of his peers and against what managers in the company wanted to do is probably what has made him now overconfident that he can do it again
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Home
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That's a charitable description of a massive bonfire of cash and credibility for an end product that looks worse than a 1990s MMORPG and has fewer active users than a small town sports arena.
An unforced error on the scale of HBO switching to MAX, except likely far more expensive. What is the Metaverse anyway?
The same as Zuck's bet on VR (remember Oculus?).
Similar to Zuck's promises of superintelligence.
Just one of the many futures wherein Meta poured a lot of money and achieved nothing.
I hope in their real future there is bankruptcy and ruin.
When Facebook went into gaming, it was about the time they went public and they were in search of revenue. At the time, FB games were huge. It was the era of Farmville. Some thought that FB and Zynga would be the new Intel and MIcrosoft. This was also long before mobile gaming was really big so gaming wasn't an unreasonable bet.
Waht really killed FB Gaming was not having a mobile platform. They tried. But they failed. We could live in a very different world if FB partnered with Google (who had Android) but both saw each other as an existential threat.
After this, Zuckerberg paid $1 billion for Instagram. This was a 100x decision, much like Google buying Youtube.
But in the last 5-10 years the company has seemed directionless. FB itself has fallen out of favor. Tiktok came out of nowhere and has really eaten FB's lunch.
The Metaverse was the biggest L. Tends of billions of dollars got thrown at this before any product market fit was found. VR has always been a solution looking for a problem. Companies have focused on how it can benefit them but consumers just don't want headsets strapped to their heads. It's never grown beyond a niche and never shown signs that it would.
This was so disastrous that the company lost like 60%+ of its value and seemingly it's been abandoned now.
Meta also dabbled with cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Also abandoned.
Social media really seems to have settled into a means of following public figures. Individuals generally seem to interact with each other via group texts.
Meta has a massive corpus of posts, comments, interactions, etc to train AI. But what does Meta do with AI? Can they build a moat? It's never been clear to me what the end goal is.
I question whether the corpus is of particularly high quality and therefore valuable source data to train on.
On the one hand: 20+ years of posts. In hundreds of languages (very useful to counteract the extreme English-centricity of most AI today).
On the other hand: 15+ years of those posts are clustered on a tiny number of topics, like politics and selling marketplace items. Not very useful unless you are building RagebaitAI I suppose. Reddit's data would seem to be far more valuable on that basis.
I wish Google circles were still a thing.
He never tried his secret sauce again. He never realized where his actual success was
A couple of years ago, I asked a financial investment person about AI as a trick question. She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure). I was waiting for her to put her foot in her mouth and buy into the hype.She skillfully navigated the question in a way that won my respect.
I personally believe that a lot of investment money is going to evaporate before the market resets. What we're calling AI will continue to have certain uses, but investors will realize that the moonshot being promised is undeliverable and a lot of jobs will disappear. This will hurt the wider industry, and the economy by extension.
We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do, just like many VOD, smartphone and grocery delivery companies of the 90s did with the internet. The groundwork has been laid, and it's not too hard to see the shape of things to come.
This tech, however, is still far too immature for a lot of use cases. There's enough of it available that things feel like they ought to work, but we aren't quite there yet. It's not quite useless, there's a lot you can do with AI already, but a lot of use cases that are obvious not only in retrospect will only be possible once it matures.
Your "Netflix over dialup" analogy is more accessible to this readership, but Sears+Prodigy is my favorite example of trying to make the future happen too early. There are countless others.
Are we though? Aside from a narrow set of tasks like translation, grammar, and tone-shifting, LLMs are a dead end. Code generation sucks. Agents suck. They still hallucinate. If you wouldn't trust its medical advice without review from an actual doctor, why would you trust its advice on anything else?
Also, the companies trying to "fix" issues with LLMs with more training data will just rediscover the "long-tail" problem... there is an infinite number of new things that need to be put into the dataset, and that's just going to reduce the quality of responses.
For example: the "there are three 'b's in blueberry" problem was caused by so much training data in response to "there are two r's in strawberry". it's a systemic issue. no amount of data will solve it because LLMs will -never- be sentient.
Finally, I'm convinced that any AI company promising they are on the path to General AI should be sued for fraud. LLMs are not it.
So newer chips will not be exponentially better but will be more of incremental improvements, so unless the price of electricity comes down exponentially we might never see AGI at a price point that’s cheaper than hiring a human.
Most companies are already running AI models at a loss, scaling the models to be bigger(like GPT 4.5) only makes them more expensive to run.
The reason why internet, smartphones and computers have seen exponential growth from the 90s is due to underlying increase in computing power. I personally used a 50Mhz 486 in the 90s and now use a 8c/16t 5Ghz CPU. I highly doubt if we will see the same form of increase in the next 40 years
The groundwork for VR has also been laid and it's not too hard to see the shape of things to come. Yet VR hasn't moved far beyond the previous hype cycle 10 years ago, because some problems are just really, really hard to solve.
I think this is one of the major mistakes of this cycle. People assume that AI will scale and improve like many computing things before it, but there is already evidence scaling isn't working and people are putting a lot of faith in models (LLMs) structurally unsuited to the task.
Of course that doesn't mean that people won't keep exploiting the hype with hand-wavy claims.
I totally agree with you... though the other day, I did think the same thing about the 8bit era of video games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks
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Its hard for me to imagine Skynet growing from chatgpt
What will it mean if the cutting edge models are open source, and being OpenAI effectively boils down to running those models in your data center? Your business model is suddenly not that different from any cloud service provider; you might as well be Digital Ocean.
If you had actually invested in AI pure players and Nvidia, the shovel seller, a couple years ago and were selling today, you would have made a pretty penny.
The hard thing with potential bubbles is not entirely avoiding them, it’s being there early enough and not being left at the end holding the bag.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/the-...
It shouldn’t be mind boggling. They see revolutionary technology that has potential to change the world and is changing the world already. Making a gamble like that is worth it because losing is trivial compared to the upside of success.
You are where you are and not where they are because your mind is boggled by winning strategies that are designed to arrive at success through losing and dancing around the risk of losing.
Obviously mark is where he is also because of luck. But he’s not an idiot and clearly it’s not all luck.
A honest businessman wouldn't put their company into a stock bubble like this. Zuckerberg runs his mouth and tells investors what they want to hear, even if it's unbacked.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this valuable because so much of the value is derived from ad-fraud that Facebook is both party to and knows about.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this big because it's growth relied extensively on crushing all competition through predatory pricing, illegal both within the US and internationally as "dumping".
Bear in mind that these are all bad as they're unsustainable. The AI bubble will burst and seriously harm Meta. They would have to fall back on the social media products they've been filling up with AI slop. If it takes too long for the bubble to burst, if zuckerberg gets too much time to shit up Facebook, too much time for advertisers to wisen up to how many of their impressions are bots, they might collapse entirely.
The rest of Big Tech is not much better. Microsoft and Google's CEOs are fools who run their mouth. OpenAI's new "CEO of apps" is Facebook's pivot-to-video ghoul.
Instead, think of whales for a sec. Think elephants - remember those? Think of Pando the tree, the largest organism alive. Then compare with one of the most valuable companies in the world. To a regular person's senses, the latter is a vaster and more complex entity than any tree or whale or elephant.
Gee, what makes it grow so big though? The power of human ambition?
And here's where I say, no, it needs to be this big, because at smaller scales it would be too dumb to exist.
To you and me it may all look like the fuckup of some Leadership or Management, a convenient concept beca corresponding to a mental image of a human or group of humans. That's some sort of default framing, such as can only be provided to boggle the mind; considering that they'll keep doing this and probably have for longer than I've been around. The entire Internet is laughing at Zuckerberg for not looking like their idea of "a person" but he's not the one with the impostor syndrome.
For ours are human minds, optimized to view things in term of person-terms and Dunbar-counts; even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped. But last time I checked my hand wasn't shaped anything like the invisible network of cause and effect that the metaphor represents; instead I would posit that for an entity like Facebook, to perform an action that does not look completely ridiculous from the viewpoint of an individual observer, is the equivalent an anatomical impossibility. It did evolve after all from American college students
See also: "Beyond Power / Knowledge", Graeber 2006.
That was soooo 2 weeks ago.
Personally, I think what we will witness is consolidation and winner-takes-all scenarios. There just isn't a sustainable market for 15 VS Code forks all copying each other along with all other non-VS Code IDEs cloning those features in as fast as possible. There isn't space for Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, Opencode all doing basically the same thing with their special branding when the thing they're actually selling is a commoditized LLM API. Hell, there _probably_ isn't space for OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Mistral and DeepSeek and Alibaba and whoever else, all fundamentally creating and doing the same thing globally. Every single software vendor can't innovate and integrate AI features faster than AI companies themselves can build better tooling to automate that company's tools for them. It reeks of the 90's when there were a dozen totally viable but roughly equal search engines. One vendor will eventually pull ahead or have a slightly longer runway and claim the whole thing.
My feelings are that most of the "huge advancements" are not going to benefit the people selling AI.
I'd put my money on those who sell the pickaxes, and the companies who have a way to use this new tech to deliver more value.
Or the more likely explanation is that they feel they've completed the hiring necessary to figure out what's next.
So it’s true that AI will kill jobs, but not in the way they’ve imagined?!
Why do you assume this people know any better than average Joe on the street?
Study after study demonstrates they can't even keep up with the market benchmarks, how would they be any wiser to tell you what's a fad or not.
Everything zuck has done since the "dawn of AI" has been to intentionally subvert and sabotage existing AI players, because otherwise Meta would be too far behind. In the same way that AI threatens Search, we are seeing emergently that AI is also threatening social networks -- you can get companionship, advice, information, emotional validation, etc. directly from an AI. People are forming serious relationships with these things in as much a real way as you would with anyone else on Facebook or Instagram. Not to mention, how long before most of the "people" on those platforms are AI themselves?
I believe exactly 0 percent of the decision to make Llama open-source and free was done altruistically as much as it was simply to try and push the margins of Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. downward. Indeed, I feel like even the fearmongering of this article is also strategically intended to devalue AI incumbents. AI is very much an existential threat to Meta.
Is AI currently fulfilling the immense hype around it? In my opinion, maybe not, but the potential value is obvious. Much more obvious than, for example, NFTs and crypto just a few years ago.
How so?
Or, this knowingly could not be sustained. So they scooped up all the talent they wanted before anybody could react, all at once, with big carrots. And then hit pause button to let all that new talent figure out the next step.
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In my world, AI has been little more than a productivity boost in very narrowly scoped areas. For instance, generating an initial data mapping of source data against a manually built schema for the individual to then review and clean up. In this case, AI is helping the individual get results faster, but they're still "doing" data migrations themselves. AI is simply a tool in their toolbox.
Also disagree with missing the train, these tools are so easy to use a monkey (not even a smart one like an ape, more like a Howler) can effectively use them. Add in that the tooling landscape is changing rapidly; ex: everyone loved Cursor, but now it's fallen behind and everyone loves Claude Code. There's some sense in waiting for this to calm down and become more open. (Why are users so OK with vendor lock-in??? It's bothersome)
The hard parts are running LLMs locally (what quant do I use? K/V quant? Tradeoffs? Llama.cpp or ollama or vllm? What model? How much context can I cram in my vram? What if I do CPU inference? Fine tuning? etc..) and creating/training them.
If AI is going to be integral to society going forward, how is it shortsighted?
> She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure).
So you prefer a 2x gain rather than 10X gain from the likes of Nvidia or Broadcom? You should check how much better META has done compared to MSFT the past few years. Also a "financial investment person"? The anecdote feels made up.
> She skillfully navigated the question in a way that won my respect.
She won your respect by giving you advice that led to far less returns than you could have gotten otherwise?
> I personally believe that a lot of investment money is going to evaporate before the market resets.
But you believe investing in MSFT was a better AI play than going with the "hype" even when objective facts show otherwise. Why should any care what you think about AI, investments and the market when you clearly know nothing about it?
Imagine being paid generational wealth, and then the house of cards comes crashing down a couple of months later.
In essence, they have left stellar projects with huge money potential for the corporate rat race, albeit at important $.
They are rich. Nobody is offered $100M+ comp if you are not already top 1% talent
tl;dw: some of it is anti-trust avoidance and some of it is knee-capping competitors.
They want an ROI. Taking them away from competitors is a side bonus.
Supposedly, all people that join meta are on the same contract. They also supposedly all have the same RSU vesting schedules as well.
That means that these "rockstars" will get a big sign on bonus (but its payable back inside 12 months if they leave) then ~$2m every 3 months in shares
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If you still think they are, do you have any proof? any sources? All of these media articles have zero sources and zero proof. They just ran with it because they heard Sam Altman talk about it and it generates clicks.
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The guy immediately took leave to get some medical procedure done with a recovery time, then when he returned he quit for another job. He barely worked, collected a big signing bonus, used the company's insurance plan for a very expensive procedure, and then disappeared.
From that point forward, signing bonuses had the standard conditions attached.
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Facebook's product is eyeballs... they're being usurped on all sides between TikTok, X and BlueSky in terms of daily/regular users... They're competing with Google, X, MS, OpenAI and others in terms of AI interactions. While there's a lot of value in being the option for communication between friends and family, and the groups on FB don't have a great alternative, the entire market can shift greatly depending on AI research.
I look at some of the (I think it was OpenAI) in generated terrain/interaction and can't help but think that's a natural coupling to FB/Meta's investments in their VR headsets. They could potentially completely lose on a platform they largely pioneered. They could wind up like Blackberry if they aren't ready to adapt.
By contrast, Apple's lack of appropriate AI spending should be very concerning to any investors... Google's assistant is already quite a bit better than Siri and the gap is only getting wider. Apple is woefully under-invested, and the accountants running the ship don't even seem to realize it.
Using ChatGPT voice mode and Siri makes Siri feel like a legacy product.
In practice though their platform is closed to any other assistant than theirs, so they have to come up with a competent service (basically Ben Thomson's "strategy tax" playing in full)
That question will be moot the day Apple allows other companies to ingest everything's happening on device and operate the whole device in reaction to user's requests, and some company actually does a decent job at it.
Today Google is doing a decent job and Apple isn't.
They did it to themselves. Facebook is not the same site I originally joined. People were allowed to people. Now I have to worry about the AI banning me.
Am I the only one that find the attempt to jam AI interactions into Meta's products useless and that it only detracts from the product? Like there'll be posts with comedy things and then there are suggested 'Ask Meta AI' about things the comedy mentions with earnest questions - it's not only irrelevant but I guess it's kind of funny how random and stupid the questions are. The 'Comment summaries' are counter-productive because I want to have a chuckle reading what people posted, I literally don't care to have it summarised because I can just skim over a few in seconds - literally useless. It's the same thing with Gemini summaries in YouTube - I feel it actually detracts from the experience of watching the videos so I actively avoid them.
On what Apple is doing - I mean, literally nothing Apple Intelligence offers excites me, but at the same time nothing anybody else is doing with LLMs really does either... And I'm highly technical, general people are not actually that interested apart from students getting LLMs to write their homework for them...
It's all well and good to be excited about LLMs but plenty of these companies' customers just... aren't... If anything, Apple is playing the smart move here - let other spend (and lose) billions training the models and not making any real ROI, and they can license the best ones for whatever turns out to actually have commercial appeal when the dust settles and the models are totally commodified...
Aside, groups is about the only halfway decent feature in FB, and they seem to be trying to make it worse. The old chat integration was great, then they remove it, and now you get these invasive messenger rooms instead.
It's more than okay for a company with other sources of revenue to do research towards future advancement... it's not risking the downfall of the company.
Good grief. Please leave your bubble once or twice in a month.
Tiktok yes. X and Bluesky, absolutely not.
From DemandSage:
That's according to DemandSage ... I'm not sure I can trust the numbers, FB jumped up from around 3b last year, which again I don't trust. 12b is more than the global population, so it's got to be all bots. And even the 3b number is hard to believe (at close to half the global population), no idea how much of the population of earth has any internet access.From Grok:
Looks like I'm definitely in a bubble... I tend to interact 1:1 as much on X as Facebook, which is mostly friends/family and limited discussions in groups. A lot of what I see on feeds is copy/pasta from tiktok though.That said, I have a couple friends who are die hard on Telegram.
From Meta itself: “All that’s happening here is some basic organisational planning: creating a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises.”
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-hiring-freeze-fda6b3c4?s...