Is 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?
The 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.
Wang is a networking machine and has connected with everyone in the industry. Likely was brought in as a recruiting leader. Mark being Mark, though, doesn’t understand the value of vision and figured getting big names in the same room was better than actually having a plan.
> they are really just good at appearing to be smart.
In other words, functionally speaking, for many purposes, they are smart.
This is obvious in coding in particular, where with relatively minimal guidance, LLMs outperform most human developers in many significant respects. Saying that they’re “not smart” seems more like an attempt to claim specialness for your own intelligence than a useful assessment of LLM capabilities.
> They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart
There are too many different ways to measure intelligence.
Speed, matching, discovery, memory, etc.
We can combine those levers infinitely create/justify "smart". Are they dumb? Absolutely, but are they smart? Very much so. You can be both at the same time.
Maybe you meant genius? Because that standard is quite high and there's no way they're genius today.
If Zuck throws $2-$4Bn towards a bunch of AI “superstars” and that’s enough to convince the market that Meta is now a serious AI company, it will translate into hundreds of billions in market cap increases.
Wang never led a frontier lab. He founded a company that uses hlow-paid uman intelligence to label training data. But clearly he is as slick a schmoozer as Sam Altman to have taken in a seasoned operator like Zuckerberg.
Even 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.
I agree, classic innovator's dilemma. It's a new business enterprise, has nothing to do with Meta's existing business or products. They can't be under the same roof and mush have independent goals.
True 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
So 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?
As 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.
All 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.
Computer scientists spending a career building advertising inventory and private data lakes while at the same time desperate to never be perceived in this light. It must make for an interesting "culture."
The problem with that assessment is that only really the monetisation team were the ones abusing the data. They are an organisation that were very much apart from the rest, different culture and different rules.
For the longest while you could be actually making things better, of thinking you were.
When problems popped up, we _could_ apply pressure and get things fixed. The blatant content discrimination in india, instagram kids, and a load of other changes were forced by employees.
However, in 2023 there were some rule changes aimed at stopping "social justice warrior-ing" internally. It was repeatedly tightened until questioning the leaders is considered against the rules.
Its no coincidence that product decisions are getting worse.
It’s both sad and believable when I hear that Boz is the most sane of them all.
Boz is such a grifter in his online content. He naturally weasel words every little point and while I have no doubt he’s smart, I don’t think I could trust him to provide an honest opinion publicly.
My friends at meta tend to not hold him in the highest esteem but echo largely what you said about the politics and his standing amongst them.
When 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.
Meta 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.
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.
I'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??
Can 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.
well 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 :)
Zuck 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.
Readit News
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.
In other words, functionally speaking, for many purposes, they are smart.
This is obvious in coding in particular, where with relatively minimal guidance, LLMs outperform most human developers in many significant respects. Saying that they’re “not smart” seems more like an attempt to claim specialness for your own intelligence than a useful assessment of LLM capabilities.
There are too many different ways to measure intelligence.
Speed, matching, discovery, memory, etc.
We can combine those levers infinitely create/justify "smart". Are they dumb? Absolutely, but are they smart? Very much so. You can be both at the same time.
Maybe you meant genius? Because that standard is quite high and there's no way they're genius today.
Can you give an example of the difference between these two things?
Prove me wrong.
Seems like a great bang for the buck.
This hot dog, this no hot dog.
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.
> he was basically an IC
Disagree with this part - ICs have to write code. He literally did nothing except meetings and WP posts.
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.
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.
The problem with that assessment is that only really the monetisation team were the ones abusing the data. They are an organisation that were very much apart from the rest, different culture and different rules.
For the longest while you could be actually making things better, of thinking you were.
When problems popped up, we _could_ apply pressure and get things fixed. The blatant content discrimination in india, instagram kids, and a load of other changes were forced by employees.
However, in 2023 there were some rule changes aimed at stopping "social justice warrior-ing" internally. It was repeatedly tightened until questioning the leaders is considered against the rules.
Its no coincidence that product decisions are getting worse.
Boz is such a grifter in his online content. He naturally weasel words every little point and while I have no doubt he’s smart, I don’t think I could trust him to provide an honest opinion publicly.
My friends at meta tend to not hold him in the highest esteem but echo largely what you said about the politics and his standing amongst them.
Sounds like every company.
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?
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.
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.
>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?
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??