nilkn (u/nilkn) - Readit News

nilkn commented on Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears telegraph.co.uk/business/... · Posted by u/pera

TrackerFF · 3 days ago

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.

nilkn · 3 days ago

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.

nilkn commented on o3 and Grok 4 accidentally vindicate neurosymbolic AI garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/NotInOurNames

nilkn · a month ago

As far as I can tell, putting the conspiratorial thinking aside, he's not really wrong, but I'm also not sure it matters that much.

If neurosymbolic AI was "sidelined" in favor of "connectionist" pure NN scaling, I don't think it was part of a conspiracy or deeply embedded ideological bias. I mean, maybe that's the case, but it seems far more likely to me that pure deep learning scaling just provided a more incremental and accessible on-ramp to building real-world systems that are genuinely useful for hundreds of millions of users. If anything, I think the lesson here was to spend less time theory-crafting and more time building. In this case, it looks like it was the builders who got to the endpoint that was only imagined by the theory-crafters, and that's what matters at the end of the day.

nilkn commented on LLMs should not replace therapists arxiv.org/abs/2504.18412... · Posted by u/layer8

raverbashing · 2 months ago

LLMs are missing 3 things (even if they ingest the whole of knowledge):

- long term memory

- trust

- (more importantly) the ability to nudge or to push the person to change. An LLM that only agrees and sympathizes is not going to make things change

nilkn · 2 months ago

For a bit now ChatGPT has been able to reference your entire chat history. It was one of the biggest and most substantial improvements to the product in its history in my opinion. I'm sure we'll continue to see improvements in this feature over time, but your first item here is already partially addressed (maybe fully).

I completely agree on the third item. Carefully tuned pushback is something that even today's most sophisticated models are not very good at. They are simply too sycophantic. A great human professional therapist provides value not just by listening to their client and offering academic insights, but more specifically by knowing exactly when and how to push back -- sometimes quite forcefully, sometimes gently, sometimes not at all. I've never interacted with any LLM that can approach that level of judgment -- not because they lack the fundamental capacity, but because they're all simply trained to be too agreeable right now.

nilkn commented on Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries' wired.com/story/sam-altma... · Posted by u/spenvo

sorcerer-mar · 2 months ago

I did not say their performance is 1:1 with a business line, but great job tearing down that strawman.

I said they are accountable to their business line -- they own a portfolio and are accountable for that portfolio's performance. If the portfolio does badly, it means nearly by definition that the executive is doing badly. Like an athlete, that doesn't mean they're immediately put to the streets, but it also is not ambiguous whether they are performing well or not.

Which also points to why performance management methods are not valid, i.e. a high-sensitivity, high-specificity measure of an individual executive's actual personal performance: there are obviously countless external variables that bear on the outcome of a portfolio. But nonetheless, for the business's purpose, it doesn't matter. Because the real purpose of performance management methods is to have a quasi-objective rationalization for personnel decisions that are actually made elsewhere.

Perhaps you can mention which performance management methods you believe are valid (high-specificity and high-sensitivity measures of an individual's personal performance) in AI R&D?

"Pretty much every top-tier executive at top-tier companies is making seven or eight figures as table stakes". In this group, what percentage are ICs? Sure there are aberrational celebrity hires, of course, but what you are pointing to is the norm, which is not celebrity hires doing IC work.

> If execs really were so replaceable... companies wouldn't be paying so much money for them

High-level executives within the same tier are largely substitutable - any qualified member of this cohort can perform the role adequately. However, this is still a very small group of people ultimately responsible for huge amounts of capital and thus collectively can maintain market power on compensation. The high salaries don't reflect individual differential value. Obviously there are some remarkable executives and they tend to concentrate in remarkable companies, by definition, and also by definition, the vast majority of companies and their executives are totally unremarkable but earn high salaries nonetheless.

nilkn · 2 months ago

Lack of differentiation within a tiny elite circle of candidates does not imply that salaries do not reflect individual differential value broadly. While these people control a large amount of capital, they do not own that capital -- their control is granted due to their talent and can be instantly revoked at any moment. They have no leverage to maintain control of this capital except through their own reputation and credibility. There is no "tenure" for executives -- the "status" of the role must essentially be re-earned constantly over time to maintain it, and those who don't do so are quickly forced out.

The researchers being hired here are just as accountable as the execs we're talking about -- there is a clear outcome that Zuck expects, and if they don't deliver, they will be held accountable. I really, genuinely don't see what's so complicated about this.

Accountability to a business line does not imply that if that business does poorly then every exec accountable to it was doing poorly personally. I'm actually a personal counter-example and I know a number of others too. In fact, I've even seen execs in failing BUs get promoted after the BU was folded into another one. Competent exec talent is hard to find (learning to operate successfully at the exec level of a Fortune 50 company is a very rarefied skill and can't be taught), and companies don't want to lose someone good just because that person was attached to a bad business line for a few months or years.

Something important to understand about the actual exec world is that executives move around within companies constantly -- the idea that an executive is tied to a single business and if something goes wrong there they must have sucked is just not true and it's not how large companies operate generally. When that happens, the company will figure out the correct action for the business line (divest, put into harvest mode, merge into another, etc., etc.), then figure out what to do with the executives. It's an opportunity to get rid of the bad ones and reposition the top ones for higher-impact work. Sometimes you do have to get rid of good people, though, which is true of all layoffs -- but even with execs there's a desire to avoid it (just like you'd ideally want to retain the top engineers of a product line being shuttered).

nilkn commented on Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries' wired.com/story/sam-altma... · Posted by u/spenvo

sorcerer-mar · 2 months ago

> There are plenty of established performance management mechanisms to determine individual contributions

"Established" != valid, and literally everyone knows that.

The executives you reference are never ICs and are definitionally accountable to the measured performance of their business line. These are not superstar hires the way that AI researchers (or athletes) are. The body in the chair is totally interchangeable so long as the spreadsheet says the right number, and you expect the spreadsheet performance to be only marginally controlled by the particular body in the chair. That's not the case with most of these hires.

nilkn · 2 months ago

I'd say execs getting hired for substantial seven- and eight-figure packages, with performance-based bonuses / equity grants and severance deals, absolutely do have a lot more in common with superstars than with most other professionals. And, just like superstars, they're hired based off public reputation more than anything else (just the sphere of what's "public" is different).

It's false that execs are never ICs. Anyone who's worked in the upper-echelon of corporate America knows that. Not every exec is simply responsible 1:1 for a business line. Many are in transformation or functional roles with very complex responsibilities across many interacting areas. Even when an exec is responsible for a business line in a 1:1 way, they are often only responsible for one aspect of it (e.g., leading one function); sometimes that is true all the way up to the C-suite, with the company having literally only a single exception (e.g., Apple). In those cases, exec performance is not 1:1 tied to the business they are 1:1 attached to. High-performing execs in those roles are routinely "saved" and banked for other roles rather than being laid off / fired in the event their BU doesn't work out. Low-performing execs in those roles are of course very quickly fired / re-orged out.

If execs really were so replaceable and it's just a matter of putting the right number in a spreadsheet, companies wouldn't be paying so much money for them. Your claims do not pass even the most basic sanity check. By all means, work your way up to the level we're talking about here and then report back on what you've learned about it.

Re: performance management and "everyone knowing that", you're right of course -- that's why it's not an interesting point at all. :) I disagree that established techniques are not valid -- they work well and have worked for decades with essentially no major structural issues, scaling up to companies with 200k+ employees.