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Wow what could possibly be so bad that multiple people leave after just some days
Teething pains are surely expected. But the egos of some of these people have to be inflated worse than ai wrapper valuations.
> Meta said this allegation was “manufactured tension without basis in fact that’s clearly being pushed by dramatic, navel-gazing busybodies.”

Was this bombastic, “nyah-nyah,” “I know you are but what am I” style of public communication a thing before the current president hired spokespeople who behave this way?

If it’s at all indicative of how things work inside that company, I’d be out the door on the first day too, no matter how many absurd millions were supposedly on offer…

I feel like it's kind of counterproductive; it comes across as "what you are saying is true, but we are not happy about, and also how very dare you say it", in a way that the more conventional "[blah] declined to comment", or a simple denial, does not.

Like, it's hard to see how it's a _good_ media relations strategy.

Maybe Zuck’s “Just keep throwing money at it” strategy ain’t all that.
The problem with trying to just throw money at a problem to hire a bunch of “top” talent and “leading visionaries” is that those egos rarely play well together under the same roof.

Culture, or the lack thereof, eats your unlimited budget for lunch. There are indeed problems that money can’t solve. That’s playing out painfully at Meta right now.

> “While TBD Labs is still relatively new, we believe it has the greatest compute-per-researcher in the industry, and that will only increase,” Meta said.

Well, two ways to make that true!

> Avi Verma, a former OpenAI researcher, went through Meta’s onboarding process but never showed up for his first day, according to a person familiar with the matter.

I don't get it. You voluntarily choose to leave a very highly paid job in favor of an extremely high paid job, and then you... just don't show up to work? What could possibly go so wrong between the time of signing the job contract and showing up to work on day 1?

Maybe you know some of the people who've already started and just got re-orged _for the fourth time in six months_ (per the article)?

I mean, if it was me, and I had a bit of a buffer (which, y'know, you'd assume most people in this position do), there'd be a temptation to say "screw that, life's too short", and take a few months off before looking for a job somewhere less silly.

The apparent shift in strategy/philosophy away from releasing open models seems noteworthy, and might have caused confusion/dissent.
What's the argument for Facebook pursuing AI at all? Is it mainly because they have a lot of money they don't know what to do with?
I hope they fail. Meta and Zuck can't be trusted after years of making the world a worse place to live.
The side question to this article, imho, is "when will the current bubble burst?"
How are people still on FB or Insta? I've been absent for a few years now, but whenever I read about FB it seems worse than ever.
I’d love to goof around in a dept. named “To Be Determined” for a year or three.