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Because the AI works so well, or because it doesn't?

> ”By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Wang writes in a memo seen by Axios.

That's kinda wild. I'm kinda shocked they put it in writing.

Guaranteed this is them cleaning out the old guard, its either axe them, or watch a brutal political game between legacy employees and new LLM AI talent
“If I work in/with AI my job will be safe” isn’t true after all.
makes sense. AI to cast out AI
This is actually really interesting because I’ve never actually seen anything coming out of Lecun‘s group that made it into production

that does not mean that nothing did, but this indicates to me that FAIR work never actually made it out of the lab and basically everything that Lecun has been working on has been shelved

That makes sense to me as he and most of the AI divas have focused on their “Governor of AI” roles instead of innovating in production

I’ll be interested to see how this shakes out for who is leading AI at Meta going forward

they've lost on basically all fronts of AI right?
You can think of Metabook like a chemical spill

If you're not swimming in their river, or you weren't responsible for their spill, who cares?

But it spreads into other rivers and suddenly you have a mess

In this analogy the chemical spill - for those who don't have Meta accounts, or sorry, guess you do, we've made one for you, so sorry - is valuation

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211388

They could have predicted this ... with some probability?
Targeting their legacy Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team, not the newly formed Meta Superintelligence lab.
Meta will shortly post for 700 new AI roles
> while the company continues to hire workers for its newly formed superintelligence team, TBD Lab.

It's coming any day now!

> "... each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Wang writes

It's only a matter of time before the superintelligence decides to lay off the managers too. Soon Mr. Wang will be gone and we'll see press releases like:

> ”By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, so the logical step I took was to reduce the team size to 0" ... AI superintelligence, which now runs Meta, declared in an interview with Axios.

Meta stock is trading down today at the moment, slightly more than the S&P 500.

Maybe they should have just announced the layoffs without specifying the division?

> Meta will allow impacted employees to apply for other roles within the company

How gracious.

Seems like the AI push is going about as well as the metaverse push.
AI has no demand, they overhired, Wang has no clue what to do next and fires people to make an impact.

Other AI companies will soon follow.

assuming 500K avg comp, that's ~300m/yr.
my take: Meta’s leadership and dysfunctional culture failed to nurture talent. To fix that, they started throwing billions of $ at hiring from outside desperately.

And now they're relying on these newcomers to purge the old Meta styled employees and by extension the culture they'd promoted.

It's only 600 so far... Rumors were that it was going to be in the thousands. We'll see how long they can hold off. Alexandr really wants to get rid of many more people.
That'll save them a few million dollars when things are tight.
I'd imagine that's maddening to have your role change every few months.
Is the bubble still growing, or are we getting close to hitting critical mass?
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Meta is fumbling hard. Winning the AI race is about marketing at this point - the difference between the models is negligible.

Chat GPT is the one on everyone's lips outside of technology, and in the media. They have a platform by which to push some kind of assistant but where is it? I log into facebook and it's buried in the sidebar as Meta AI. Why aren't they shoving it down my throat? They have a huge platform of advertisers who'd be more than happy to inject ads into the AI. (I should note I hope they don't do this - but it's inevitable).