Can't think of a better poster child of complete corporate waste that benefits no one whose assets should be seized and redistributed to the masses.
For the amount that Meta wastes on LLM spending you can pay for things like universal childcare, public community college, and providing free lunch to all public students.
If you care about things like money, look up the dollar returns on feeding children during their development or when you tell families they don't have be an economic burden for simply existing.
How much of your money do you spend on paying for kids school lunches, paying medical bills of terminally ill kids and paying off the student loans of graduates?
It's very easy to say that someone/some oeganization's wealth should be confiscated, yet I have yet to see those proposing it actually putting any of their own money where their mouth is.
> How much of your money do you spend on paying for kids school lunches, paying medical bills of terminally ill kids and paying off the student loans of graduates?
CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently dispatched a small team at his company to create a smartphone app similar to Polymarket and Kalshi, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing two employees with knowledge of the matter.
The app will probably rely on a video game-like points system instead of users wagering money, though the company has not ruled out betting real money eventually, according to the report.
I don't want to be a Zuckerberg hater, but is there any thing Zuckerberg has done or said in the last few years that wasn't mundane, reactionary or self-aggrandizing?
In other words, was there a single decision or take he made that turned out in his favor?
The failure that is llama4 needs to be studied. Meta was kicking ass with llama3.x and then something happened, something really went wrong. what happened between that time and llama4? I think it happened after llama3.1, llama3.2 was nothing to write home about. We need the gossips, maybe a book
I would love to know that inside story. The whole saga is starting to look like one of the biggest own goals in history - Meta went from being widely respected and considered a peer with leading frontier labs to having no competitive technology. How a company seemingly willfully threw away a leading position in the most valuable tech race of all time should be a business case study, apart from a technology one.
I do have a theory : Llama3.1 marks the point where Zuck got seriously interested and took over the reigns in driving the work. From the minute he started directing things instead of considering the AI work as a quirky side project, things went downhill. He tried to force a huge scale up in Llama4 which didn't work. Then as we know he disbanded the whole team and brought in a new crowd of mercenaries who may or may not have had the technical skills but they came into an organisation in disarray and still driven by Zuck himself who is continually forcing decisions that are not well founded in the science.
All the above is an entirely evidence free fan fiction version of things, but I would be completely unsurprised if it is true.
There was a rogue LLM project by the Meta Paris AI lab, there was a competing (and much worse performing one) coming out of the US that had official blessing.
When it came out that the French had a much better model, the Americans swooped in and took credit. This is was the beginning of llama.
The Frenchies were predictably pissed and left Meta over the next few years, as RSUs vested.
I feel as thought Meta, compared to other tech giants, have a vested interest in saying that AI failed, as they are the only major tech company that has almost unequivocally lost the AI race.
For Meta, it was never really clear why they even were in the AI race in the first place, since pretty much all of their products are B2C and don't really profit from integrating powerful AI models. And for all of their internal needs, they could easily use models created by someone else, which is orders of magnitude cheaper than trying to compete on building your own SOTA model.
Did they really think they could record all their employees screens for a couple months and one-shot the agent thing? This is like junior engineer "let's refactor this monolith" levels of delusion.
I think that over long developers will desperately be needed to handle AI.
In my experience, within weeks now concepts written in stone get shattered and the next paradigm has to be used in order to max out AI in an development environment.
What is the case for AI? To handle basic work? Augment the work? Add work?
Why I think dev will be in a good spot if they adapt is the simple fact, that while laymen are using ChatGPT etc. every day, this is like driving a Tesla vs a formula 1 car.
If you take ChatGPT away from the laymen, they are helpless with IT. Devs aren't.
AI isn't static, and every turn evolves into complexity, only devs may handle when they adapt to frequent paradigm shifts and go into high level mode.
It will be again the interface between men and machine, laymen and AI. The gap won't close anytime as expected (The programming manager - remember 6 month ago?), but widens more and more.
What I see is that in day to day work many services have arms race with AI updates. The managers are more and more overwhelmed by the workload but how to automate systems is still devs' area to shine.
The business case is still hidden and unclear, but only one aspect is clear to me: low level programming is mostly configuration work now and bug fixing for AI very seldomly now.
I think what everyone underestimated was the absolute bonkers amount of compute it will take and how that compute must scale in order to keep up with larger and larger models.
Mark is really a bad leader with a mwah mwah vision. He is maybe correct in some things. But the execution is really really poor. Plus he does not have followers and believers. He only got money that can simulate followers to a certain extent
115 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadThe man can't catch a break!
For the amount that Meta wastes on LLM spending you can pay for things like universal childcare, public community college, and providing free lunch to all public students.
If you care about things like money, look up the dollar returns on feeding children during their development or when you tell families they don't have be an economic burden for simply existing.
A better world is possible.
It's very easy to say that someone/some oeganization's wealth should be confiscated, yet I have yet to see those proposing it actually putting any of their own money where their mouth is.
A third of my salary each month.
Think about the number of kids that were harmed being fed ads and nonsense content to enable this... this a scandal IMO.
Meta’s chaotic AI strategy
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523271
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Admits the Company's AI Reorg Was 'Atrocious'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548461
CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently dispatched a small team at his company to create a smartphone app similar to Polymarket and Kalshi, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing two employees with knowledge of the matter.
The app will probably rely on a video game-like points system instead of users wagering money, though the company has not ruled out betting real money eventually, according to the report.
In other words, was there a single decision or take he made that turned out in his favor?
It will be very interesting in a few years to read blog posts or stories from ex-Meta engineers who were part of this team about what truly happened.
I do have a theory : Llama3.1 marks the point where Zuck got seriously interested and took over the reigns in driving the work. From the minute he started directing things instead of considering the AI work as a quirky side project, things went downhill. He tried to force a huge scale up in Llama4 which didn't work. Then as we know he disbanded the whole team and brought in a new crowd of mercenaries who may or may not have had the technical skills but they came into an organisation in disarray and still driven by Zuck himself who is continually forcing decisions that are not well founded in the science.
All the above is an entirely evidence free fan fiction version of things, but I would be completely unsurprised if it is true.
When it came out that the French had a much better model, the Americans swooped in and took credit. This is was the beginning of llama.
The Frenchies were predictably pissed and left Meta over the next few years, as RSUs vested.
Some guy in sales at Anthropic has a new yacht though.
Many such cases.
In my experience, within weeks now concepts written in stone get shattered and the next paradigm has to be used in order to max out AI in an development environment.
What is the case for AI? To handle basic work? Augment the work? Add work?
Why I think dev will be in a good spot if they adapt is the simple fact, that while laymen are using ChatGPT etc. every day, this is like driving a Tesla vs a formula 1 car.
If you take ChatGPT away from the laymen, they are helpless with IT. Devs aren't.
AI isn't static, and every turn evolves into complexity, only devs may handle when they adapt to frequent paradigm shifts and go into high level mode.
It will be again the interface between men and machine, laymen and AI. The gap won't close anytime as expected (The programming manager - remember 6 month ago?), but widens more and more.
What I see is that in day to day work many services have arms race with AI updates. The managers are more and more overwhelmed by the workload but how to automate systems is still devs' area to shine.
The business case is still hidden and unclear, but only one aspect is clear to me: low level programming is mostly configuration work now and bug fixing for AI very seldomly now.