I wonder when (if ever) the companies realize that demoralizing your workforce (and destroying that sector of the job market) doesn't have only advantages.
I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stopped being 10x engineers, and are just collecting their paychecks and waiting for the layoff now. And I'm not sure you can "get them back", ever.
At least some companies reacted to this with more top-down management, stricter metrics etc. which kills motivation further and leads to metric optimization. Tell a good, smart, motivated engineer that you want more AI usage, and he's going to maybe start using some AI where it makes sense, but mostly ignore the metric while trying to do useful work. Demotivate the same engineer and make clear that his paycheck depends on metrics, and he'll give you what you're asking for, except https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn is probably not what you _wanted_...
Yeah, working harder to avoid a layoff in a big company doesn't really work out - by the time you know about the layoffs they've probably already made their decisions about who stays and goes anyway. Plus that higher rate of effort might be unsustainable and you end up leaving on your own accord anyway or burning out. Layoffs somewhat change the employment arrangement too for the people that stay: "we pay you the same but now you're expected to do the work of the missing people"
> I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out
I don't think that should be the real fear. The real fear is those 10x engineers still putting in equivalent effort, but now having to spend mental capacity on positioning themselves for future layoffs and worrying about getting fired.
I think we greatly underestimate the performance boost there is in security. When you don't have to worry about plan b, you can be so much more efficient at plan a.
The only introspection will be along the lines of “we should have moved faster and broken more things”; because of (1) and (2), it can’t progress to the level of “maybe we were completely wrong in a fundamental sense”, because they just don’t perceive human minds outside of their own (they really do view us as NPCs).
> trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected
Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four month in advance apparently, nor does he want to wait and work of actual data. Meta can affort to implement some AI, wait to see if it pans out and then layoff people. On the other hand, he had way to much patience with the Metaverse, even as all signed pointed to it being a failure. His personal hobbies shows that he is capable of patience, training, hunting isn't going to yield results in four months. I think he lacks the skills to manage, and to recognize and hire competent managers. Had Meta stock not been structured the way it is, I would like to think that the board had replaced Zuckerberg as CEO.
I wouldn't however agree that Meta was necessarily to late to AI. They showed a lot of potential early on, but then sort of dropped off. They weren't to late, it is just another mismanaged project.
Zuckerberg was barely adult when he started Facebook. And he probably bumped into a few older guys who thought they knew better than him, and history proved them wrong.
He likely developed some irrational belief that clever and young beats anything else, and saw an echo of his own bravado in Alexandr Wang.
Turns out his heuristics were not calibrated properly.
Assuming a sufficient base level of competence, more of how things go for company A vs. company B can be explained by random walks through events (their dependent paths) than by management.
A competent and persistent leader can increase the odds, but under close study, fortuitousness and serendipity – or luck of the draw and timing – have more explanatory power.
Meanwhile, just try to make your own luck. Make sure you happen to things, instead of things happening to you.
his biggest fear is not being the one to nail the next big thing. it happened with mobile, although that was basically irrelevant in hindsight. he thought it was metaverse, which failed, while in the meantime it was actually the new AI cycle, which he was late on / lost by the time llama 4 flopped.
i think he’d rather just blow up the whole company than continue to be solely associated with one (or even a few) of the most successful websites/apps in history, for some reason. maybe he thinks people will like him if he does something else?
Meta is in a weird place because Zuck is at this point very far removed from day to day company operations and its overall culture, but still wants to be the one calling all the shots. Plus just like Musk and others he has megalomania and wants to rule the world. And considering his hold of the company no one can really argue with him.
You can pretty much see his thought process in real time.
"Google and OpenAI have built these cool LLM things, but I have the best engineers in the world so obviously I should be driving that technology. Go build it for me."
Turns out his engineers aren't very effective at building it.
"Obviously I need to fire all these lazy employees and get the best industry talent. They aren't going to refuse my money."
So he throws billions at some top AI researchers, but they produce nothing of value.
"I don't understand, why am I still not winning? It must be because the AI industry itself is now moving at a very slow pace.
It's probably chance, but this post is at the top of HN right next to https://weli.dev/blog/half-baked-product/. Seems like you don't need to be a young startup founder to get your dough in a twist.
Everyone I have seen in a corporate environment is using it to do their existing work faster. The rest of the organization has not yet evolved to take advantage of these new tools.
in fact i’d say it’s a rather poor wrapper and sensationalizes far beyond what reuters actually reported. e.g. the unsupported claim that Zuckerberg somehow put Alex Wang “in charge of the entire company.”
Maybe the best solution is not to fire good engineers and replace them with AI, but to remove the useless "vibe" managers who are basically the bottleneck for everything.
AI has caused a lot of leaders to overreact. Great leaders find a balance between overreacting and waffling. It's often wise to dampen your response a little bit, without dragging your feet.
"I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil."
I'll go with both... I think the guy made some real moves early on, but it's been a while since whatsapp and instagram. And since then, if the tales in Careless People are to be believed, so much smoke has been blown up his digestive endpoint that he's mostly smoke now.
it's a common missconception that engineers spend most of their time producing code based on documented requirements in jira tickets.
I'd believe that a complete automation of this aspect of our industry would only be enough to provide a 10-20% boost in productivity. Still impressive, but within the range of "Our team improved our CI, build times, development process etc."
This is a bit like going back in time to the beginning of the industrial revolution and estimating the impact of a mechanisation based on comparing the speed of early mechanical looms vs. a skilled human.
It takes years or decades for the automation of an artisan process to shake out, because it involves rethinking how everything around the now-automated process happens, and because the benefits involve the automation's ability to continue scaling beyond a level where human capacity was saturated. We're only at the very beginning of that process for coding, and right now we tend to see LLMs somewhat awkwardly inserted into pre-existing software development lifecycles. But it's unlikely that'll be still be the way we're creating software in 10/20 years time.
With hardware, there’s a physical element that the management can appreciate, even when they don’t understand every constraint. With code, it’s that nebulous thing where the only thing visible are pictures on the screen. Trusting engineers is apparently too high a bar to cross.
Exactly this. Grinding away inside various places I've worked for the last 10 years I longed for intense chunks of actually writing code. It was actually a rare treat to get something large and coherent enough to involve code production.
Most times were spent juggling paperwork, bouncing back and forth on code reviews, negotiating ambiguous requirements, and attending pointless meetings.
Granted... the agentic tools can also help with that. I've had them automate JIRA tedium for me before, much to middle management's chagrin.
AI requires trillions of dollars of investment to keep going because it can't turn a profit and has a massive public backlash because the majority of people dislike it and distrust it. Companies have to force their employees to use it. It can only exist because of the massive amount of free knowledge it feeds on. It does not seem inevitable at all. This is the most forced-upon-us technology in history. It's only "inevitable" in the sense that it's extremely exciting to the greedy and lazy.
Remember, the internet was born and touted to be the greatest technology invention in human kind before the bubbled popped but didn't die. It evolved into something else while other technology caught up before it became what it is now. (I'm strictly talking about the techy things it can do, and definitely not how content is now pretty much only from a handful of major social sites.) I'm getting the same vibes from whatever AI is now. Your inevitable part might not be wrong, but it really feels like we might have to get a bubble popping and a restart because the hype is way out ahead of where the tech actually is very similar to web1.0. But what do I know?
But that's part of the inevitable isn't it? You'll never get everyone to stop. Someone will always do it because they feel it being inevitable that if they don't do it someone else will so might as well do it.
AGI isn't necessary to completely change things. The change that's occurred in the last 6 months alone is massive. Another couple of big steps like the end of last year and the world is unrecognisable from even a few years ago.
What makes another couple big steps like that inevitable in a short time frame?
Before the recent floodgates cracked open, AI research made only slow incremental progress for decades. Why couldn't we already be back near that rate of progress?
I’m not the person you’re responding to, but I’ll answer. It’s not worth the (token) cost. It’s too inefficient. It’s brute-forcing solutions to problems by spending more and more tokens.
I don't think it is either of those. He is clearly not dumb nor do I think he is inherently evil. The thing is just that he became a billionaire at 23 and did not have to experience any of the grounding and setbacks that turn someone into a responsible adult.
He is basically a middle-aged college bro that always got what he wanted and never had to ask twice for something.
This is definitely a why not both sort of situation. In fact, I think being dimwitted is often associated with being evil, since goodness is (often) just rational self-interest.
Zuckerberg got enthroned when he was like 22 and has been primarily interacting with people who want something with him, while not having any wants himself, since then.
He's not necessarily dimwitted but it would take an absolutely amazing person to understand the 8 layers below him without having lived any of them. Of course he can't transcend Meta into something beyond what it's become.
Being fabulously wealthy his whole adult life he doesn’t know what it’s like to struggle to make rent, or have to take your kids out of school and leave the country in 60 days. Those are things that happen to plebs far away and far beneath his concern.
Honestly if a meta employee, esp software dev is having to struggle to make rent or have no emergency savings, its actually on the employee. They are not making burgerking salaries to have to live paycheck to paycheck unless they make poor housing and cars and vacation choices.
The visa issue guys should play safe, stick to stabler companies, more reward isnt without more risk
I get that whats happening at meta is wrong, but please stay away from these excuses as to why thats wrong, these aren’t for those employees
I'm kind of curious, whatever happened to Zuckerberg's AI clone? I haven't heard about it recently but it was one of the uh, more interesting AI stories.
This is another piece of evidence against the "Zuckerberg Exceptionalism" theory. I've argued before that he is neither a great leader nor a particularly intelligent person outside some alleged Math talent. He was, at best, a competent entrepreneur and very hard worker who was in the right place at the right time.
Meta's strategy is the kind of thing many/most people here could have come up with:
* "We have lots of users, let's show them more ads"
* "They are doing AI, let's do AI".
* "I've watched Ready Player One, let's build VR".
Other than the original few years of Facebook has Zuck actually succeeded at anything new? Metaverse was a failure. Instagram and WhatsApp were both bought and Instagram's biggest feature is a straight rip from Snapchat. Occulus was bought. Facebook itself is completely dead among all my peers and even the local business stuff I used to do on it is dead now too. It feels like he just falls from one mistake into another but gets away with it due to the company being a behemoth + his unique control of the company keeping him unaccountable.
In Taiwan, Facebook seams like it's part of the Government and it seems that near all the small biz use it to communicate and advertize. Reminds me of the AOL days when people thought that was the Internet.
They no longer need to. They have a core business to finance whatever stupid ideas ad infinitum. When was Oracle or IBM successful at anything new last time? Yet they chum along with 140k and 280k (!!!) employees.
It feels like the only thing it's really big in now in the states for is facebook marketplace, which is just a slightly higher trust (but still scam and flake prone) version of craigslist using the existing user base. Feels like all his big swings have been strikes
True, it is pretty bad at getting right to what I want. A genuinely useful integration of AI would be to process and classify listings on upload so that I can have more filters on attributes of items for sale. I'm not holding my breath for that though
Success from your perspective, or the market's? The market seems generally pleased that he's taken more than a quarter of global ads, and dominates in social media advertisement.
By practically any measure all of the things you've listed have been wildly successful.
The question wasn't if Zuck has been successful, it was if Meta has succeeded at anything new. When was the last time Meta made something original, brought to market and had success with it?
Instagram Reels? Your measure of “innovation” is just not how large companies succeed. They are specialized at optimization, and take seeds of things and water them. Instagram had 0 revenue and like 13 employees when acquired. WhatsApp had 50 employees, no encryption, etc
I think there's a measure of success in thought leadership and/or product.
Apple is wildly successful at both, arguably more so the leadership than the actual product. Amazon, despite its faults, has a ton of businesses many of which do well, and it continues to innovate. I'm biased but I think Google is also in that category, with many new products that are widely well regarded (yes some were acquisitions, but typically smaller ones).
Meta on the other hand... Facebook was huge, no doubt. Instagram too, but that was already semi locked in on acquisition, they already had product/market fit at least. WhatsApp has languished under Zuckerberg, having had their explosive growth independently.
Oculus? Nope. Metaverse? Nope. Crypto? Nope. AI? Nope, or at least not yet.
By business metrics, very successful. By innovation in ads, very successful. But building new consumer businesses? Not really.
According to my peers Microsoft has no market share, and literally nobody is willingly using PHP or Java. But that's obviously not true. Facebook is still dominant, Meta is an infinite money printing machine. The company can take a lot of risk for a very long time without problem
Always good to remember with large tech companies that they can have millions or hundreds of millions of people very vocally opposed to them and still have billions of users.
Which, as I said, they bought. And then they ripped off the biggest feature. Most of the genuinely 'new' things they've tried with Instagram have failed.
They benefited greatly from the FTC not doing their job. Google too. Overall it has been extremely damaging to the industry but I suspect that it is the main reason for a small part of California (it not even American exceptionalism, it's Silicon Valley exceptionalism) completely dominating tech.
Didn't Zuck allegedly steal the concepts from those twins and claim it was his own? Something like that but at Harvard the idea morphed as people connected and I seem to recall a quote from Zuck that he couldn't believe people would give up all this data. So alleged plagiarism and getting lucky by the sounds of it.
> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil. The problem during the first era of the AI boom (circa 2023) was indeed that Meta was too slow to identify the metaverse flub.
Former meta wanker here.
Its both. but also its the structure around Zuckerberg that makes it worse.
First Zuckerberg only cares about tech, he doesn't care about product. he loves research, and he loves new things that can be done with the research that he's been sponsoring. People management, politics, product design is all stuff that is outsourced.
Now, rightly, Zuckerberg has trust issues. Everyone either tells him he's brilliant or a massive cunt. there is no inbetween. This means he has an inner circle that manages his action flow and diffuses it into the organisiation.
This is problematic because they are not there because of competence, virtually all of them are there because they have been at facebook for a long time. Its network not competence.
Facebook used to (it was less before I left) bang on about this being "your company" as in it was a town hall of ideas, and the best would bubble up to the top, the rest would dissolve into the primal talent pool.
This means that the company "product team" were setup and still to some extent to be information brokers, they would pull the best initiatives and show them selectively to Zuck. They didnt really provide strong vision about what the "facebook" product should be.
Combine that with the 6month PSC cycle, where you have to demonstrate "impact", means you have lots of half baked single ideas that bubble up, get tested and then either kinda fizzle out or stay there like a fucking cancer. These ideas are driven by metrics of a sub department of a sub department of a sub department. At one point the notifications on the facebook app were owned by more than one team, possibly three, with a overall family of app notification team(I get hazy on this, whatever it was there were many many people who's job was to move images around on the notification panel by minute amounts and work out if that drove screen time)
This means that direction is hard, mainly because there is none from the centre, and that the company flow isn't designed for a single design to be implemented globally. There isn't enough glory to go around to feed the senior ++ staff engineers who get paid $3m a year to specialise is tweaking the colour of the border of buttons in the facebook app by 3%.
Boz bills himself as the "moderator" and "unblocker" not the arbiter of taste, or the "facebook style". I don't think Cox has publicly ever uttered any words of substance. the point is, none of them have said "here is the experience design that we want, go and make this work so that it looks and feels like this". Its all "ok this feature moved MAU by .0005% lets ship that one"
There is one exception to all of that: monetization. If monetization want to change something for whatever reason, then they get it. Gambling adverts in your notifications? sure, creating an audience group for tweens that have just deleted a selfie? fuckyeah Hiding fraud from the outside world? sure is 10% of global revenue enough?
TLDR:
Zuck is politically naive, and consistently fails to learn. He is reliant of his inner circle to spoon feed him decisions outside his competency areas
I wonder when (if ever) the companies realize that demoralizing your workforce (and destroying that sector of the job market) doesn't have only advantages.
I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stopped being 10x engineers, and are just collecting their paychecks and waiting for the layoff now. And I'm not sure you can "get them back", ever.
At least some companies reacted to this with more top-down management, stricter metrics etc. which kills motivation further and leads to metric optimization. Tell a good, smart, motivated engineer that you want more AI usage, and he's going to maybe start using some AI where it makes sense, but mostly ignore the metric while trying to do useful work. Demotivate the same engineer and make clear that his paycheck depends on metrics, and he'll give you what you're asking for, except https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn is probably not what you _wanted_...
Yeah, working harder to avoid a layoff in a big company doesn't really work out - by the time you know about the layoffs they've probably already made their decisions about who stays and goes anyway. Plus that higher rate of effort might be unsustainable and you end up leaving on your own accord anyway or burning out. Layoffs somewhat change the employment arrangement too for the people that stay: "we pay you the same but now you're expected to do the work of the missing people"
Exactly. With the broad layoffs some companies do, you learn the company doesn’t value you, so why should you value the company?
> I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out
I don't think that should be the real fear. The real fear is those 10x engineers still putting in equivalent effort, but now having to spend mental capacity on positioning themselves for future layoffs and worrying about getting fired.
I think we greatly underestimate the performance boost there is in security. When you don't have to worry about plan b, you can be so much more efficient at plan a.
Never — remember, these people believe 3 things:
1) empathy is a weakness
2) introspection is a waste of time
3) move fast and break things
The only introspection will be along the lines of “we should have moved faster and broken more things”; because of (1) and (2), it can’t progress to the level of “maybe we were completely wrong in a fundamental sense”, because they just don’t perceive human minds outside of their own (they really do view us as NPCs).
> introspection is a waste of time
Even worse, the claim it’s bad
The title is a weird. Ineffective? At doing what?
This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg:
> trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected
Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four month in advance apparently, nor does he want to wait and work of actual data. Meta can affort to implement some AI, wait to see if it pans out and then layoff people. On the other hand, he had way to much patience with the Metaverse, even as all signed pointed to it being a failure. His personal hobbies shows that he is capable of patience, training, hunting isn't going to yield results in four months. I think he lacks the skills to manage, and to recognize and hire competent managers. Had Meta stock not been structured the way it is, I would like to think that the board had replaced Zuckerberg as CEO.
I wouldn't however agree that Meta was necessarily to late to AI. They showed a lot of potential early on, but then sort of dropped off. They weren't to late, it is just another mismanaged project.
Zuckerberg was barely adult when he started Facebook. And he probably bumped into a few older guys who thought they knew better than him, and history proved them wrong.
He likely developed some irrational belief that clever and young beats anything else, and saw an echo of his own bravado in Alexandr Wang.
Turns out his heuristics were not calibrated properly.
Didn’t he famously trash folks over 30 years back? He has really done nothing innovative outside of ads.
What’s innovative about ads?
>I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former.
Why is this an either/or? Those aren't mutually exclusive.
It's like that old saying: “Don't attribute to malice – or incompetence – that which can be explained by path dependency.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence
OK, not the saying. Perhaps should be.
Assuming a sufficient base level of competence, more of how things go for company A vs. company B can be explained by random walks through events (their dependent paths) than by management.
A competent and persistent leader can increase the odds, but under close study, fortuitousness and serendipity – or luck of the draw and timing – have more explanatory power.
Meanwhile, just try to make your own luck. Make sure you happen to things, instead of things happening to you.
The way the sentence is structured implies he is evil either way. He is either (dim witted and evil) or (just evil).
> Had Meta stock not been structured the way it is, I would like to think that the board had replaced Zuckerberg as CEO.
He saw that coming and slyly prevented it. He cannot be as dimwitted as you suggest.
Given his war on the whistleblower and what we learned about Meta and Zuckerberg from her he is evil too
his biggest fear is not being the one to nail the next big thing. it happened with mobile, although that was basically irrelevant in hindsight. he thought it was metaverse, which failed, while in the meantime it was actually the new AI cycle, which he was late on / lost by the time llama 4 flopped.
i think he’d rather just blow up the whole company than continue to be solely associated with one (or even a few) of the most successful websites/apps in history, for some reason. maybe he thinks people will like him if he does something else?
Yeah, you're right, I edited it just now. I rewrote parts of the comment and moved things around and didn't re-read the whole thing.
I actually think Zuckerberg is smarter and more capable than you.
Your boot sir
(It’s obviously true.)
With the polish creme? Ah, my favorite.
Meta is in a weird place because Zuck is at this point very far removed from day to day company operations and its overall culture, but still wants to be the one calling all the shots. Plus just like Musk and others he has megalomania and wants to rule the world. And considering his hold of the company no one can really argue with him.
You can pretty much see his thought process in real time.
"Google and OpenAI have built these cool LLM things, but I have the best engineers in the world so obviously I should be driving that technology. Go build it for me."
Turns out his engineers aren't very effective at building it.
"Obviously I need to fire all these lazy employees and get the best industry talent. They aren't going to refuse my money."
So he throws billions at some top AI researchers, but they produce nothing of value.
"I don't understand, why am I still not winning? It must be because the AI industry itself is now moving at a very slow pace.
It's probably chance, but this post is at the top of HN right next to https://weli.dev/blog/half-baked-product/. Seems like you don't need to be a young startup founder to get your dough in a twist.
Everyone I have seen in a corporate environment is using it to do their existing work faster. The rest of the organization has not yet evolved to take advantage of these new tools.
Very shallow wrapper around the reuters piece (https://www.reuters.com/business/zuckerberg-says-ai-agent-de... ), I dont think author adds any tangible value
in fact i’d say it’s a rather poor wrapper and sensationalizes far beyond what reuters actually reported. e.g. the unsupported claim that Zuckerberg somehow put Alex Wang “in charge of the entire company.”
Maybe the best solution is not to fire good engineers and replace them with AI, but to remove the useless "vibe" managers who are basically the bottleneck for everything.
AI has caused a lot of leaders to overreact. Great leaders find a balance between overreacting and waffling. It's often wise to dampen your response a little bit, without dragging your feet.
CEOs are so afraid of being Innovators Dilemma’d that they make rash moves before they have any data.
"I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil."
I'll go with both... I think the guy made some real moves early on, but it's been a while since whatsapp and instagram. And since then, if the tales in Careless People are to be believed, so much smoke has been blown up his digestive endpoint that he's mostly smoke now.
His most innovative move was acquisition
Seems like a lot of CEOs overestimated the speed of AI, but also it is inevitable.
I don't see how this is the same. This is about Meta falling behind in training competitive LLMs against Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Chinese labs.
it's a common missconception that engineers spend most of their time producing code based on documented requirements in jira tickets.
I'd believe that a complete automation of this aspect of our industry would only be enough to provide a 10-20% boost in productivity. Still impressive, but within the range of "Our team improved our CI, build times, development process etc."
This is a bit like going back in time to the beginning of the industrial revolution and estimating the impact of a mechanisation based on comparing the speed of early mechanical looms vs. a skilled human.
It takes years or decades for the automation of an artisan process to shake out, because it involves rethinking how everything around the now-automated process happens, and because the benefits involve the automation's ability to continue scaling beyond a level where human capacity was saturated. We're only at the very beginning of that process for coding, and right now we tend to see LLMs somewhat awkwardly inserted into pre-existing software development lifecycles. But it's unlikely that'll be still be the way we're creating software in 10/20 years time.
With hardware, there’s a physical element that the management can appreciate, even when they don’t understand every constraint. With code, it’s that nebulous thing where the only thing visible are pictures on the screen. Trusting engineers is apparently too high a bar to cross.
Exactly this. Grinding away inside various places I've worked for the last 10 years I longed for intense chunks of actually writing code. It was actually a rare treat to get something large and coherent enough to involve code production.
Most times were spent juggling paperwork, bouncing back and forth on code reviews, negotiating ambiguous requirements, and attending pointless meetings.
Granted... the agentic tools can also help with that. I've had them automate JIRA tedium for me before, much to middle management's chagrin.
AI requires trillions of dollars of investment to keep going because it can't turn a profit and has a massive public backlash because the majority of people dislike it and distrust it. Companies have to force their employees to use it. It can only exist because of the massive amount of free knowledge it feeds on. It does not seem inevitable at all. This is the most forced-upon-us technology in history. It's only "inevitable" in the sense that it's extremely exciting to the greedy and lazy.
Remember, the internet was born and touted to be the greatest technology invention in human kind before the bubbled popped but didn't die. It evolved into something else while other technology caught up before it became what it is now. (I'm strictly talking about the techy things it can do, and definitely not how content is now pretty much only from a handful of major social sites.) I'm getting the same vibes from whatever AI is now. Your inevitable part might not be wrong, but it really feels like we might have to get a bubble popping and a restart because the hype is way out ahead of where the tech actually is very similar to web1.0. But what do I know?
Is AGI really inevitable ? Claiming something is inevitable is a great way to disarm critical thinking.
It's about as 'inevitable' as fusion power and flying cars ;)
Well, if progress stops it can be avoided..
But that's part of the inevitable isn't it? You'll never get everyone to stop. Someone will always do it because they feel it being inevitable that if they don't do it someone else will so might as well do it.
AGI isn't necessary to completely change things. The change that's occurred in the last 6 months alone is massive. Another couple of big steps like the end of last year and the world is unrecognisable from even a few years ago.
What makes another couple big steps like that inevitable in a short time frame?
Before the recent floodgates cracked open, AI research made only slow incremental progress for decades. Why couldn't we already be back near that rate of progress?
Give your arguments for it not being inevitable if you question it.
There is no reason to believe that it is inevitable.
I’m not the person you’re responding to, but I’ll answer. It’s not worth the (token) cost. It’s too inefficient. It’s brute-forcing solutions to problems by spending more and more tokens.
> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil.
I can.
It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.
I don't think it is either of those. He is clearly not dumb nor do I think he is inherently evil. The thing is just that he became a billionaire at 23 and did not have to experience any of the grounding and setbacks that turn someone into a responsible adult.
He is basically a middle-aged college bro that always got what he wanted and never had to ask twice for something.
This is definitely a why not both sort of situation. In fact, I think being dimwitted is often associated with being evil, since goodness is (often) just rational self-interest.
Zuckerberg got enthroned when he was like 22 and has been primarily interacting with people who want something with him, while not having any wants himself, since then.
He's not necessarily dimwitted but it would take an absolutely amazing person to understand the 8 layers below him without having lived any of them. Of course he can't transcend Meta into something beyond what it's become.
Being fabulously wealthy his whole adult life he doesn’t know what it’s like to struggle to make rent, or have to take your kids out of school and leave the country in 60 days. Those are things that happen to plebs far away and far beneath his concern.
Honestly if a meta employee, esp software dev is having to struggle to make rent or have no emergency savings, its actually on the employee. They are not making burgerking salaries to have to live paycheck to paycheck unless they make poor housing and cars and vacation choices.
The visa issue guys should play safe, stick to stabler companies, more reward isnt without more risk
I get that whats happening at meta is wrong, but please stay away from these excuses as to why thats wrong, these aren’t for those employees
negativity is usually the easy path so evil and dimwittedness go together quite well.
The evil genius is very rare compared to the evil idiot.
Or in this case the, I think, evil smart person who is way out of touch.
I'm kind of curious, whatever happened to Zuckerberg's AI clone? I haven't heard about it recently but it was one of the uh, more interesting AI stories.
That quote doesn't support the headline
This is another piece of evidence against the "Zuckerberg Exceptionalism" theory. I've argued before that he is neither a great leader nor a particularly intelligent person outside some alleged Math talent. He was, at best, a competent entrepreneur and very hard worker who was in the right place at the right time.
Meta's strategy is the kind of thing many/most people here could have come up with:
* "We have lots of users, let's show them more ads"
* "They are doing AI, let's do AI".
* "I've watched Ready Player One, let's build VR".
Duh.
> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil.
Evil
> Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698684
Other than the original few years of Facebook has Zuck actually succeeded at anything new? Metaverse was a failure. Instagram and WhatsApp were both bought and Instagram's biggest feature is a straight rip from Snapchat. Occulus was bought. Facebook itself is completely dead among all my peers and even the local business stuff I used to do on it is dead now too. It feels like he just falls from one mistake into another but gets away with it due to the company being a behemoth + his unique control of the company keeping him unaccountable.
In Taiwan, Facebook seams like it's part of the Government and it seems that near all the small biz use it to communicate and advertize. Reminds me of the AOL days when people thought that was the Internet.
They no longer need to. They have a core business to finance whatever stupid ideas ad infinitum. When was Oracle or IBM successful at anything new last time? Yet they chum along with 140k and 280k (!!!) employees.
Doesn't IBM still do high tech research? The only thing I know Oracle does is buy up companies to take over their products (and customers).
280K is down from 400k+ when I worked at the latter 2 decades ago
It feels like the only thing it's really big in now in the states for is facebook marketplace, which is just a slightly higher trust (but still scam and flake prone) version of craigslist using the existing user base. Feels like all his big swings have been strikes
Facebook marketplace also keeps people scrolling which means theres just way more prospective buyers.
Search is bad at finding what you want but good at keeping you searching.
Here in Canada, kijiji(ebay classifieds) was popular and has accounts and ratings. People still have moved to marketplace.
True, it is pretty bad at getting right to what I want. A genuinely useful integration of AI would be to process and classify listings on upload so that I can have more filters on attributes of items for sale. I'm not holding my breath for that though
Success from your perspective, or the market's? The market seems generally pleased that he's taken more than a quarter of global ads, and dominates in social media advertisement.
By practically any measure all of the things you've listed have been wildly successful.
The question wasn't if Zuck has been successful, it was if Meta has succeeded at anything new. When was the last time Meta made something original, brought to market and had success with it?
Instagram Reels? Your measure of “innovation” is just not how large companies succeed. They are specialized at optimization, and take seeds of things and water them. Instagram had 0 revenue and like 13 employees when acquired. WhatsApp had 50 employees, no encryption, etc
Thank you for being one of the few to actually read the question :)
I think there's a measure of success in thought leadership and/or product.
Apple is wildly successful at both, arguably more so the leadership than the actual product. Amazon, despite its faults, has a ton of businesses many of which do well, and it continues to innovate. I'm biased but I think Google is also in that category, with many new products that are widely well regarded (yes some were acquisitions, but typically smaller ones).
Meta on the other hand... Facebook was huge, no doubt. Instagram too, but that was already semi locked in on acquisition, they already had product/market fit at least. WhatsApp has languished under Zuckerberg, having had their explosive growth independently.
Oculus? Nope. Metaverse? Nope. Crypto? Nope. AI? Nope, or at least not yet.
By business metrics, very successful. By innovation in ads, very successful. But building new consumer businesses? Not really.
It really seems like its a testament to the other c-levels and higher management that facebook has managed to become what it is despite Zuck
According to my peers Microsoft has no market share, and literally nobody is willingly using PHP or Java. But that's obviously not true. Facebook is still dominant, Meta is an infinite money printing machine. The company can take a lot of risk for a very long time without problem
Always good to remember with large tech companies that they can have millions or hundreds of millions of people very vocally opposed to them and still have billions of users.
Instagram is an $80bn company right now. I’d call that a success.
Which, as I said, they bought. And then they ripped off the biggest feature. Most of the genuinely 'new' things they've tried with Instagram have failed.
Zuck became one of the richest and most powerful people in the world by saying "what if Myspace but we make it elite and exclusive and no custom html"
No, he actually became one of the richest ppl in the world by stealing that idea from somebody else.
I suppose if your history started at the Social Network movie that would seem factual
I suppose if you observed every Facebook product development since those days it would seem like a founding value.
Sure, other than being the dominate social media platform for the original few years (2 decades) he is a total failure I guess
They maintained the 2 decades dominance by either knifing the baby (vine) or buying (Instagram, whatsapp) every upstart.
The moment they couldn't do either they got their clock cleaned (tiktok)
Wow, that sounds super easy. Why didn't you do it?
They benefited greatly from the FTC not doing their job. Google too. Overall it has been extremely damaging to the industry but I suspect that it is the main reason for a small part of California (it not even American exceptionalism, it's Silicon Valley exceptionalism) completely dominating tech.
Didn't Zuck allegedly steal the concepts from those twins and claim it was his own? Something like that but at Harvard the idea morphed as people connected and I seem to recall a quote from Zuck that he couldn't believe people would give up all this data. So alleged plagiarism and getting lucky by the sounds of it.
[dupe] More discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48767058
> dimwitted or just evil
...Yes
> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil. The problem during the first era of the AI boom (circa 2023) was indeed that Meta was too slow to identify the metaverse flub.
Former meta wanker here.
Its both. but also its the structure around Zuckerberg that makes it worse.
First Zuckerberg only cares about tech, he doesn't care about product. he loves research, and he loves new things that can be done with the research that he's been sponsoring. People management, politics, product design is all stuff that is outsourced.
Now, rightly, Zuckerberg has trust issues. Everyone either tells him he's brilliant or a massive cunt. there is no inbetween. This means he has an inner circle that manages his action flow and diffuses it into the organisiation.
This is problematic because they are not there because of competence, virtually all of them are there because they have been at facebook for a long time. Its network not competence.
Facebook used to (it was less before I left) bang on about this being "your company" as in it was a town hall of ideas, and the best would bubble up to the top, the rest would dissolve into the primal talent pool.
This means that the company "product team" were setup and still to some extent to be information brokers, they would pull the best initiatives and show them selectively to Zuck. They didnt really provide strong vision about what the "facebook" product should be.
Combine that with the 6month PSC cycle, where you have to demonstrate "impact", means you have lots of half baked single ideas that bubble up, get tested and then either kinda fizzle out or stay there like a fucking cancer. These ideas are driven by metrics of a sub department of a sub department of a sub department. At one point the notifications on the facebook app were owned by more than one team, possibly three, with a overall family of app notification team(I get hazy on this, whatever it was there were many many people who's job was to move images around on the notification panel by minute amounts and work out if that drove screen time)
This means that direction is hard, mainly because there is none from the centre, and that the company flow isn't designed for a single design to be implemented globally. There isn't enough glory to go around to feed the senior ++ staff engineers who get paid $3m a year to specialise is tweaking the colour of the border of buttons in the facebook app by 3%.
Boz bills himself as the "moderator" and "unblocker" not the arbiter of taste, or the "facebook style". I don't think Cox has publicly ever uttered any words of substance. the point is, none of them have said "here is the experience design that we want, go and make this work so that it looks and feels like this". Its all "ok this feature moved MAU by .0005% lets ship that one"
There is one exception to all of that: monetization. If monetization want to change something for whatever reason, then they get it. Gambling adverts in your notifications? sure, creating an audience group for tweens that have just deleted a selfie? fuckyeah Hiding fraud from the outside world? sure is 10% of global revenue enough?
TLDR:
Zuck is politically naive, and consistently fails to learn. He is reliant of his inner circle to spoon feed him decisions outside his competency areas
So just bad governance and B-stocks giving zuck control forever meaning nothing will change? Great
I mean the funding will dry up, and it'll go the way of yahoo.
Wang for ceo.
Zuck ruined enough lives, let him go become an mma podcaster like he wants.
The guy who was going to lead Meta into a glorious AI future?
Zuck makes the rules. He’s made enough in his time.