Meta's A.I. exodus: Top talent quits as lab tries to keep pace with rivals
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I see it as this, you can throw money at a project to build a new OS but you still need the right people to have an actually good OS.
There's a ton of companies that would be happy to pay them to keep working on it.
I work for a big AI consultancy, but we haven't seen relevant work from Meta for a while. Their non-bayesian stuff is "meh" and often seriously misguided in their business approach. (which makes sense, they're not accustomed to work as consultants on setups with limited data)
Maybe you meant something else, but that’s how your statement reads.
What the hell is a big AI consultancy? As far as I can tell, these do not exist. Why would you expect to see meta doing consulting work at all?
It seems snake oil adjacent to me, at least at this point.
Thanks
Are the people who depend on it seriously incapable of taking up the load?
Probably. First of all most are domain experts not at all systems programmers. That’s the main value of such libraries.
And even for those who work close to the iron: plenty depend on, say, the Linux kernel without being able to write patches or even diagnose problems. And few, if any kernel developers have submitted patches to, say, GCC.
If these suggestions are credible and don't come from the Facebook team, that might sidestep your concerns.
Is there reason to expect this to change? Maintaining something like Torch and keeping it competitive in terms of speed is a HUGE amount of work for systems development, writing insane numbers of GPU kernels, etc. After having read it, I wouldn't quite yet call the tone of the discussion you linked "serious talk"...
[1]: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-machine-learning-...
BTW I was speaking generally about open source libraries, not just PyTorch, though indeed a Julia port sounds interesting.
You could argue that at it's peak Bell labs was a vanity division. That research may have changed the world, but very little of it likely ended up benefiting AT&T in any major way financially. It's telling that once AT&T was broken up Bell labs, while existing in some form for years after, was never reestablished.
But the days of telecom research making rapid and monumental advances peaked decades ago. Nokia or AT&T or Huawei or Ericsson could quadruple their R&D spending and it wouldn’t reestablish the impact of Bell Labs of last century, because it’s simply a much more mature field.
Whether it was a vanity division or not, it did serve one practical purpose for AT&T: it presented the company as a benevolent monopoly, spending its profits on developing technologies that benefitted the nation. This helped stave off anti-trust action for a long time.
2021 $46.75 B
2020 $32.67 B
2019 $24.83 B
2018 $25.37 B
2017 $20.59 B
2016 $12.52 B
2015 $6.21 B
2014 $4.93 B
2013 $2.81 B
2012 $0.54 B
2011 $1.73 B
Edit: never mind I found it https://ai.facebook.com/tools/
t. Almost 20 years of leadership positions in adtech.
They are all powered by neural networks
I suggest finding more polite ways to critique a post. Otherwise discussions tend to get boring quickly.
Also, the GP was explicitly describing their perception, not trying to promote it as truth. One interesting response would be "I really think that's false. I wonder how we reached such different conclusions."
Which is exactly why some consider it to be a vanity division.
All that brain power devoted to a company nobody (genuinely) respects, and whose sense of vision -- in the current year, 2022 -- teeters between stale and outright delusional.
But hey, if it gets you $300k a year for easy work and resume cred for the kind of job you really want -- go for it.
Agreed. It's all about the application and purpose (and the hubris of some of its practitioners), not the theory (or even the demonstrated effectiveness in certain areas).
When we see these disconnects at "work", on the ground -- in terms of lack of relevance / applicability to what the business actually needs -- they are sometimes quite startling, in fact.
I have a lot of bad things to say about the company and their products, but they and google are almost single (double?) handedly responsible for the advances in ML/AI that we've seen over the last years. (Not to say they are at all the only ones who have contributed, but if you subtracted their contributions we would have a very different world, certainly an average schmoe like me wouldn't be able to fire up world class models with millions or billions of dollars of R&D in them in a free hosted notebook connected to GPU, and actually solve difficult ML problems)
And Does it make sense to separate Waymo and DeepMind out from Google since that's the owner? Idk. Just a thought.
But even if they weren't exactly #2, they're probably inarguably top 5 right? That's still pretty amazing. And that's without really considering international companies. I have no idea what the AI capabilities of Chinese tech companies are, for example.
With Google and ml I connect so much positive and life-changing like: health care, weather, language model, deepmind ... There research blog and papers are great.
And then Facebook.
Yeah what is Facebook doing with ml? Optimizing for the next bullshit to make our society worse?
Non if there things are popping up anywhere.
Do they actually do anything which helps people instead of making them more victims of fb?
Who else has multiple products scaling to billions of users daily that are built around features that use AI?
They also work on AI research that only they can really work on due to their scale.
FB is planning on spending 20b this year alone on AI and AI related infrastructure.
These are AI/ML researchers, and so you can probably talk about that area at Meta, but it doesn't apply to other departments necessarily.
But I think it's kind of obvious that AI/ML is a dicey proposition there. See for example[0] how they decided to stop doing facial recognition. I can easily imagine a lot of AI projects being canned or back-burnered like that now. What's ML used for at Meta? Feed recommendations, social graph inferences, face identification, etc? All those are under heavy scrutiny, and a lot of the work of doing it "right" is not even an ML question at all, but one of policy, regulation, and product. It's not like self-driving cars where people can generally agree that "getting from A to B without crashing" is a good thing, and where the obvious ML and engineering problems line up with product problems. But if you "increase engagement" with your feed recommendations, that could be good or bad in ways that ML can't really tell you. If you get better at identifying people in pictures, people are going to hate you and there will news articles about stalking. If you identify who a potential friend might be, that's a privacy consideration, etc, etc.
But what's going on there is pretty independent of the "metaverse" stuff, I think.
> These are AI/ML researchers, and so you can probably talk about that area at Meta, but it doesn't apply to other departments necessarily.
When you look at their products as a whole at their root are essentially AI/ML driven or rely on the capability. This is very relevant to and applies to those that are most directly revenue generating like advertising.
> I can easily imagine a lot of AI projects being canned or back-burnered like that now. What's ML used for at Meta? Feed recommendations, social graph inferences, face identification, etc? All those are under heavy scrutiny, and a lot of the work of doing it "right" is not even an ML question at all, but one of policy, regulation, and product
Correct due to multiple factors there's little growth or innovation possible in the main products that Meta generates revenue from. Right now they only sell a single product which is advertising.
Metaverse is a highly speculative venture that may not work and there are companies like Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft Gaming that are better positioned to rely on existing technologies, platforms and synergies that have a major edge here.
That's why I would interpret AI/ML researchers leaving as a sign that Meta's best days are behind it and Metaverse is an act of desperation.
Facebook/Meta stock lost 30% of it's value a few months back and may not recover any time soon.
Many of these people are high level, so I'm guessing (based on a quick skim of levels.fyi) about 50% or more of their TC comes from stock.
This amounts to an effective 15% pay cut in a year with record inflation.
I think most of us would leave our job over a 15% pay cut, especially if we were well established in the field. On top of this it loosens those golden handcuffs quite a bit for anyone who was on the fence about being employed by facebook, but couldn't say no to the comp.
Not to say that some might be motivated by money, but at that level I would be surprised if it motivated many.
When you don’t make enough to make ends meet, or to do so comfortably, sure, fixing that situation is going to be very important to you.
But once you have what you need to live the life you want, why not simply live the life you want? One of my closest friends has been at google for almost 20 years. He doesn’t want to be promoted because he likes his job and his coworkers.
OTOH if money is your thing, that’s OK too.
You can say that it shouldn't matter; that a $200k salary decrease to someone making seven figures shouldn't matter, because they're rich and they can take it. Maybe that's a correct assertion; that it shouldn't matter. But: it does.
Money always matters. Money always matters. Money always matters.
Except when it doesn't.
A Principal Engineer at my company, could easily increase his salary 20-50% by moving to a FAANG, and can do Leetcode problems in his head, doesn't move. Because he has more independence here and can work on more interesting problems here.
He grew up in relative poverty. He already gets paid a lot. It's enough for him.
I'm not a cheap person, if I need to spend money on something, I will. It's just that my life style and affinities mean I'm not spending much.
I'm not much of a fashion guy, so no huge collection of expensive clothes.
Nor am I a car guy (I don't even currently own one, and if I were to have one again in the future, it would simply be a tool).
When I travel, the destination is often decided at the last moment, and I'm more of a backpack kind of guy.
When I buying something somewhat expensive (price ~$1000 or more), I'm always evaluating the usefulness of the thing, for example, I kind of want to replace my folk guitar but in fairness, I rarely play my current one, and it's not like this will change with a nicer one (I also have two very nice electric guitars I've not touched in years).
Simply put, partly out of how I was brought-up, partly out of some ecological-consciousness, I do not buy something simply because I can.
Also, regarding this part:
> Its the kind of thing said by someone who has never made that much money
When I make this statement, opposition comes far more often from people "who have never made that much money". My friends with similar or greater earnings get my point of view, even if they don't have the same views, but my friends with lower incomes generally strongly disagree with this kind of view.
I somewhat fall into the demographic you describe but find myself not really caring about maximizing TC because I’m working on interesting and meaningful problems. (I would never be interested in working on adtech or infosec even for double my pay — I’m just not interested in those areas.)
I have met many in tech whose game is maximizing TC. They’re very vocal but I don’t know if they represent everyone.
My experience has been that most of the people I know that work for FAANG are extremely TC conscious, that's a large part of why they work at a FAANG in the first place and the source of a non-trivial amount of their self worth. If you look around the comments on Blind (a biased source for sure, but certainly a non-zero part of the community) you'll find plenty of people where TC is all that matters.
I interviewed at FB a few years ago and one thing that surprised me when I asked "what's your favorite thing about working here?" I got the same answer from everyone I talked to: the compensation/benefits. I thought for sure the answers would involve working on hard problems at scale, having incredible amounts of data etc. However without fail every interviewer immediately pointed out their comp and other perks as their primary motivator for working there.
In general I would say that people that make a lot of money, make a lot of money because making a lot of money is important to them.
People at that salary level usually leave for other reasons, like not wanting to work for such a morally bankrupt company whose sole purpose is selling ads.
Because to me, it seems impossible to not notice the inflation in food prices over the past year. It hasn't really changed my life, but it's very noticable that prices are going up.
You can see more here: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t01.htm
I earn significantly less than a FAANG employee, and I agree with GP. From groceries alone, I'd never have known we had inflation. The only increase in prices that I did notice on my own is that eating out has gotten more expensive. And that's because many meals I would have for under $10 have magically hit $10+ - a notable boundary point, and the price point where I start thinking twice about "convenience" lunches.
I know this is "privilege", but it's emphasizing my point, which is that these top AI engineers making 3-10x as much as me certainly aren't worrying about inflation.
I am fairly senior and make tons of money. The ratio of income to my annual grocery bill is stupid. Also, I eat mostly salads and meat is not my most common protein source. Groceries could go up 10x and fluctuation in my investments would still grossly dwarf .
But one of my earliest memories is my mother crying at the ATM because the checking account was over-drawn and there was no food at home (by the time I was in high school we were much better off than most, but the treatment effect stuck -- my younger sibling and I think about money in very different ways. Crazy what a $2K savings buffer can do). I then spent a good part of my early adult life stressing about affording food & choosing between rent and desired groceries.
I still stress over every single thing that goes in the grocery basket, for absolutely not rational reason. In particular, I don't stress about e.g. restaurant bills. Why? Because the times in my life when food was scarce do not overlap with times I was in restaurants as a patron.
The grocery store in particular is a source of psychological terror for many Americans at one point or another in their lives, and those memories are visceral.
It's not on the level of food insecurity, but I see a ton of comments in this thread by people who obviously are too young to remember the dot-com bust of 2001.
I was just out of school in 1999 and can vividly recall one of the senior engineers warning me, with mortal seriousness in his eyes, "it isn't always like this". I also remember having absolutely no fucking clue what he was talking about, except on the most superficial level. He was then just about the age that I am now.
Winter is coming.
I think a significant driver of that was the tightening screws re: criticism and pending federal investigation.
The brand reinvention was in the context of changing perceptions that could culminate in existential threats to the company. There is no good way out of it, but changing the conversation from "Break up facebook" to "gee that Meta sure is weird", is a mixed success, and exchanging catastrophe for mixed success made quite a bit of sense as a strategy.
> "Death grip ain't shit..."
> "Give another name, because your real name ain't no good."
I'd be surprised if that's the case for such specialized workers. I know for a fact that at least some places has been giving out double digit salary increases at six month reviews.