Mark Zuckerberg creating new Applied AI engineering company, reorganises teams | Hacker News Reader

Mark Zuckerberg creating new Applied AI engineering company, reorganises teams

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

100 pointsmatthieu_bl60 comments

Can anyone find any more authoritative sources for this story than I can?

The original source submitted was https://www.idnfinancials.com/news/61918/zuckerberg-has-fini..., with the headline Zuckerberg has “finished” with Alexandr Wang, worth US$14 billion.

The second paragraph says “According to a report by Times of India...”. I found that article - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/mar... – and changed the URL and title on this submission (though I find it hard to read the article without freezing/crashing Chrome on my quite-new Apple laptop).

I can't find a source for the claim that Zuckerberg has “finished” with Alexandr Wang in either article. Nobody is quoted using the word “finished” or making any other assertions about Wang's status at Meta. It all just seems to be IDN Financials handwavingly connecting dots to create a sensationalist story and headline.

Also, the Times of India article says “According to The Wall Street Journal...”, which must mean this article: Meta to Create New Applied AI Engineering Organization – https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-to-create-new-applied-ai-en....

That article also makes no assertions about Wang's status at Meta.

As that article is the original source for this whole story, it should be the URL and title for this submission. But I can't get an archive link for it.

For now I'm downweighting this submission and I want the last 30 minutes of my life back!

Update: officially refuted by Meta PR: https://x.com/andymstone/status/2031129981267620314

ai slop meets clickbait. what a future

clickbate was always slop, mate

People seriously underestimate how many founders were just right place at the right time/had their startups pumped full of VC cash. Meet some of these unicorn founders in person behind closed doors and it will throw you into an existential crisis

the fun part - it doesn't matter if his professional reputation is that of a clown. He is still a billionaire clown and you, my friend, may be a genius but dependent on the hand that feeds you for the rest of your existence.

id love to be a billionaire

Grifting is very profitable. Some risk of getting caught of course, but in our high trust society you can usually get away with it

The HN post[1] eight months ago about the Scale acquisition is full of comments questioning Zuck's choice to have Wang lead their AI division. I guess HN was right this time.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44268197

Reporting at the time said Wang was far from Zuck’s top choice. Murati and Ilya (among others) were all asked first and said no.

The striking thing I heard from Meta staff is that Alexandr Wang would walk around campus with very obvious bodyguards surrounding him. Like sure maybe security is needed, but the decision to be surrounded with bouncerish guys says something about him.

But even on campus? Weird.

Yeah on campus apparently

That is just being obnoxiously self important.

It could be required by the company. Many companies require top executives to have personal security. I'd be surprised if Zuck didn't have bodyguards even within the office. He has 24/7 security outside, so why wouldn't he inside?

I think the notes about Alexander I’ve heard is just how obvious his were

Yeah, like all the tech CEOs surely have bodyguards, but they try to blend in and not be noticeable as bodyguards; sounds like these were trying to make a certain impression?

What are the odds that Zuckerberg would still be CEO if he didn't have a majority stake in the company? From the outside it seems like he has made one terrible financial decision after the next. Can anyone be surprised that things aren't going smoothly given his track record?

Facebook stock is up 6x in ~3 years, so the market does not agree with your assessment of his track record.

Some people in tech want companies to innovate and take risks by spending on R&D instead of just funneling it back to investors or safer existing markets, others will complain that they took those risks and failed despite still running profitable businesses.

meta is spending an absolute boat load on R&D and taking massive risks. It seems like your actual position is “company bad”

I'm in the former group where I personally support Meta taking risks on big ideas while still being profitable. Just like SpaceX and others. I don't blame Mark for getting excited about AR which is very likely a big market in the future, the gamble on the tech being affordable enough was just far too early for the scale of investment. Their investments there might still pay off as it gets cheaper.

Astonishingly. I just find it funny that one person can be responsible for wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and still keep their job.

Because he made many more billions... Not sure why this is difficult to understand though. It's a simple subtraction.

Pound wise - penny foolish

Easy: be responsible at the same time for tens of billions in upside.

Post VR it is not like investors don’t know what this is. Meta bets and bets big.

I hate the guy personally, but still understand that at that scale, if the leader is so conservative that s/he never risks losing, they are already losing. Like airline manufacturers never investing in jets because early ones weren't safe.

MSFT's bumbling idiot Ballmer Threw away at least a billion on one of the failed early versions of the Surface, but it went on to be profitable (or at least successful with customers) later. They also burned billion(s) acquiring skype, only to switch to Teams. Say what you want about their terrible products, but somehow they are still successful businesses.

And in the last 4.5y it's up 70% while the S&P500 is up 51% in the same time period, not quite as exciting eh?

Beating the index by 40% after 2 decades as a company? Yeah, still good.

Well we just went from "6x" to "40%" and "good" so, yeah... not quite as exciting.

Of course, Facebook themselves acknowledge that 10% of their revenue is literal scams. Like, people pay them to forward their scams to the targets of said scams. They know this is happening.

Obviously criminality pays. I wouldn’t hold up a drug dealer’s returns as evidence of good leadership

Unfortunately looking at CEOs that don't have a majority stake but make one terrible decision after another (waves to Satya) I think odds are pretty good he'd still be around.

Given that he has been running the company for many years and the valuation/profit/or whatever has gone up 100x times, I'd say the board is probably gonna be patient with the guy.

Imagine the guy made you $1.4 trillion dollars but lost $14 billions. Would you fire him?

I would.

After enough chances, yeah. Zuck probably has a few more big mistakes to go before the stock price is crushed and flat lines for awhile… in that environment a change of CEO would be needed.

So, no then.

But if he made X more mistakes, you would? Yeah sure bro.

You mean his terrible financial decisions of founding a company in 2004 that IPO at 104B within eight years, and now 14 years on is valued at 1.6T? Are we looking different track records?

The decision to buy scale and put Wang in charge was a bad one, but I think people are too focused on the $14B (which doesn't matter to Meta in the slightest) instead of the actual logic behind the purchase. Meta didn't need more labeled data, and a data labeling expert is not the person to lead your AI initiatives. I think spending $14B to try and get ahead in the AI race is a great idea, and Meta should be spending more money (there is some level of existential risk if they don't play in this market), but spending it on companies like Scale makes no sense.

This seems like the right take to me. Meta made $60 bil net profit on their last earnings report. With Mark unaccountable to investors effectively all of that can be funneled into their AI initiative. With their massive distribution network I think it makes sense for them to take big risks because if they fall behind they dont suffer a penalty from declining user base. It just never made sense for this to be the risk they took

I guess this comment got merged into a different thread (the times of india one). This comment was originally posted to this article's thread https://www.idnfinancials.com/news/61918/zuckerberg-has-fini...

This looks like a slop article. It seems to be referring (without a link) to https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/mar... which itself appears to be referring to this (without a link) https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-to-create-new-applied-ai-en... Neither of these articles include the word "finished" in them.

Update: and fwiw here is Andy Stone saying it's false https://x.com/andymstone/status/2031129981267620314

This is the only sensible take. This article is based on an Indian publication. It is true we'll never get the full story but this is pretty weak.

I mean, I'll be happy when this happens but today aint it.

I've participated in some corporate shit-shows in my day, but man I don't think I've ever seen one burn cash this fast.

Another thought: they say the software you ship reflects your org chart ("you ship your org chart"). Given how far Meta has slipped in the last year in the AI race, their org-wide dysfunction is starting to seriously harm them, from Financials to execution to talent. They need to get their act together, starting from the top.

I'm not a fan of Meta, but I'm a big fan of Llama. It was the first notable open weights model, and paved the way for all the others. Just for that I want to say: I'm rooting for you guys. Hope an amazing Llama 5 release comes after all this pain and churn.

These sort of people do not care about any of us.

Meta is building a more powerful version of Llama that is likely not going to be open-weight anymore and will move to being closed up. [0].

You're more likely going to be using Deepseek v4 or Deepseek R2 as an open weight model than Llama 5 at this point.

[0] https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20251211PD206/meta-llama-dev...

A new applied AI? A new team with access to fbook?

Challenge: take all the real estate / house for rent / sale scammers and make them only be seen by each other and not waste so many other people's time.

I'm sure an agent could of taken the fb message and then engaged in the sms phone texts and deciphered the affiliate scam I dealt with today faster than I did.

Save users time, money and make fbook better. I think this is possible.

shoutout Zuck for making the call. seems right given they haven't had any good model releases since bringing him on

can't even really blame Alex for taking the deal, why would Zuckerberg not do more due diligence? Wang has created (a relatively) successful subcontracting operation but that doesn't mean anything about research or new models

Unfortunate isn't the right word, but it's unfortunate they are going to spend all this money and have nothing to show for it. Maybe wasteful is the right word.

I have a feeling we will start seeing a lot of this...

Metaverse was the biggest joke and many of you here defended this trash.

It doesn't matter how many "wunderkinds" Zuckerberg pays off to work at Meta. Meta is not an AI company so they will never produce anything of relevance in that domain.

I don’t see meta around in 10 years frankly. They are very vulnerable to technological shifts they aren’t leading.

Same with apple

Meta, Reddit, Twitter, they're staying around. Too much of the population has been captured in those places and is too passive and docile to seek out better options. The disruption we've seen in the last with social networks won't happen anymore. These places are so bad already that there's no reason to think the remaining people will leave for any reason.

Meta is the smallest but also the most profitable of the FAANGs in terms of percentage profit margin at 30%, vs 25% for Apple and Google and much less for Amazon and Netflix. Their position in social networks is a license to print money and unless humanity goes fully autistic all of a sudden, this is unlikely to change, technological shifts notwhitstanding.

The one thing that can kill them is the fact each successive generation avoids their fuddy-duddy parents' social network, so Boomers and Gen X are on Facebook, Millennials on Instagram and Gen Z on TikTok. If TikTok had been killed as was originally the plan, they would have benefited massively, but Trump does not trust Zuck and made sure it went to his son Barron and the Ellisons.

Who could have predicted that a guy who has no experience developing superintelligence will fail at developing superintelligence.

zuck panicked.

the metaverse didn't pan out.

other companies were making inroads on A.I and zuck felt flat-footed.

the crazy shit is in an era where most content on social media is A.I generated - zuck should've pivoted to banning A.I content but eh what do I know

I don't know how he could ban it. AI can't be used to reliably detect AI for the same reasons it's unreliable at other tasks. He didn't really have a choice but to sell the same grift everyone else is selling. He's stuck in a prisoners' dilemma that everyone is losing except a few people at the top.

Fail fast

I wish I could fuck up this much this often and still get richer every day.

Say what you will about Zuck, he's made investors a trillion dollars. If they cared about his occasionally being wrong and losing a few billion here or there, it's not showing up in the stock price.

Hard to not delight in the schadenfreude

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