Meta Reassigns 7k Employees to Focus on A.I | Hacker News Reader

Meta Reassigns 7k Employees to Focus on A.I

nytimes.com

46 pointsxnx16 comments

Meta will keep oscillating. Its an example of too much cash chasing too few ideas. Tomorrow Zuck will say solving quantum field equations are the future, and since they wont find more than 8 people on the planet with the skills, execs will start running around furiously producing all kinds of fake activty to validate the "vision". When the system turns into a money printer the 3 inch chimp brain looses all grounding. Humility is the first trait that evaporates. The Attention Economy has zero mechanisms of humility generation. Its a runaway halucination engine. And Meta will keep oscillating till that is fixed.

Not necessarily a bad thing, I'd rather see attempts at innovation or moonshot ideas than sitting on the cash. These are calculated business moves targeting ideas that have a reasonably high chance of success. Isn't Google's graveyard an example of too much cash chasing too few ideas?

I'd rather they do something like google X where they can build a company around the idea, rather than getting a bunch of random PHP/React devs told to build VR, then flopping at it.

> I'd rather see attempts at innovation or moonshot ideas than sitting on the cash.

I'd rather they pay the money out to their shareholders as dividends.

It's hard to recognize when you've grown up. Hard to recognize when you are slowing down.

They should just return cash to shareholders if they can't think of anything better to do, but I guess Zuck has too many shares and no one can force him to do this and so we have to watch him light money on fire as he chases some gimmick that will take Meta to the next level.

This seems to be the common take, Zuckerberg pissing away money because he wants to and can, and I can’t reconcile it with Metas vulnerable position.

Remember ‘adpocalypse’? Metas cash cows all rely on third party devices and hardware they don’t control. Apple and Google dictate how much info they get on critical fronts, and can cut Meta out at any point. VR was an attempt to create a sustained platform advantage where Meta was in control. “AI” is an area where Metas mining of its own data could plausibly create products and services that would be uniquely competitive against MS/Google/Amazon and OpenAI/Anthropic. Regardless of broader market success, those AI capabilities should avoid a scenario where Metas operations and ad-wizardry have to rely on a third party AI giant who is simultaneously a product competitor, dooming them to irrelevancy.

The accusation is the Zuck is flighty and arbitrary. But his business is arguably a dead-man-walking without strategic realignment. On a 15 year timeline Meta is vulnerable from all sides and swimming upstream against social platform decay. These Hail Mary efforts seem reactive to their vulnerabilities, with an eye to securing long term existence.

It's so incredibly common that when a company becomes successful and only has predominantly one owner, there's nobody to keep him from treating his employees like personal play things.

The incentives at Meta are all wrong, so they will forever spin their wheels trying to latch onto something the next big thing while they continue to simply be a social media company.

This is the way. Hopefully they learned from IKEA which instead of firing 8,500 support agents retrained them into interior designers.

Actually, layoffs are still happening tomorrow.

https://archive.ph/xryro

This has some kind of Catpcha QR scan with a phone device. I will never use it

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48161427

Maybe they will fix the AI that banned me from running facebook / instagram ads after running them for 8 days.

My ability to run ads, and to work for about half the places trying to hire me to run ads, was perma banned by an AI with this message:

- "Our technology found your ad account doesn’t follow our Advertising Policies. As a result, our technology took action."

Or maybe people knowing of the layoffs set it up this way. Hmm. That would hit their bottom line many times over.

Either way, being struck down in the crossfire is terrible.

- edited to add quotes

"your job is to build the machine that will fire you"

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