- He could be well-placed to see whether AI agent development is successful since at a high level he oversees much of it, and will be getting detailed metrics and things.
- Whether or not his opinion is correct, tech CEOs are notorious trend-chasers, and his opinion could set the tone for other companies.
- He himself might even be a trend-follower in this case, and is presiding over an early dialing-back of AI-hype.
as integrated into Meta's platforms it is clearly uncompetitive as a consumer chatbot with the likes of ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini.
Like the other chatbots give me useful answers to questions even if they're wrong sometimes. Meta AI, on the other hand, cracks jokes about my foxwork. That's no so bad because sketch comedy is one of the foxwork skill areas (e.g. if I get you to laugh you are under my spell) but it's not useful and edifying the way competitors are.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0231133383
and found out that people really do it. It took me about 300 days to contract with a community of foxes and started "going out as a fox". At first I didn't want to explain it to people at all but when I botched my explanation and my wife gave me some tough love about "cultural appropriation" I realized I needed a cover story and it is "I go out as a character to do street photography and make people smile"
And it became real. My son didn't believe it until he saw me work: my son saw these two college girls walking down the street and thought "there is no way they would talk to me" and next thing he knows they flagged me down and are asking me questions and I took their picture. I went to fireworks in Groton, NY and the next day in Little York [1] I haven't even parked my car and people I saw the day before are excited to see me.
When I get approached every day it becomes effortless and automatic to make an approach and when I feel like I am getting a 50% take rate I think "I am doing something wrong and I need to regroup", my usual take rate is in the 80-90% range but it feels like 100%. I don't even talk with other street photographers about it on forums because I'm drawing from an entirely different probability distribution.
Thanks to this work, it looks like I will be teaching about magic soon [2] so I was working on a short monologue about blessings on the drive up to Little York which primed me to really respond when people I photographed said simple things like "Enjoy the Fourth of July" and eating soft serve ice cream from a vendor felt like the feast that Martin Prechtel says is the only ritual -- and I am still feeling high from it just like I felt high from going to Litha put on my my pagan friend.
See https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/foxwork
[1] one of the five Yorks of New York
[2] Magic is real, full stop. Science is real too, and there is nothing more scientific than the double-blind test that accounts for the placebo effect which is as I see it: "the patient experiences the treatment as receiving a blessing and feels better" and "the doctor experiences the treatment as giving a blessing and perceives the patient differently"
exactly why I won't listen to someone who is falling behind.
Outside of tech Warren Buffett seems popular.
Also, is favorable/unfavorable a good measure of popularity?
This thread is bizarre.
He can run the day to day string pulling however he wants, he is literally the one with all the power.
Y’all are delusional.
If you think they’re idiots, go start your own companies and eat their lunch. They got rich by eating someone else’s lunch, after all.
Right now, it is their game to lose.
And this is Meta we are talking about not Tesla, it's P/E is like 20 something. The valuation is very reasonably correlated to the earnings.
Regardless of wether this is right or wrong, and not even getting into the correctness of such claims, the fact is that he fired 10000 employees, from what used to be, from the outside, an engineering first company. And he sent hints to the market that more layoffs would come as agents become better.
The first problem is: it looks we still need human beings, AI is great, but its not as awesome as we initially thought.
The second problem is: all people who can leave are leaving, and those who can't are looking for a job. Humans, we need stability, a steady flow of income, and joy in what we do. By firing people and putting them in permanent observation, for an AI that will replace them, he is destroying any reason anybody would ever want to work for such a company.
Mark would make a great Lumon CEO
Nice summary of a good hacker's viewpoint. All his money, power, and other non-technical signals don't really give him the technical authority to weigh on what really makes a technical difference.
That being said, depending on how good information-sharing is at the company, he might have a valuable perspective. But given that morale is low, it's doubtful that engineers feel free to tell the straight unvarnished truth without fear. And in typical large-company fashion, managers above them likely spin things positively as much as possible.
He spoke at an internal town hall for Meta. His employees care...
Perhaps he employs some, you know, to inform him on the topic?
My point was not that Meta has the best AI researchers/engineers.
My point was it should not matter if Zuck is a PHP developer or whatever, instead of an AI researcher, as he employs a lot of people with those exact skills.
I made no comment about how Meta is doing in the AI race, so it’s a bit besides the point IMO, but you did make me smile :)
On that note, does anyone have the authority to speak about AI agents that would satisfy your requirements? It's not exactly quantum chromodynamics, it's glorified automation that costs a lot more and does it poorly.
I'm anti Zuck, but it's mostly because he's a lizard man with no morals. You are anti Zuck because he's mentioned that the promise of AI isn't going to the moon as promised. We are not the same.
No disrespect to anyone that worked or works at meta:
We can build a better version of his whole platform in 30 mins.