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"
This is broadly true, but there are performance-based layoffs sometimes. The trick is to know whether the next round is going to be a decimation or a restructuring.
If it's a restructuring, nothing you do will save you or condemn you. The decisions are made via spreadsheet, and it's unlikely anyone in your management chain will be involved. In fact, if you're a high performer who's accumulated a lot of compensation, that might paint a target on your back. If you're a protected class, you might get passed over to minimize the risk of legal action.
If it's a decimation, you'll probably have a good idea whether you'd survive.
The takeaway is keep your ear to the ground, maintain some familiarity with where your company spends its money and how executives make decisions, and you might be able to tell what kind of reduction is in the cards and prepare for it. And also, keep relationships up with recruiters.
At Google the random 2023 layoffs left no guarantee that anything you do mattered. Maybe your salary or mouse click activity was wrong, or maybe your entire org was doomed already and you'd be layed off or moved to Bard (Gemini) and your old team would disappear.
> working harder to avoid a layoff in a big company doesn't really work out
If this is where you're at in relation to your employer, that doesn't avoid a layoff, it accelerates the next round, whether or not you're in the batch is just a matter of time.
I think it explains everything, most companies are optimizing for “confused” - a class within the framework of people who work hard for no reason.
Not saying it’s the best but it’s certainly a way to do it, and probably becomes inevitable once the company is big enough.
I also think it closely parallels the practice of companies being actively hostile to their customers (or Pareto optimal as they might see it). Big companies would rather provide an offering that suits them, actively mistreating their customers, and just target customers that will go along with it rather than wasting time on customers that want some less profitable version of the offering.
This is commonly posted here, and is a hilarious read.
it's also about as valid a Freud or Horoscopes. Maybe some grains of truth, sure, but it's a view of the world filtered through old management textbooks then filtered through a comic and then filtered through the Office.
The problem with such a culture of fear is that the Good Ones(tm) take it as a hint and jump ship; as they're good, they have no trouble finding a job and leaving. But the Mediocre Ones(tm) know that they won't be able to find a comparable job, so they bring the knives out and it becomes a Lord of The Flies situation.
Thus the company gets hurt 2 ways: good ones leave, and bad ones stay, making the lives of everyone else miserable.
> 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.
In general it seems that companies are pretty bad about this type of logic. It's the same issue with trying to force attrition through "return to office" or similar things as a way of getting the cost cutting without having to pay severance; the people who will walk away are the ones who are have enough money to not need immediate employment (who are more likely to be from the higher-compensated members of the workforce, which in a competently-run company would be the most valuable ones) or who know they're in high enough demand to be able to find something else fairly quickly, so likely the ones who they should be trying hardest to retain. This is pretty much the exact opposite of what they actually want, which is to stop paying people who they don't need.
Yup, I was once one of those 10x engineers who had been “amazing at the job” but now I’m just collecting a paycheck, waiting for my layoff. I’ve been completely exhausted from the hundred thousand layoffs happening. I have friends at other companies who are just getting pips despite having great accomplishments. Employers have figured out that they don’t need to pay severance that way.
This seems a pretty distinct corporate culture in the US. The companies pamper you in the boom, but dump you in the bust. When times are good, they shower you with perks yet when times are slightly bad, they lay you off like a replaceable line item. This is quite different from Europe or Japan, for instance.
Idk, Tech did great during covid and during the RTO some people felt that from everything that changed on the working conditions since things got weird, nothing improved.
Some high profile companies or even portions of those stink. The vast majority I've worked for in the US are NOTHING like that, but "company behaves, invests in employee growth, and treats employees nice" doesn't get picked up by the news / on social media.
In fact in the US worked for a company bought by a Japanese company and really nothing really changed and the Japanese and American company were quite similar.
Culture my foot! It's a difference of law. American employment is "at-will", meaning they can legally fire you for "any reason or no reason", with the only asterisk being that "any reason" cannot violate civil-rights law (eg: they can't fire you for your race, sex, or age). European and Japanese law penalize laying off an onboarded, long-term, full-time employee who's already passed probation and acquired years of seniority.
I don't disagree exactly but I think if you pay enough, it matters less. Meta, Amazon, those places can afford to churn through people.
Personally I work at a very small company, I make changes largely how and when I wish ... lots of freedom. In a couple minutes the fix is in production and we're all good to go. It's great.
But I don't think the folks attracted to those big companies with big pay are applying for tiny co for less money. Actually I know they're not because I'm not seeing them in interviews.
To some extent folks make themselves hired guys for top dollar and if that's the deal there ya go.
I don't think in large companies or names like Meta, the top brass actually care what the moral amongst workers are.
I was at Accenture when they let a lot of people go. I watched very talented people just leave. Nothing changed. Management couldn't care less. They could always hire anyone they want/need to.
That's true to a point, but Amazon is finding out the hard way that eventually the well of people willing to put up with bullshit runs dry and it becomes much harder to get actually good talent or workers.
Meta needs to be careful IMO. The subset of capable people willing to work for a company as demonstrably evil as them is not infinite.
Plenty of people still work at Meta and are applying. Trying to get the good money, Meta on the CV, move on to another overpaying tech co, grind a few years and never have to work again.
I m also betting there are a ton of fairchildren skunkworkers walking out with some better version of the secret sauce right now. I actually expect a cambrien explosion of good, lean software after the big 4 died in the shit shell made from aixcrement.
> 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).
"That’s my only real motivation: not to be hassled. That, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."
You also kill the people who would have become highly-productive in the future. Their early career is defined by trauma that they learn is the norm, and they spend the rest of it reacting to real and imagined threats based on that norm.
This goes for the economy writ large. There are two generations of Americans who have been taught that housing is unstable, and that so is their paycheck, and that neither political party will lift a finger to help in any meaningful way (i.e., one that sacrifices donor sentiment and dollars). It's like the opposite of postwar Europe and Japan. How do you fix half the country not believing in your economic model?
Of course, and it's essentially an over-the-top parody of what's really happening: People aren't literally running the tool, but running pointless agentic queries where the primary purpose is to drive token usage up, not get actual work done.
Actually... I wouldn't be surprised if some people were actually running the tool and got away with it (or praised for getting the metric up) for a long time...
If you're being told explicitly to consume tokens then leaving it running while you try to get real work done sounds value-added to me. "Don't worry boss, no one's beating our team on the token leaderboard this week..."
If you don't think companies realize this I suggest you talk to some leaders. It's a very obvious issue with any layoff and is why they are usually the last option.
Unfortunately for boards and ceos, software engineers arent dumb. If they see your bottom line explode while their workload increases and their pay doesn't, they will not give you 10x. Honestly I'm surprised if people are even giving 0.5x in the current climate. Engineers need to stop trusting big companies to get their back.
> 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.
Instagram ads are the most consistently interesting ads I see online, and by an enormous margin. Ads suck, and I resent that their inherent purpose is to manipulate me, but they accomplish their goal better than any other ads I've ever seen.
I don't mean it in a "super bowl commercial" way; the products in Instagram ads are the consistently interesting part. It seems like a safe assumption that the advertisers for plenty of uninteresting products are trying to buy ads on Instagram, and that the advertisers for plenty of interesting products are trying to buy ads elsewhere. That means that Instagram's targeting is the differentiating factor.
I guess my argument is that it's not innovative or "hard" to sell ads to people who have given you massive amounts of personal and demographic information (voluntarily!)
I dunno if it’s exclusively his innovation, but Zuckerberg’s insight was that you could actually lie to your users by presenting yourself as trustworthy, while having malicious intent to violate their privacy by selling their data to advertisers, and there are no business repercussions for doing so.
Something something even Apple wants 10s of billion$ a year from it… building the big money machine is an innovation of a kind when only a few entities can really do it.
Zuckerberg was never a great strategist. The only good strategic decisions that he was ever made were the acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp. Almost everything else was either completely misguided, way too late, or executed so poorly that it could never work.
Meta is basically the Temu version of Google. Google also goes wrong a lot, and they are mostly resting on their big successes from years ago, but they still at least have the people and ability to produce top tier results every once in a while, while Meta was always second rate.
Zuckerberg may not be a great strategist, but your two exceptions (WhatsApp and instagram) easily cover all the failures. This is sort of like saying “he’s a bad hitter, except for the grand slam”. Or more appropriately for HN, like saying “he’s a bad venture investor, other than the two fund returning investments.”
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.
It does not have to be either one. Zuckerberg is simply not a great leader, apparently. This is not surprising. Few people can run big companies. There is a huge spectrum between "dimwitted" and "great CEO".
Personally I believe very few people to be actually evil, but it's a question of definition. To me, you need to be deliberate to be evil. E.g. Elon Musk isn't evil (I think), he's just insane. Peter Thiel might actually be evil, because his actions are deliberate and planned. Zuckerberg also doesn't strike me as evil, just incredibly socially inept (and maybe dimwitted).
But no, you're right, it doesn't have to be one or the other.
I think one reason Google has been so successful is that the original founders did what they knew best and built a great startup, then stepped down and left the company for people who know how to run a corporation. I imagine these are very different skill sets.
Zuckerberg isn’t dimwitted but Meta is probably at its peak as a company, lightning probably isn’t going to strike again, Metaverse and Meta AI are going nowhere no matter how much money he throws at it. But he’s not alone. Microsoft can spend and spend and it won’t help Copilot fly.
If you view AI as a way to downsize and cut payroll expenses without admitting that you must cut payroll expenses because the business is not booming, it makes sense.
Facebook was evil from its very inception. Its origin is a site for non-consensually rating women's faces. Zuckerberg personally called his initial users "dumb f*cks" for trusting him with their personal information and offered to to give that data to his friend. There was never any doubt about what kind of person Zuckerberg is.
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?
I think Elon owns a lot of real estate in these guys’ heads. When you have $200B+ in the bank, little else matters others than being seen as a titan of industry IMO. I think the fact that Musk has Tesla and Spacex (even with all his extra curricular activities) makes a guy like Zuckerberg seethe that he’s just “the internet websites guy”.
Yeah. Its crazy really. His legacy still carries Apple to new highs. And they will continue doing so, Tim did a great job preserving the values at Apple whilst scaling.
The thing is that metas massive consumer user base means that they haven’t lost the ai race I think. They don’t need to run the whole customer acquisition rat race. They’ve already got billions of customers who they can have using models within a month, they just need to keep pushing to create a model people are happy to use. Metas product compliments uniquely well with ai I think so they’re never really out of it until their users leave.
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 replace them with the best industry talent. They aren't going to refuse my money."
So he throws billions at a few 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.
> So he throws billions at a few top AI researchers, but they produce nothing of value.
so he spends 1% of yearly revenue on AI talent to catch up? we can't judge if they have produced nothing of value, no? They don't owe the world to open source their work?
Meta has plenty of failings, but taking risks and investing optimistically is not on my list. I guess the sentiment here on HN is probably biased by the addictive nature of its products.
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.”
Given that, the pattern I saw in my head was that Zuck sees a new toy, get excited and thinks it will change everything, invests in it, then admit he’s wrong, but at least we have an ads business to keep this whole thing rolling along. Rinse and repeat.
Reminds me a lot of crypto payments, metaverse / VR / AR.
A man trying to predict the future and being mostly incorrect while not really facing any consequences of being wrong. Always searching for the next big thing. Classic Silicon Valley tale.
I'm gunna say something crazy sounding that might be insensitive but is really obviously true to anyone that thinks about it for a few seconds. Meta throwing away a ton of really good talent is probably better for the world by a large degree. It is better if less very smart people work for them. We do not need more tracking algo's and unsafe uninterpretable AI (search 'meta coconut latent reasoning paper') made by a company that's fine with using the information of when teen girls delete selfies to sell them ads for beauty products. We don't.
ok, that is evil because this would inflict pain on people to no overall benefit. this is equivalent to saying "prisons should torture the worst criminals", which would be insane
> Working there is a choice
look into non-competition clauses, there's a real chance its not. also people who work there are not somehow vastly less moral than those that work at Google ect
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.
From what I've read from people with relevant experience, the only way to get a large organization change direction is to issue imperative decrees lacking nuance, because large organization by nature tend to be process heavy and are too incompetent to follow a nuanced direction.
If you have tens of thousands of employees the more complicated the communication is, the larger the variation of interpretation of its meaning, I suppose
I have a theory of this based mostly in time working in Meta's RL org on VR and Wearables (disclosure)....
There's a fundamental comms issue, I think, where you can only broadly communicate the least common denominator of what every involved person will understand. The "imperative decrees lacking nuance."
This is doubly hard if the thing is New, so it isn't broadly understood by default in the collective professions of the workforce. For example, we had a HECK of a time getting many web+mobile designers to understand 3D for spatial design like the game designers did. And vise versa, the nuances of building reusable UI and interaction frameworks when maintaining a software platform, for the games folks.
It's virtually impossible (no pun intended) to do something both New and Nuanced with a large group of people. You'll spend all the effort trying to get them to mutually understand a shared, nuanced vision on one hand, and constantly scrambling with their different interpretations producing incompatible parts of work, on the other.
I think you can ONLY really manage it with small groups, and it's a big part of why startups will continue running circles around big orgs, even with shared talent pool.
The only organizational structure that I think mitigates it is having strong top down direction, with vision and expertise at basically every level of the hierarchy. Because it's just taking the small group expert model and delegating it down to expanding levels of detail in execution. Apple seems to be wholly structured around this, and has occasionally done it very well.
Technically I think there IS another org struct that helps, but it's impractical for a number of Big Corp reasons.
A broad studio-like portfolio, where you mostly stay hands-off and willing to burn a ton of money in directions that won't work, and accept that they are out of your control. Stochastically let the best 10% of isolated plays rise on their own while 90% fail.
I think the VC model tends to do this relatively well. Large orgs though are inevitably culturally, or even legally -- "shareholders! fiscal responsibility! optimal deployment of capital!" -- INCAPABLE of being that intentionally lossy and hands-off.
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.
"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.
Buying a competitor to which you are losing in an emerging market is not innovative it's the opposite statement: We lack innovation internally and need to look outside the company.
And now we have Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Account Manager that links the usernames, features to post Instagram posts to Facebook also and vice versa, people sharing links to their Instagram/Facebook posts via WhatsApp statuses, ... what a mess.
As someone who made advances in two mostly independent fields (arguably 3), 100%!
But also, while I'm not mega rich, I'm very comfortable, if only to keep me from stirring the pot some more with my troublemaking nature. This is where Tom Lehrer's advice that selling out is OK if you get a good price comes into play. And yes, satire, but surprisingly good career advice in the real world.
It’s interesting to see how all these big techs are going from “hiring with best with attractive comp package” directly to “saving the most by replacing employees with something that sometimes does the right thing”.
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
Smartest folks in the room. Greatest capital allocators we have. Maybe that’s what happens when systems not only permit but encourage and reward failing upwards.
The bigger story here is that the AI agents were not effective. This is a huge admission and explains why Anthropic, OpenAI, and now Microsoft are creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). It ties in with Meta becoming a GPU cloud to sell "excess AI compute". xai and now meta renting excess AI compute and shovel-vendors are trying to keep the embers alive with free tokens in a last-ditch effort.
Missing in here is the nuance that Meta was absolutely not too late to the first AI boom with Llama, and at one point were the clear leaders of the OSS alternative LLM space. But they blew it up themselves with the disastrous Llama 4 release which included, amongst immense self-imposed delays, lies on benchmarks. No wonder nobody wants to use their tech.
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".
In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user.
Conversations he was having “with our top people” when they started planning the restructuring in January and February “were that they were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt,” Zuckerberg said.
If Zuckerberg is seeing problems, that means other large tech firms that also followed the siren call of AI transformation and opted to quickly shake things up are likely feeling similar pains.
> Amazon now mandates senior engineers to sign off on AI-generated code
This will never work because then you are expecting the more experienced people to be reviewing endless slop coming from less experienced people. They will either do a bad job to comply or just quit
Not impressed with the quote from Zuckerberg. I see it as a very shallow analysis. I think the stated goal of Agentic development is too amorphous to know what might work. I assume they thought there were too many voices in the development so they had layoffs only to find that wasn't the issue. Why would layoffs make work happen faster.
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.
Except that LLMs are only being trained to do things that humans can do, not things that humans cannot do.
I have heard a lot of claims like this, where we cannot imagine the benefits of AI because the work will look so different to how it is now, but I have yet to see that actually demonstrated anywhere.
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.
> Most times were spent juggling paperwork, bouncing back and forth on code reviews, negotiating ambiguous requirements, and attending pointless meetings.
you are only as fast as your slowest part. it seems so many execs and managers are clueless about things people discovered decades ago (deming, goldratt, demarco et al)
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.
I always found arguments for or against such technological advancements meaningless, if we don't specify what timeframes we are talking about. Sometimes I have the impression that people who disagree are simply thinking in different timeframes.
For me, only short- and sometimes mid-term timeframes are practical in such deabtes. Long-term is interesting, but more in the realm of science fiction.
In the context of AGI, is it inevitable eventually?
Sure, I would agree, unless some catastrophic event puts back our technological advancement.
IMO, don't see the path to AGI with the current tech, though. All current SOTA agents are still LLM based with all their flaws (limited reasoning, generalization, incomplete world model, hallucinations, ...). At their core, they are still next token predictors with a limited context.
Most of the advances in AI in the past 2 years are in post-training and harnesses.
I'd expect a different core technology than just an LLM in order to get to AGI.
> In the context of AGI, is it inevitable eventually? Sure, I would agree, unless some catastrophic event puts back our technological advancement.
What if it’s not a catastrophic event, but technological progress just asymptotically approaches 0? What if there is a limit to layers upon layers of abstraction and at some point it just becomes too complicated to keep going?
What if we all somehow decide that we don’t want AGI? It seems impossible now but a lot of people really seem to hate AI. What if that sentiment grows globally the next 50-100 years?
That’s all ignoring the possibility that the materialists are wrong. Around 80% of the world believes in some kind of soul or spirit. If anything materialism is a bit of a fringe belief.
> What if it’s not a catastrophic event, but technological progress just asymptotically approaches 0? What if there is a limit to layers upon layers of abstraction and at some point it just becomes too complicated to keep going?
Looking at history, there is not really an argument for progress to stop in the long term.
I think I get what you mean, that further advancement gets more and more complicated and the human mind gets to a limit what it can comprehend and reason about. But lots of research and progress have been augmented by technology in the past 70 years or so, and I don't see a reason why it wont continue along that path.
I agree that there is a limit to everything. But it is almost impossible to forsee when and where that is going to happen.
> I agree that there is a limit to everything. But it is almost impossible to forsee when and where that is going to happen.
That’s my point. We have no reason to assume that AGI exists within that limit. Certainly not enough to confidently state that it’s inevitable.
> I think I get what you mean, that further advancement gets more and more complicated and the human mind gets to a limit what it can comprehend and reason about.
That’s exactly what I meant!
>But lots of research and progress have been augmented by technology in the past 70 years or so, and I don't see a reason why it wont continue along that path
The prohibition against unjust killing is pretty much universal. What is or isn’t unjust is variable, but all societies have the concept of and prohibition against unjust killing.
It’s true that if AGI is easy for a small group of people to build prohibition isn’t really possible. But if AGI takes a massive data center and billions of dollars, it could be.
What is our definition of progress ? We were progressing against world hunger but we decided to shut down efforts against it last year. Is it progress to invest $1T into semi-accurate plagiarism machines trained on stolen data ?
Sadly, a lot of peoples definition of progress is "number go up". The stock market is booming and yet most people are poorer than they were in the past because those numbers and that "progress" is only in the interest of a very small number of people completely disconnected from the society they live in.
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?
Because we don’t want to be left behind as members of the permanent underclass. Unless you own the god machine or work on improving it you don’t matter.
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.
What it boils down to is that speed without direction is at best a waste of time and at worst a recipe for a roadrunner shaped hole in a solid cliff wall. Velocity is a vector, speed is a scalar. AI may help with speed, but it sure as hell doesn't help you move the right way.
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?
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.
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.
All of these tech companies have fallen into the Wall Street trap and it will be their ultimate undoing. Meta probably more than most.
I feel like a broken record but Google cracked this particular nut in the 2000s by creating an environment where people could flourish who would otherwise suffer in Corporate America. Google studied this and found in the 2010s that psychological safety was the number one factor in team success [1].
Corporate America typically has what's called an "up or out" mentality. Jack Welch dogmatic thinking rules here. Fire the bottom 5% every year and if you don't get promoted within a certain period, get rid of you because you've reached your potential. This is what created things like stack ranking (which is nothing more than a popularity contest) and smoothing of performance ratings. The last one is toxic because a certain percentage of ratings have to be subpar (ie below "Meets Expectations"). All of this destroys collaboration and creates an environment where those who are more political and more likable rise to the top.
And guess what? Your autistic engineers who otherwise flourished in early Google can't function effectively in such an environment. And these are the people who otherwise become subject-matter experts in storage systems, networking and other niche topics.
At some point innovation ends and the only way to satisfy the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is to raise prices and/or cut costs. So all these companies have engaged in the suppression of wages despite being wildly profitable on a per-employee basis.
As for Zuckerberg in particular, he clearly has no idea where to go with Meta and the AI division is a disaster. The posterchild for bad decision-making and leadership was the Metaverse because $70B+ was spent on an idea with no product-market fit. There were other less expensive boondoggles (eg Libra).
So Zuck hired like crazy in the pandemic because that's what everyone else did and has now engaged in massive layoffs because, well, that's what everyone else is doing and he has no idea what to do with those people. Notice how it's leadership errors that are massively disruptive to people's lives but they suffer none of the consequences when they're responsible? Yeah, me too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Has Zuckerberg ever deliberately invented a successful product using skill and taste?
His original moneymaker was sort of happenstance, a right-place-right-time quick hack that lucked out, got traction, and raised enough money to scale out, BIG, with essentially the same concept that he lucked upon.
Instagram and WhatsApp, both absolutely successful beyond imagination, were acquisitions. Same goes for Oculus.
Has Zuckerberg/Meta ever once themselves deliberately sat down and invented and built something great masses of people want? Facebook doesn't count; that was happenstance. He didn't hack that together in a day to get a billion users, or perhaps even to build a "product" at all.
They tried doing hardware with that Echo Show knockoff, afaik nobody really bought it. They tried the metaverse thing, and, again, nobody really wanted it. (I'm still not convinced it doesn't have legs; the way they did it was obviously not it.)
Google.com, Chrome, and Gmail we all very tasteful products. Gmail won more on storage space, but each of the products were distinctly fairly clean design for their time.
> 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
This article is classic 20/20 hindsight that you always see when a business decision doesn't pan out. From the author:
> The self-created tragedy of Meta is that the company is loath to invent new products. Instead, Meta’s management more or less relies on “vibes” to govern its decisions, and those vibes are often either wrong or far too late. The most pertinent example of the former is the ill-fated metaverse, which was developed solely on the (unbelievable) whim that the pandemic would last forever — or at least far longer than it actually did — and people would become accustomed to replacing in-person interaction with virtual reality. It was precisely at this moment, roughly around mid-2020, that Meta (then Facebook) disintegrated from a social media company into a Ship of Theseus that still technically operated its core social platforms but fundamentally was distracted by a red herring. Vibes-based management.
This is bullshit. All businesses need to take calculated risks, which sometimes don't pan out. The reason Zuck went full bore into VR/AR is because he desperately understood (correctly, IMO) that not owning a major computing platform was a huge risk. Microsoft had Windows on the desktop, Apple and Google had iOS and Android on mobile. When iOS restricted advertiser tracking (requiring opt in, which nearly every same person thought was a good thing) it cost Facebook a ton of money. So Zuckerberg made a big bet that VR/AR would be the next big computing platform.
Except the bet flopped. Turned out very few people want a big pair of goggles strapped to their face all day. But Facebook wasn't alone in making a bad bet - Apple spent billions on Vision Pro, and that's basically dead.
The problem isn't that Facebook made a big bet that flopped, and that alone isn't "vibes management". The problem is that since Zuck has majority voting power, basically all decisions come down to him and nothing is tempered by the expectations/desires of others, so you get this "pendulum" management as I call it. Sometimes you have these visionary leaders and it works out, but a lot of times it crashes over time. Musk runs his companies largely the same way, and while obviously it has worked out well for his companies and shareholders, it's widely known now that employees at his companies see a primary task as "managing Musk". Tesla's self-driving capabilities are far behind Waymo despite having a lot more driving data, and a big issue is Musk's insistance on cameras only. I've seen comments here on HN that any self-respecting AI leader would never work for X AI because the marching orders are basically "grok has to say what Musk wants".
Having an "emperor CEO" means the company can move quickly, but that goes for both beneficial and detrimental directions.
Zuckerbergs ineffectiveness was evident long before the examples mentioned in this article.
He failed to counter the rise of Twitter, failed to combat misinformation during elections, directly contributing to the result of the brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in 2016
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"
This is broadly true, but there are performance-based layoffs sometimes. The trick is to know whether the next round is going to be a decimation or a restructuring.
If it's a restructuring, nothing you do will save you or condemn you. The decisions are made via spreadsheet, and it's unlikely anyone in your management chain will be involved. In fact, if you're a high performer who's accumulated a lot of compensation, that might paint a target on your back. If you're a protected class, you might get passed over to minimize the risk of legal action.
If it's a decimation, you'll probably have a good idea whether you'd survive.
The takeaway is keep your ear to the ground, maintain some familiarity with where your company spends its money and how executives make decisions, and you might be able to tell what kind of reduction is in the cards and prepare for it. And also, keep relationships up with recruiters.
At Google the random 2023 layoffs left no guarantee that anything you do mattered. Maybe your salary or mouse click activity was wrong, or maybe your entire org was doomed already and you'd be layed off or moved to Bard (Gemini) and your old team would disappear.
> working harder to avoid a layoff in a big company doesn't really work out
If this is where you're at in relation to your employer, that doesn't avoid a layoff, it accelerates the next round, whether or not you're in the batch is just a matter of time.
Read “The Gervais Principle” https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
I think it explains everything, most companies are optimizing for “confused” - a class within the framework of people who work hard for no reason.
Not saying it’s the best but it’s certainly a way to do it, and probably becomes inevitable once the company is big enough.
I also think it closely parallels the practice of companies being actively hostile to their customers (or Pareto optimal as they might see it). Big companies would rather provide an offering that suits them, actively mistreating their customers, and just target customers that will go along with it rather than wasting time on customers that want some less profitable version of the offering.
This is commonly posted here, and is a hilarious read.
it's also about as valid a Freud or Horoscopes. Maybe some grains of truth, sure, but it's a view of the world filtered through old management textbooks then filtered through a comic and then filtered through the Office.
It's Dilbert meets Simulation vs. Simulacra.
Can you talk more about Dilbert + Simulacra?
The problem with such a culture of fear is that the Good Ones(tm) take it as a hint and jump ship; as they're good, they have no trouble finding a job and leaving. But the Mediocre Ones(tm) know that they won't be able to find a comparable job, so they bring the knives out and it becomes a Lord of The Flies situation.
Thus the company gets hurt 2 ways: good ones leave, and bad ones stay, making the lives of everyone else miserable.
Exactly. With the broad layoffs some companies do, you learn the company doesn’t value you, so why should you value the company?
You should not.
Jobs are ephemeral, as companies consider employees to be replaceable / expendable cogs in the machine.
Keeping expectations equal makes sure all parties benefit. Companies base their decisions on revenue and cost, employees should as well.
Any past illusions that loyalty to a company has personal beneift are long since dispelled.
> 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.
In general it seems that companies are pretty bad about this type of logic. It's the same issue with trying to force attrition through "return to office" or similar things as a way of getting the cost cutting without having to pay severance; the people who will walk away are the ones who are have enough money to not need immediate employment (who are more likely to be from the higher-compensated members of the workforce, which in a competently-run company would be the most valuable ones) or who know they're in high enough demand to be able to find something else fairly quickly, so likely the ones who they should be trying hardest to retain. This is pretty much the exact opposite of what they actually want, which is to stop paying people who they don't need.
Yup, I was once one of those 10x engineers who had been “amazing at the job” but now I’m just collecting a paycheck, waiting for my layoff. I’ve been completely exhausted from the hundred thousand layoffs happening. I have friends at other companies who are just getting pips despite having great accomplishments. Employers have figured out that they don’t need to pay severance that way.
This seems a pretty distinct corporate culture in the US. The companies pamper you in the boom, but dump you in the bust. When times are good, they shower you with perks yet when times are slightly bad, they lay you off like a replaceable line item. This is quite different from Europe or Japan, for instance.
Idk, Tech did great during covid and during the RTO some people felt that from everything that changed on the working conditions since things got weird, nothing improved.
Some high profile companies or even portions of those stink. The vast majority I've worked for in the US are NOTHING like that, but "company behaves, invests in employee growth, and treats employees nice" doesn't get picked up by the news / on social media.
In fact in the US worked for a company bought by a Japanese company and really nothing really changed and the Japanese and American company were quite similar.
Culture my foot! It's a difference of law. American employment is "at-will", meaning they can legally fire you for "any reason or no reason", with the only asterisk being that "any reason" cannot violate civil-rights law (eg: they can't fire you for your race, sex, or age). European and Japanese law penalize laying off an onboarded, long-term, full-time employee who's already passed probation and acquired years of seniority.
I don't disagree exactly but I think if you pay enough, it matters less. Meta, Amazon, those places can afford to churn through people.
Personally I work at a very small company, I make changes largely how and when I wish ... lots of freedom. In a couple minutes the fix is in production and we're all good to go. It's great.
But I don't think the folks attracted to those big companies with big pay are applying for tiny co for less money. Actually I know they're not because I'm not seeing them in interviews.
To some extent folks make themselves hired guys for top dollar and if that's the deal there ya go.
I don't think in large companies or names like Meta, the top brass actually care what the moral amongst workers are. I was at Accenture when they let a lot of people go. I watched very talented people just leave. Nothing changed. Management couldn't care less. They could always hire anyone they want/need to.
That's true to a point, but Amazon is finding out the hard way that eventually the well of people willing to put up with bullshit runs dry and it becomes much harder to get actually good talent or workers.
Meta needs to be careful IMO. The subset of capable people willing to work for a company as demonstrably evil as them is not infinite.
Oh I have not heard about the Amazon issue. Can you please point me to an article or post detailing? Now I'm very curious.
This [0] refers to their warehouse workers, but I've heard of similar problems during the earlier 2020s engineer hiring boom (on reddit iirc)
0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/22/amazon-wo...
Plenty of people still work at Meta and are applying. Trying to get the good money, Meta on the CV, move on to another overpaying tech co, grind a few years and never have to work again.
I m also betting there are a ton of fairchildren skunkworkers walking out with some better version of the secret sauce right now. I actually expect a cambrien explosion of good, lean software after the big 4 died in the shit shell made from aixcrement.
> 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.
A percentage of our 10x engineers just left.
Morale problems can be just enough to make your best people pick up the phone when recruiters call.
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
"That’s my only real motivation: not to be hassled. That, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."
You also kill the people who would have become highly-productive in the future. Their early career is defined by trauma that they learn is the norm, and they spend the rest of it reacting to real and imagined threats based on that norm.
This goes for the economy writ large. There are two generations of Americans who have been taught that housing is unstable, and that so is their paycheck, and that neither political party will lift a finger to help in any meaningful way (i.e., one that sacrifices donor sentiment and dollars). It's like the opposite of postwar Europe and Japan. How do you fix half the country not believing in your economic model?
Using that tool has gotta be a fireable offense, right?
Of course, and it's essentially an over-the-top parody of what's really happening: People aren't literally running the tool, but running pointless agentic queries where the primary purpose is to drive token usage up, not get actual work done.
Actually... I wouldn't be surprised if some people were actually running the tool and got away with it (or praised for getting the metric up) for a long time...
If you're being told explicitly to consume tokens then leaving it running while you try to get real work done sounds value-added to me. "Don't worry boss, no one's beating our team on the token leaderboard this week..."
Time and time again, we get shown that the folks running companies still don't understand Goodhart's law
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
If you don't think companies realize this I suggest you talk to some leaders. It's a very obvious issue with any layoff and is why they are usually the last option.
What options did they go through before the current cross-industry trend became massive recurring layoffs then I wonder
Unfortunately for boards and ceos, software engineers arent dumb. If they see your bottom line explode while their workload increases and their pay doesn't, they will not give you 10x. Honestly I'm surprised if people are even giving 0.5x in the current climate. Engineers need to stop trusting big companies to get their back.
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.
Ya but he’s not young anymore. By his own logic he should step down and let a Stanford dropout run things.
Lol. Good one!
Didn’t he famously trash folks over 30 years back? He has really done nothing innovative outside of ads.
and even that is mostly attributable to Sandberg
What’s innovative about ads?
Instagram ads are the most consistently interesting ads I see online, and by an enormous margin. Ads suck, and I resent that their inherent purpose is to manipulate me, but they accomplish their goal better than any other ads I've ever seen.
> Instagram ads are the most consistently interesting ads I see online
The credit for that belongs to the advertisers not Instagram.
I don't mean it in a "super bowl commercial" way; the products in Instagram ads are the consistently interesting part. It seems like a safe assumption that the advertisers for plenty of uninteresting products are trying to buy ads on Instagram, and that the advertisers for plenty of interesting products are trying to buy ads elsewhere. That means that Instagram's targeting is the differentiating factor.
I guess my argument is that it's not innovative or "hard" to sell ads to people who have given you massive amounts of personal and demographic information (voluntarily!)
Both Google and Amazon know a great deal about me and my purchasing habits. Neither shows me ads that feel very relevant.
Well, I was trying to be a little charitable
I dunno if it’s exclusively his innovation, but Zuckerberg’s insight was that you could actually lie to your users by presenting yourself as trustworthy, while having malicious intent to violate their privacy by selling their data to advertisers, and there are no business repercussions for doing so.
That's literally just a con. People have been doing this since the dawn of history. The only unique bit is the sheer scale it's happening at now
Zuckerberg influenced people to hand over their personal data.
His team then enabled lots of people to become influencers. Those influencers influence their followers to buy products (aka generate ad-revenue).
And that is the pure essence of the business model.
Something something even Apple wants 10s of billion$ a year from it… building the big money machine is an innovation of a kind when only a few entities can really do it.
Meta’s ad product is incredibly innovative. Just look at the fallout from ATT to see an obvious example
Zuckerberg was never a great strategist. The only good strategic decisions that he was ever made were the acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp. Almost everything else was either completely misguided, way too late, or executed so poorly that it could never work.
Meta is basically the Temu version of Google. Google also goes wrong a lot, and they are mostly resting on their big successes from years ago, but they still at least have the people and ability to produce top tier results every once in a while, while Meta was always second rate.
Zuckerberg may not be a great strategist, but your two exceptions (WhatsApp and instagram) easily cover all the failures. This is sort of like saying “he’s a bad hitter, except for the grand slam”. Or more appropriately for HN, like saying “he’s a bad venture investor, other than the two fund returning investments.”
Instagram and what’s app were two of the best purchases in American history though. It’s hard to overlook how well they worked out
they really should have been blocked by anti-trust though
>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.
It does not have to be either one. Zuckerberg is simply not a great leader, apparently. This is not surprising. Few people can run big companies. There is a huge spectrum between "dimwitted" and "great CEO".
The way the sentence is structured implies he is evil either way. He is either (dim witted and evil) or (just evil).
Personally I believe very few people to be actually evil, but it's a question of definition. To me, you need to be deliberate to be evil. E.g. Elon Musk isn't evil (I think), he's just insane. Peter Thiel might actually be evil, because his actions are deliberate and planned. Zuckerberg also doesn't strike me as evil, just incredibly socially inept (and maybe dimwitted).
But no, you're right, it doesn't have to be one or the other.
I think one reason Google has been so successful is that the original founders did what they knew best and built a great startup, then stepped down and left the company for people who know how to run a corporation. I imagine these are very different skill sets.
> 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.
Zuckerberg isn’t dimwitted but Meta is probably at its peak as a company, lightning probably isn’t going to strike again, Metaverse and Meta AI are going nowhere no matter how much money he throws at it. But he’s not alone. Microsoft can spend and spend and it won’t help Copilot fly.
People gonna start using Bing, any day now. OTOH, Google's got this reputation for killing off products.
It's possible for someone to be good at one thing and bad at another.
If you view AI as a way to downsize and cut payroll expenses without admitting that you must cut payroll expenses because the business is not booming, it makes sense.
Given his war on the whistleblower and what we learned about Meta and Zuckerberg from her he is evil too
Facebook was evil from its very inception. Its origin is a site for non-consensually rating women's faces. Zuckerberg personally called his initial users "dumb f*cks" for trusting him with their personal information and offered to to give that data to his friend. There was never any doubt about what kind of person Zuckerberg is.
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?
I think Elon owns a lot of real estate in these guys’ heads. When you have $200B+ in the bank, little else matters others than being seen as a titan of industry IMO. I think the fact that Musk has Tesla and Spacex (even with all his extra curricular activities) makes a guy like Zuckerberg seethe that he’s just “the internet websites guy”.
Musk is not in their heads, the guy who died in 2011 is in their heads. You know the founder of Apple…
Yeah. Its crazy really. His legacy still carries Apple to new highs. And they will continue doing so, Tim did a great job preserving the values at Apple whilst scaling.
The thing is that metas massive consumer user base means that they haven’t lost the ai race I think. They don’t need to run the whole customer acquisition rat race. They’ve already got billions of customers who they can have using models within a month, they just need to keep pushing to create a model people are happy to use. Metas product compliments uniquely well with ai I think so they’re never really out of it until their users leave.
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.
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 replace them with the best industry talent. They aren't going to refuse my money."
So he throws billions at a few 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.
The guy is out of touch with society.
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.
> So he throws billions at a few top AI researchers, but they produce nothing of value.
so he spends 1% of yearly revenue on AI talent to catch up? we can't judge if they have produced nothing of value, no? They don't owe the world to open source their work?
Meta has plenty of failings, but taking risks and investing optimistically is not on my list. I guess the sentiment here on HN is probably biased by the addictive nature of its products.
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.”
I literally supported the claim by linking to this reporting, which effectively says the same thing.
(And yes, I did make an HN account for this.) https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destr...
Thank you for the original.
Given that, the pattern I saw in my head was that Zuck sees a new toy, get excited and thinks it will change everything, invests in it, then admit he’s wrong, but at least we have an ads business to keep this whole thing rolling along. Rinse and repeat.
Reminds me a lot of crypto payments, metaverse / VR / AR.
A man trying to predict the future and being mostly incorrect while not really facing any consequences of being wrong. Always searching for the next big thing. Classic Silicon Valley tale.
I'm gunna say something crazy sounding that might be insensitive but is really obviously true to anyone that thinks about it for a few seconds. Meta throwing away a ton of really good talent is probably better for the world by a large degree. It is better if less very smart people work for them. We do not need more tracking algo's and unsafe uninterpretable AI (search 'meta coconut latent reasoning paper') made by a company that's fine with using the information of when teen girls delete selfies to sell them ads for beauty products. We don't.
This is gonna sound evil but idc.
If I hire ex-Meta guys its for one reason only: squeeze them dry to repent their sins. Literally squeeze, squeeze... and squeeze and til they quit.
Personally I wish others would do it too. Working there is a choice.
ok, that is evil because this would inflict pain on people to no overall benefit. this is equivalent to saying "prisons should torture the worst criminals", which would be insane
> Working there is a choice
look into non-competition clauses, there's a real chance its not. also people who work there are not somehow vastly less moral than those that work at Google ect
as below - dont care
Two wrongs don’t make a right my friend.
dont care
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.
From what I've read from people with relevant experience, the only way to get a large organization change direction is to issue imperative decrees lacking nuance, because large organization by nature tend to be process heavy and are too incompetent to follow a nuanced direction.
If you have tens of thousands of employees the more complicated the communication is, the larger the variation of interpretation of its meaning, I suppose
I have a theory of this based mostly in time working in Meta's RL org on VR and Wearables (disclosure)....
There's a fundamental comms issue, I think, where you can only broadly communicate the least common denominator of what every involved person will understand. The "imperative decrees lacking nuance."
This is doubly hard if the thing is New, so it isn't broadly understood by default in the collective professions of the workforce. For example, we had a HECK of a time getting many web+mobile designers to understand 3D for spatial design like the game designers did. And vise versa, the nuances of building reusable UI and interaction frameworks when maintaining a software platform, for the games folks.
It's virtually impossible (no pun intended) to do something both New and Nuanced with a large group of people. You'll spend all the effort trying to get them to mutually understand a shared, nuanced vision on one hand, and constantly scrambling with their different interpretations producing incompatible parts of work, on the other.
I think you can ONLY really manage it with small groups, and it's a big part of why startups will continue running circles around big orgs, even with shared talent pool.
The only organizational structure that I think mitigates it is having strong top down direction, with vision and expertise at basically every level of the hierarchy. Because it's just taking the small group expert model and delegating it down to expanding levels of detail in execution. Apple seems to be wholly structured around this, and has occasionally done it very well.
Technically I think there IS another org struct that helps, but it's impractical for a number of Big Corp reasons.
A broad studio-like portfolio, where you mostly stay hands-off and willing to burn a ton of money in directions that won't work, and accept that they are out of your control. Stochastically let the best 10% of isolated plays rise on their own while 90% fail.
I think the VC model tends to do this relatively well. Large orgs though are inevitably culturally, or even legally -- "shareholders! fiscal responsibility! optimal deployment of capital!" -- INCAPABLE of being that intentionally lossy and hands-off.
So… Amazon?
Yeah, makes a lot of sense.
CEOs are so afraid of being Innovators Dilemma’d that they make rash moves before they have any data.
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.
"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
Buying a competitor to which you are losing in an emerging market is not innovative it's the opposite statement: We lack innovation internally and need to look outside the company.
And now we have Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Account Manager that links the usernames, features to post Instagram posts to Facebook also and vice versa, people sharing links to their Instagram/Facebook posts via WhatsApp statuses, ... what a mess.
The word innovative does n9t mean anything anymore. It became synonym with "earns a lot of money".
People who innovate without becomming super rich dont get ackwnowledged as innovative. CEO buys or copy an app - innovative.
As someone who made advances in two mostly independent fields (arguably 3), 100%!
But also, while I'm not mega rich, I'm very comfortable, if only to keep me from stirring the pot some more with my troublemaking nature. This is where Tom Lehrer's advice that selling out is OK if you get a good price comes into play. And yes, satire, but surprisingly good career advice in the real world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz-Aed356kA
It’s interesting to see how all these big techs are going from “hiring with best with attractive comp package” directly to “saving the most by replacing employees with something that sometimes does the right thing”.
> 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.
It's not like he was a decent person before he got rich.
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.
Smartest folks in the room. Greatest capital allocators we have. Maybe that’s what happens when systems not only permit but encourage and reward failing upwards.
The bigger story here is that the AI agents were not effective. This is a huge admission and explains why Anthropic, OpenAI, and now Microsoft are creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). It ties in with Meta becoming a GPU cloud to sell "excess AI compute". xai and now meta renting excess AI compute and shovel-vendors are trying to keep the embers alive with free tokens in a last-ditch effort.
At some point, after repeated rounds of ineffective hire-and-fire cycles, it becomes impossible to avoid admitting that the problem is the management.
The root cause is workers not unionizing and forming worker-owned co-ops rather than depending on the whims of idiot-jerks running corporations.
Missing in here is the nuance that Meta was absolutely not too late to the first AI boom with Llama, and at one point were the clear leaders of the OSS alternative LLM space. But they blew it up themselves with the disastrous Llama 4 release which included, amongst immense self-imposed delays, lies on benchmarks. No wonder nobody wants to use their tech.
Lives were destroyed, families were in turmoil, but look at the bright side: it was a learning moment.
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.
math talent is over-rated.
I know many math talented guys - olympiad level. What are they doing 30 yrs on? nothing special.
The unfortunate truth for many is (and the lie they got told) - none of that stuff has any relevance to large contributions in the economy.
That quote doesn't support the headline
In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user.
Conversations he was having “with our top people” when they started planning the restructuring in January and February “were that they were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt,” Zuckerberg said.
If Zuckerberg is seeing problems, that means other large tech firms that also followed the siren call of AI transformation and opted to quickly shake things up are likely feeling similar pains.
For instance, Andy Jassy spouted very similar language in his 2025 letter to Amazon shareholders (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and...) which was followed by layoffs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46748603).
What have we seen since? Lots of stuff breaking, from seller-focused tech (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?s...) to cloud services. Amazon now mandates senior engineers to sign off on AI-generated code (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017), even though that will interfere with the mandate to "move fast and operate the like the world's biggest startup."
> Amazon now mandates senior engineers to sign off on AI-generated code
This will never work because then you are expecting the more experienced people to be reviewing endless slop coming from less experienced people. They will either do a bad job to comply or just quit
/s (just in case)
Not impressed with the quote from Zuckerberg. I see it as a very shallow analysis. I think the stated goal of Agentic development is too amorphous to know what might work. I assume they thought there were too many voices in the development so they had layoffs only to find that wasn't the issue. Why would layoffs make work happen faster.
Seems like a lot of CEOs overestimated the speed of AI, but also it is inevitable.
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.
Except that LLMs are only being trained to do things that humans can do, not things that humans cannot do.
I have heard a lot of claims like this, where we cannot imagine the benefits of AI because the work will look so different to how it is now, but I have yet to see that actually demonstrated anywhere.
This is nonsense.
Every new technology we discover from here on out has a compressed lifecycle.
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.
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.
Is AGI really inevitable ? Claiming something is inevitable is a great way to disarm critical thinking.
I always found arguments for or against such technological advancements meaningless, if we don't specify what timeframes we are talking about. Sometimes I have the impression that people who disagree are simply thinking in different timeframes. For me, only short- and sometimes mid-term timeframes are practical in such deabtes. Long-term is interesting, but more in the realm of science fiction.
In the context of AGI, is it inevitable eventually? Sure, I would agree, unless some catastrophic event puts back our technological advancement.
IMO, don't see the path to AGI with the current tech, though. All current SOTA agents are still LLM based with all their flaws (limited reasoning, generalization, incomplete world model, hallucinations, ...). At their core, they are still next token predictors with a limited context.
Most of the advances in AI in the past 2 years are in post-training and harnesses.
I'd expect a different core technology than just an LLM in order to get to AGI.
> In the context of AGI, is it inevitable eventually? Sure, I would agree, unless some catastrophic event puts back our technological advancement.
What if it’s not a catastrophic event, but technological progress just asymptotically approaches 0? What if there is a limit to layers upon layers of abstraction and at some point it just becomes too complicated to keep going?
What if we all somehow decide that we don’t want AGI? It seems impossible now but a lot of people really seem to hate AI. What if that sentiment grows globally the next 50-100 years?
That’s all ignoring the possibility that the materialists are wrong. Around 80% of the world believes in some kind of soul or spirit. If anything materialism is a bit of a fringe belief.
> What if it’s not a catastrophic event, but technological progress just asymptotically approaches 0? What if there is a limit to layers upon layers of abstraction and at some point it just becomes too complicated to keep going?
Looking at history, there is not really an argument for progress to stop in the long term. I think I get what you mean, that further advancement gets more and more complicated and the human mind gets to a limit what it can comprehend and reason about. But lots of research and progress have been augmented by technology in the past 70 years or so, and I don't see a reason why it wont continue along that path. I agree that there is a limit to everything. But it is almost impossible to forsee when and where that is going to happen.
> I agree that there is a limit to everything. But it is almost impossible to forsee when and where that is going to happen.
That’s my point. We have no reason to assume that AGI exists within that limit. Certainly not enough to confidently state that it’s inevitable.
> I think I get what you mean, that further advancement gets more and more complicated and the human mind gets to a limit what it can comprehend and reason about.
That’s exactly what I meant!
>But lots of research and progress have been augmented by technology in the past 70 years or so, and I don't see a reason why it wont continue along that path
I agree that we’ve probably got a long way to go.
What is a globally accepted sentiment found in every nation, tribe, village, and domicile across the globe today?
The prohibition against unjust killing is pretty much universal. What is or isn’t unjust is variable, but all societies have the concept of and prohibition against unjust killing.
It’s true that if AGI is easy for a small group of people to build prohibition isn’t really possible. But if AGI takes a massive data center and billions of dollars, it could be.
About as 'inevitable' as fusion power, virtual reality and flying cars I'd say. The actual technological revolutions are usually less 'obvious'.
Well, if progress stops it can be avoided..
What is our definition of progress ? We were progressing against world hunger but we decided to shut down efforts against it last year. Is it progress to invest $1T into semi-accurate plagiarism machines trained on stolen data ?
Sadly, a lot of peoples definition of progress is "number go up". The stock market is booming and yet most people are poorer than they were in the past because those numbers and that "progress" is only in the interest of a very small number of people completely disconnected from the society they live in.
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?
Good point!
Give your arguments for it not being inevitable if you question it.
Well if it's inevitable, why are we working toward it?
Because we don’t want to be left behind as members of the permanent underclass. Unless you own the god machine or work on improving it you don’t matter.
Why will those groups matter? Why would it need someone working to improve itself?
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.
There is no reason to believe that it is inevitable.
What it boils down to is that speed without direction is at best a waste of time and at worst a recipe for a roadrunner shaped hole in a solid cliff wall. Velocity is a vector, speed is a scalar. AI may help with speed, but it sure as hell doesn't help you move the right way.
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.
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?
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.
Expiration of sun is also inevitable
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.
All of these tech companies have fallen into the Wall Street trap and it will be their ultimate undoing. Meta probably more than most.
I feel like a broken record but Google cracked this particular nut in the 2000s by creating an environment where people could flourish who would otherwise suffer in Corporate America. Google studied this and found in the 2010s that psychological safety was the number one factor in team success [1].
Corporate America typically has what's called an "up or out" mentality. Jack Welch dogmatic thinking rules here. Fire the bottom 5% every year and if you don't get promoted within a certain period, get rid of you because you've reached your potential. This is what created things like stack ranking (which is nothing more than a popularity contest) and smoothing of performance ratings. The last one is toxic because a certain percentage of ratings have to be subpar (ie below "Meets Expectations"). All of this destroys collaboration and creates an environment where those who are more political and more likable rise to the top.
And guess what? Your autistic engineers who otherwise flourished in early Google can't function effectively in such an environment. And these are the people who otherwise become subject-matter experts in storage systems, networking and other niche topics.
At some point innovation ends and the only way to satisfy the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is to raise prices and/or cut costs. So all these companies have engaged in the suppression of wages despite being wildly profitable on a per-employee basis.
As for Zuckerberg in particular, he clearly has no idea where to go with Meta and the AI division is a disaster. The posterchild for bad decision-making and leadership was the Metaverse because $70B+ was spent on an idea with no product-market fit. There were other less expensive boondoggles (eg Libra).
So Zuck hired like crazy in the pandemic because that's what everyone else did and has now engaged in massive layoffs because, well, that's what everyone else is doing and he has no idea what to do with those people. Notice how it's leadership errors that are massively disruptive to people's lives but they suffer none of the consequences when they're responsible? Yeah, me too.
[1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/
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.
Fire first, ask questions later.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
Instagram Reels is just a TikTok rip off. It's not 'new'.
Thank you for being one of the few to actually read the question :)
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.
280K is down from 400k+ when I worked at the latter 2 decades ago
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).
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.
They bought at $1bn and made it an $80bn behemoth. Meanwhile, I don't understand why a company has to innovate all the time like it's a piece of cake.
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)
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.
Wow, that sounds super easy. Why didn't you do it?
It's a weird assumption that the only thing stopping people from the ad business is the effort involved.
Lots of people don't want to sell ads, particularly not with a side of societal harm, even if it would be lucrative. There are other things to value.
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.
company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.
It's metaverse deja vu.
[dupe] More discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48767058
Has Zuckerberg ever deliberately invented a successful product using skill and taste?
His original moneymaker was sort of happenstance, a right-place-right-time quick hack that lucked out, got traction, and raised enough money to scale out, BIG, with essentially the same concept that he lucked upon.
Instagram and WhatsApp, both absolutely successful beyond imagination, were acquisitions. Same goes for Oculus.
Has Zuckerberg/Meta ever once themselves deliberately sat down and invented and built something great masses of people want? Facebook doesn't count; that was happenstance. He didn't hack that together in a day to get a billion users, or perhaps even to build a "product" at all.
They tried doing hardware with that Echo Show knockoff, afaik nobody really bought it. They tried the metaverse thing, and, again, nobody really wanted it. (I'm still not convinced it doesn't have legs; the way they did it was obviously not it.)
React and zstd don't count, obviously.
No, but did any of the other big companies? Google literally found the transformer architecture but had no idea what to do with it.
Google.com, Chrome, and Gmail we all very tasteful products. Gmail won more on storage space, but each of the products were distinctly fairly clean design for their time.
Google maps basically reinvented how people think about Internet maps
Layoffs will continue until morale improves.
> 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.
At some point it should but meta has 30 times the revenue of peak yahoo will take a long time before they stop being influential.
This article is classic 20/20 hindsight that you always see when a business decision doesn't pan out. From the author:
> The self-created tragedy of Meta is that the company is loath to invent new products. Instead, Meta’s management more or less relies on “vibes” to govern its decisions, and those vibes are often either wrong or far too late. The most pertinent example of the former is the ill-fated metaverse, which was developed solely on the (unbelievable) whim that the pandemic would last forever — or at least far longer than it actually did — and people would become accustomed to replacing in-person interaction with virtual reality. It was precisely at this moment, roughly around mid-2020, that Meta (then Facebook) disintegrated from a social media company into a Ship of Theseus that still technically operated its core social platforms but fundamentally was distracted by a red herring. Vibes-based management.
This is bullshit. All businesses need to take calculated risks, which sometimes don't pan out. The reason Zuck went full bore into VR/AR is because he desperately understood (correctly, IMO) that not owning a major computing platform was a huge risk. Microsoft had Windows on the desktop, Apple and Google had iOS and Android on mobile. When iOS restricted advertiser tracking (requiring opt in, which nearly every same person thought was a good thing) it cost Facebook a ton of money. So Zuckerberg made a big bet that VR/AR would be the next big computing platform.
Except the bet flopped. Turned out very few people want a big pair of goggles strapped to their face all day. But Facebook wasn't alone in making a bad bet - Apple spent billions on Vision Pro, and that's basically dead.
The problem isn't that Facebook made a big bet that flopped, and that alone isn't "vibes management". The problem is that since Zuck has majority voting power, basically all decisions come down to him and nothing is tempered by the expectations/desires of others, so you get this "pendulum" management as I call it. Sometimes you have these visionary leaders and it works out, but a lot of times it crashes over time. Musk runs his companies largely the same way, and while obviously it has worked out well for his companies and shareholders, it's widely known now that employees at his companies see a primary task as "managing Musk". Tesla's self-driving capabilities are far behind Waymo despite having a lot more driving data, and a big issue is Musk's insistance on cameras only. I've seen comments here on HN that any self-respecting AI leader would never work for X AI because the marching orders are basically "grok has to say what Musk wants".
Having an "emperor CEO" means the company can move quickly, but that goes for both beneficial and detrimental directions.
Zuckerbergs ineffectiveness was evident long before the examples mentioned in this article.
He failed to counter the rise of Twitter, failed to combat misinformation during elections, directly contributing to the result of the brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in 2016
> dimwitted or just evil
...Yes
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.