I’m predicting the whole AI industry is crumbling into chaos. Not now, but soon; let’s say, in two or three years. It’ll be like the dotcom bubble, except way worse, and it might blow up even organically useful parts of the industry.
When it reaches that point, you’ll see corporations rebranding themselves every bloody where - because even “they used to invest in AI” will be seen as brand damage.
What about the Metaverse?
It’s quite a lot I don’t hear about that now.
Imagine blowing through 10-20 billion on a technology more dislikee and under adopted than 3D Television. Anyone remember that tech fad disappearing in silence?
The title and description and the tone of the article do not match what is actually being reported.
As the New York Times reports based on insider sources, Meta has announced internally that it will be splitting its AI division into four separate groups: one focused on research, one on so-called “superintelligence,” one on products, and another on infrastructure.
A restructure to place all their newly hired AI people, who they were paying up to a billion dollars to join, into leadership positions in more defined divisions is not “crumbling into chaos” - in fact it’s pretty much the opposite of “chaos”.
Yeah the article is pretty bad… But the missing context is Zuckerberg let a lot of devs go, and the lab that built something neat (Llama 1-4) has all but been dismantled.
The new hires reek of tech bro and big egos butting together, especially the (alleged) talk to close source their next models. ‘TBD Lab’ is supposedly tasked with the next Llama release, but I am not holding my breath.
Yeah, the reorganization does make sense on the surface, but ultimately its putting an increased emphasis on ‘products’ and the nonsense of building near-term AGI instead of basic NLP research that got them where they are.
but ultimately its putting an increased emphasis on ‘products’
Well yeah, it’s Meta. I don’t know why anyone would expect them to be doing anything less. Same with close sourcing their next models - of course that’s the end goal. That’s the end goal of every company that is making these things. They open source them and make them free until they have everyone locked in and can lock it down and start charging for it.
But they are putting the horse before the cart. These APIs and models are unsexy commodities, and Meta doesn’t have anything close to something they can charge for. Even OpenAI and Anthropic can barely justify it these days.
Others building on top Llama get them there, though. Which all the Chinese companies recognize now and are emulating: they can open the model, let it snowball with communal development to wipe out closed competitors, then offer products on top of it.
What’s conspicuous is that (at least some) in Meta recognized this. But Zuck is so fickle he won’t stick with any good idea.
Fuck every single person in their AI division. I mean fuck a whole bunch of people in tech sector, but fuck them too
Everything this man has touched since Facebook has nosedived. Even Facebook is actually terrible, but it’s the place to connect so it’s still in use. Anything that would try to compete with it would be bought out or quarantined away. How does he still get investor backing?
The Facebook interface is god-awful, and this is coming from someone who used to like and welcome the changes back in the day, to the point of defending it. Ever since Covid, it has lost all its remaining personality in favor of fast iteration.
What grinds my gears, though, is the way it has piles of configuration settings that are intentionally confusing and hostile to users, and branded in the name of transparency, but without mentioning that the most invasive settings will be kept on by default.
The Metaverse was being spruiked as the next big thing that everyone will need a VR headset for by Facebook as recently as 2023, which went so far as to change their name to Meta Platforms in 2021. Then they posted dozens of billions in losses in their Meta department each year for the succeeding couple years before casually dropping a post saying Meta would ‘pivot away from the Metaverse to focus on AI’ in early 2023. Wonder what the final losses will be for LLM AIs.
In a rational world, investors would watch Zuck to see what he goes all-in on next and avoid it. Buy the stock market is built on feelings and hype, irrational by nature.
good, suffer
Sucks to suck, Zuck.
I hope it crumbles right on top of him and those closest to him.
