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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company
octaane wrote 1 hour 29 min ago:
I feel like many of the comments are focused on the trees and not on
the forest. The new head of Facebook AI is 28 years old? That's not OK,
that's too young. Too inexperienced and not worldwise enough by a long
shot. No shit they're having problems. Can you imagine being a facebook
lifer, or one of the LLM pros they've bribed/hired over to the company,
to be bossed around by someone with very little life experience? No
shit it isn't going well.
storus wrote 6 hours 5 min ago:
So FAIR has been effectively disbanded, LeCun is moving out, Wang is
doing 996 and teams are hiring to fire to insulate people who need to
vest their stock. How long until the company accumulates enough stress
to rupture completely?
magnitudes wrote 4 hours 52 min ago:
Lecun did not run almost anything at FAIR, he was basically an IC.
FAIR has grown, not shrunk.
almostgotcaught wrote 3 hours 2 min ago:
Agree with the first part
> he was basically an IC
Disagree with this part - ICs have to write code. He literally did
nothing except meetings and WP posts.
setgree wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
I'm as ready to hate on Meta as anyone but this article is a bit of a
nothingburger.
So there are disagreements about resource allocation among staff.
That's normal and healthy. The CEO's job is to resolve those
disagreements and it sounds like Zuck is doing it. The suggestion to
train Meta's products on Instagram and Facebook data was perfectly
reasonable from the POV of the needs of Cox's teams. You'd want your
skip-level to advocate for you the same way. It was also fine for AW to
push back.
>. On Thursday, Mr. Wang plans to host his annual A.I. holiday party in
San Francisco with Elad Gil, a start-up investor...It’s unclear if
any top Meta executives were invited.
Egads, they _might_ not get invited to a 28-year-old's holiday party?
However will they recover??
WhyOhWhyQ wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
Can somebody explain to me how giving a 28 year old kid 250 million
(or was it 1 billion) to run your AI lab is a good idea? Or is it
actually a dumb idea? I think it is a dumb idea, but maybe somebody
can make it make sense.
rhines wrote 1 hour 28 min ago:
Well Wang used to live with Altman. What value that actually
provides, I don't know. But it seems to be why he's worth this
much.
dazamarquez wrote 7 hours 37 min ago:
Is Wang even able to achieve superintelligence? Is anyone? I'm unable
to make sense of Wang's compensation package. What actual, practical
skills does he bring to the table? Is this all a stunt to drive Meta's
stock value?
ginnyaang wrote 54 min ago:
> What actual, practical skills does he bring to the table?
This hot dog, this no hot dog.
hshdhdhj4444 wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
If Zuck throws $2-$4Bn towards a bunch of AI “superstars” and
that’s enough to convince the market that Meta is now a serious AI
company, it will translate into hundreds of billions in market cap
increases.
Seems like a great bang for the buck.
PessimalDecimal wrote 1 hour 9 min ago:
Oracle also briefly convinced the market it was a serious AI
company and received a market cap increase. Until it evaporated.
this_user wrote 2 hours 40 min ago:
The way it sounds, Zuckerberg believes that they can, or at the very
least has people around him telling him that they can. But Zuckerberg
also though that the Metaverse would be thing.
LeCun obviously thinks otherwise and believes that LLMs are a
dead-end, and he might be right. The trouble with LLMs is that most
people don't really understand how they work. They seem smart, but
they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart. But
that may have created the illusion the true artificial intelligence
is much closer than it really is in the minds of many people
including Zuckerberg. And obviously, there now exists an entire
industry that relies on that idea to raise further funding.
As for Wang, he's not an AI researcher per se, he basically built a
data sweatshop. But he apparently is a good manager who knows how to
get projects done. Maybe the hope is that giving him as many
resources as possible will allow him to work his magic and get their
superintelligence project on track.
irjustin wrote 1 hour 49 min ago:
> They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at
appearing to be smart
There are too many different ways to measure intelligence.
Speed, matching, discovery, memory, etc.
We can combine those levers infinitely create/justify "smart". Are
they dumb? Absolutely, but are they smart? Very much so. You can be
both at the same time.
Maybe you meant genius? Because that standard is quite high and
there's no way they're genius today.
themafia wrote 20 min ago:
> You can be both at the same time.
Smart and dumb are opposites. So this seems dubious. You can
have access to a large base of trivial knowledge (mostly in a
single language), as LLMs do, but have absolutely no
intelligence, as LLMs demonstrate.
You can be dumb yet good at Jeopardy. This is no dichotomy.
alpha_squared wrote 1 hour 5 min ago:
They're neither smart nor dumb and I think that trying to measure
them along that scale is a fool's errand. They're combinatorial
regurgitation machines. The fact that we keep pointing to that as
an approximation of intelligence says more about us than it,
namely that we don't understand intelligence and that we look for
ourselves in other things to define intelligence. This is why
when experts use these things within their domain of expertise
they're underwhelmed, but when used outside of those domains they
become halfway useful.
Trying to create new terminology ("genius", "superintelligence",
etc.) seems to only shift goal posts and define new ways of
approximation.
Personally, I'll believe a system is intelligent when it presents
something novel and new and challenges our understanding of the
world as we know it (not as I personally do because I don't have
the corpus of the internet in my head).
nl wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
Humans aren't smart, they are really just good at appearing to be
smart.
Prove me wrong.
antod wrote 1 hour 10 min ago:
You'll just claim we only "appeared" to prove you wrong ;)
milowata wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
Wang is a networking machine and has connected with everyone in the
industry. Likely was brought in as a recruiting leader. Mark being
Mark, though, doesn’t understand the value of vision and figured
getting big names in the same room was better than actually having
a plan.
sokoloff wrote 1 hour 9 min ago:
Your last sentence suggests that he willingly failed to take the
choice to create a vision and a plan.
If, for whatever reason, you don't have a vision and a plan,
hiring big names to help kickstart that process seems like a way
better next step than "do nothing".
canyp wrote 47 min ago:
How to draw an owl:
1. Hire an artist.
2. Draw the rest of the fucking owl.
Eisenstein wrote 2 hours 26 min ago:
> They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at
appearing to be smart.
Can you give an example of the difference between these two things?
heavyset_go wrote 1 hour 38 min ago:
Wisdom vs knowledge, where the word "knowledge" is doing a lot of
work. LLMs don't "know" anything, they predict the next token
that has the aesthetics of a response the prompter wants.
Eisenstein wrote 2 min ago:
[delayed]
anon84873628 wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
For fun I asked Gemini about this. It wrote a lot, including:
Appears smart: pattern matching. Actually smart: first principles
understanding.
Is that specific enough?
It also made reference to stochastic parrots vs emergent
reasoning, the bat and ball problem, the library vs the
librarian, and the Chinese room.
It ended by asking if I would like it to solve a logic puzzle I
made up on the spot to see if it relies on patterns or reasoning.
g947o wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
Hallucinating things that never exist?
mycall wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
Imagination?
g947o wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
I think these are clearly two different words that mean
different things.
this_user wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
Imagine an actor who is playing a character speaking a language
that they actor does not speak. Due to a lack of time, the actor
decides against actually learning the language and instead opts
to just memorise and train how to speak their lines without
actually understanding the content. Let's assume they are doing a
pretty convincing job too. Now, the audience watching these
scenes may think that the actor is actually speaking the
language, but in reality they are just mimicking.
This is what an LLM essentially is. It is good at mimicking,
reproducing and recombining the things it was trained on. But it
has no creativity to go beyond this, and it doesn't even possess
true reasoning, which is how it will end up making mistakes that
are just immediately obvious to a human observer, yet the LLM is
unable to see them, because it just mimicking.
mlmonkey wrote 1 hour 11 min ago:
You are describing Searle's "Chinese Room argument"[1] to some
extent.
It's been discussed a lot recently, but anyone who has
interacted with LLMs at a deeper level will tell you that there
is something there; not sure if you'd call it "intelligence" or
what. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary too. I guess
this is a long-winded way of saying "we don't really know
what's going on"...
[1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
x______________ wrote 33 min ago:
If an LLM was intelligent, wouldn't it get bored?
jimbokun wrote 22 min ago:
Why should it?
retsibsi wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
> Imagine an actor who is playing a character speaking a
language that they actor does not speak. Due to a lack of time,
the actor decides against actually learning the language and
instead opts to just memorise and train how to speak their
lines without actually understanding the content.
Now imagine that, during the interval, you approach the actor
backstage and initiate a conversation in that language. His
responses are always grammatical, always relevant to what you
said modulo ambiguity, largely coherent, and accurate more
often than not. You'll quickly realise that 'actor who merely
memorized lines in a language he doesn't speak' does not
describe this person.
Eisenstein wrote 2 hours 6 min ago:
1. I would argue that an actor performing in this way does
actually understand what his character means
2. Why doesn't this apply to you from my perspective?
mrits wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
Being able to learn to play Moonlight Sonata vs. being able to
create it. Being able to write a video game vs being able to
write a video game that sells. Being able to tell you newtons
equations vs being able to discover the acceleration of gravity
on earth
Eisenstein wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
So if an LLM could do any of those things you would consider it
very smart?
Mistletoe wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
What are the differences between a person that is smart and an LLM
that seems smart but isn't?
tom_ wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
The LLM is not a person.
hibern8 wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
The ability to generate novel ideas.
vjvjvjvjghv wrote 38 min ago:
How many people generate novel ideas? When I look around at
work, most people basically operate like an LLM. They see
what’s being done by others and emulate it.
nl wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
Well that's not true - see the Terry Tao article using
AlphaEvolve to discover new proofs.
Additionally, "novel ideas" isn't something that is included in
something that smart people do so why would it be a requirement
for AI.
bgirard wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
What's your definition of a novel idea? How do you measure
that?
I've had a 15 year+ successful career as a SWE so far. I don't
think I've had a single idea so novel that today's LLM could
not have come up with it.
yakbarber wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
it's in the eye of the beholder
ActionHank wrote 5 hours 14 min ago:
Wang is able to accurately gauge zuck’s intelligence.
KaiserPro wrote 7 hours 54 min ago:
As someone who's startup got bought out by facebook, many years ago,
its not surprising to read.
The politics surrounding zuck is wild. Cox left then came back, mainly
because hes not actually that good, and has terrible judgement when it
comes to features and how to shape effective teams (just throw people
at it, features should be purely metric based, or a straight copy of
competitors products. There is no cohesive vision of what a meta
product should be. Just churn out microchanges until something sticks)
Zuck also has pretty bad people instincts. He is surrounded by
egomangics, and Boz is probably the sanest out of all of them. Its a
shame he doesn't lead engineering that well (ie getting into fights
with plebs in the comments about food and shuttle timings)
He also is very keen on flashy new toys, and features, but has no
instinct for making a product. He still thinks that incremental
slightly broken features, but rapidly released is better than a product
that works well, is integrated and has a simple well tested UI pathway
for everything. Common UI language? Pah, thats for android/apple. I
want that new shiny feature, I want it now. What do you mean its buggy?
just pull people off that other project to fix it. No, the other one.
Schrep also was an in insightful and good leader.
Sheryl is a brilliant actor that helped shape the culture of the place.
However there was always a tinge of poison, which was mostly kept in
check until about 2021. She went full politician and started building
her own brand, and generally left a massive mess.
Zuck went full bro and decided that empathy made shit products and
decided that he like the taste of engineer's tears.
but back to TBD.
The problem for them is that they have to work collaboratively with
other teams in facebook to get the stuff the need. The problem is, the
teams/orgs they are fighting against have survived by competing against
others ruthlessly. TBD doesn't have the experience to fight the old
timers, they also don't really have experience in making frontier
models.
They are also being swamped by non-ML engineers looking to ride the
wave of empire building. this generates lots of alignment meetings and
no progress.
themafia wrote 17 min ago:
Computer scientists spending a career building advertising inventory
and private data lakes while at the same time desperate to never be
perceived in this light. It must make for an interesting "culture."
dagmx wrote 1 hour 31 min ago:
It’s both sad and believable when I hear that Boz is the most sane
of them all.
Boz is such a grifter in his online content. He naturally weasel
words every little point and while I have no doubt he’s smart, I
don’t think I could trust him to provide an honest opinion
publicly.
My friends at meta tend to not hold him in the highest esteem but
echo largely what you said about the politics and his standing
amongst them.
chis wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
All facts in this post. FB management always had such a shockingly
different tone than other big tech companies. It felt like a bunch of
friends who’d been there from the start and were in a bit over
their heads with way too much confidence.
I have a higher opinion of zuck than this though. He nailed a couple
of really important big picture calls - mobile, ads, instagram - and
built a really effective organization.
The metaverse always felt like the beginning of the end to me though.
The whole company kinda lived or died by Zuck’s judgement and that
was where it just went off the rails, I guess boz was just whispering
in his ear too much.
game_the0ry wrote 7 hours 57 min ago:
With the exception of instagram fb marketplace, meta just looks and
feels like a chaotic, sloppy mess of a company. Between the incoherent
and buggy garbage that is ads manager (something I have used for my own
business) and zuck saying he laid off poor performers (effectively
screwing those people for no reason), it all looks like poor business
operations. So its no surprise they can't figure out AI even with all
the ads profits and brain power.
An adult needs to show up, put zuck back in a corner and right the
ship.
lvl155 wrote 7 hours 48 min ago:
I refuse to believe that companies are allocating major ad spend to
Facebook in 2025. Instagram, yes.
darkwater wrote 7 hours 40 min ago:
Why do companies allocate ad spend on regular TV channels in 2025?
There is still a big cohort of people (45-70) totally hooked on
Facebook.
lvl155 wrote 6 hours 1 min ago:
It’s such a wasteland. I really think FB is fudging those
Facebook user metrics. I might login once or twice a year and
realize even marketplace is junk these days.
olyjohn wrote 3 hours 21 min ago:
Marketplace is trash. It is severely broken, the search doesn't
work, the filters don't work. It throws in shit you aren't
looking for, and constantly misses things that are there. Yet
they destroyed Craigslist. Unfortunately its where everybody
posts everything and you will sell shit much quicker on there.
PaulHoule wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
Craigslist had the same problem. Once you have a two sided
market it is almost impossible to kill your business no
matter how hard you screw it up. Unusually Facebook was able
to muscle them out, but Craigslist was characterized by
years of stagnation where the only thing that happened was
they kicked out the prostitutes.
twodave wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
> zuck saying he laid off poor performers (effectively screwing those
people for no reason)
Were they not actually performing poorly, then? Maybe I'm missing
some context, but laying off poor performers is a good thing last I
checked. It's identifying them that's difficult the further removed
you are from the action (or lack thereof).
chihuahua wrote 7 hours 37 min ago:
From what I heard, Eric Lippert was one of the layoff victims. I
find it unlikely that he was actually a poor performer, since he's
an industry legend.
anonymars wrote 6 hours 22 min ago:
"[My probabilistic languages] team in particular was at the point
where we were regularly putting models into production that on
net reduced costs by millions of dollars a year over the cost of
the work.
...
We foolishly thought that we would naturally be protected from
any layoffs, being a team that reduced costs of any team we
partnered with.
...
The whole Probability division was laid off as a cost-cutting
measure. I have no explanation for how this was justified and I
note that if the company were actually serious about
cost-cutting, they would have grown our team, not destroyed it."
[1]: https://ericlippert.com/2022/11/30/a-long-expected-updat...
twodave wrote 3 hours 42 min ago:
Thanks, this is what I was looking for. Puts the original point
into focus.
BoorishBears wrote 7 hours 45 min ago:
You're replying to someone (rightfully) pointing out that you can
layoff poor performers without proclaiming it with one of the
farthest reaching voices in the industry.
Anyone who's worked in a large org knows there's absolutely zero
chance that those layoffs don't touch a single bystander or special
case.
PaulHoule wrote 2 hours 10 min ago:
Any kind of stack ranking privileges people who are good in
presentation of self and high in pathological narcissism.
elzbardico wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
Mr Z. pays engineers well, that's what counts in my book, I like Mr. Z.
Y-bar wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
Doctors and chemists were paid handsomely by Marlboro Tobacco and
Philip Morris. Didn’t make me like the C-suite at those companies
any better.
dylan604 wrote 7 hours 38 min ago:
You must not have been one of those doctors or chemists.
yieldcrv wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
As someone that pivoted to agentic work and quit the job that tried to
get the existing team to do agentic work:
All companies are structuring like this, and some are more equipped to
do it than others
Basically the executive team realizes the corporate hierarchy is too
rigid for the lowly engineers to surface any innovation or workflow
adjustments above the AI anxiety riddled middle management and
bandwagon chaser’s desperate plea for job security, and so the
executive creates a team exempt from it operating in a new structure
Most agentic work impacts organizations that are outside of the tree of
that software/product team, and there is no trust in getting the
workflow altered unless a team from upon high overwrites the targeted
organization
we are at that phase now, I expect this to accelerate as executives
catch on through at least mid-summer 2026
tracker1 wrote 7 hours 51 min ago:
It's not even a new thing... re Skunkworks. It's completely natural
for new/developing technology to be formed in new organizations
separate from incumbered corporate bureaucracy. iirc, IBM did this
with the PC, that later languaged under the bureaucrats, and there
are many others over the past half century.
I think the biggest issue with Meta here, is how much visibility they
have to adjacent orgs, which is not too surprising given the
expenditures, but still surprising. It should be a separate unit and
the expenses absolutely thought of as separate from the rest of the
org(s).
bgwalter wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
Sounds like DOGE, a resounding success!
yieldcrv wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
yes, exactly like DOGE, even named a such within some orgs
Lots of siloed processes tied together in a simple way neglected
for decades solely because the political capital and will didn’t
exist
gowld wrote 7 hours 41 min ago:
Which orgs?
zkmon wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
Meta should replace Mr Z with a bit sane person. At this point, he is
like a mad emperor.
bloppe wrote 4 hours 30 min ago:
Zuck has unilateral majority voting power. This was probably a good
thing during the financial crisis, but appears to be more of a
liability these days.
seizethecheese wrote 3 hours 17 min ago:
Perhaps, yet it’s a $1.6T company nonetheless.
PaulHoule wrote 2 hours 16 min ago:
Management can’t kill a company that dominates a two-sided
market no matter how hard it tries —- this phenomena needs a
catchy name, the ‘zombie dillemma’ isn’t quite good enoug…
wslh wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
Would it be a successful business? That is what matters in the
market.
moralestapia wrote 8 hours 32 min ago:
Even if both "sides" really wanted to get along, working with someone
making 100x (if not 1,000x) more than you is poised to be a weird
interaction.
It must also be massively demoralizing, particularly if you're an
engineer who has been there for 10+ years and has pushed features which
directly bring in revenue, etc...
Btw,
>But Mr. Wang, who is developing the model, pushed back. He argued that
the goal should be to catch up to rival A.I. models from OpenAI and
Google before focusing on products, the people said.
That would be a massive mistake. Wang is either a one-trick pony or
someone who cares more about his other venture than Meta's, sad.
micromacrofoot wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
He's not wrong, you can't compete against blue sky R&D if you're
focused on making something profitable. It's the innovators dilemma.
ozgung wrote 7 hours 8 min ago:
I agree, classic innovator's dilemma. It's a new business
enterprise, has nothing to do with Meta's existing business or
products. They can't be under the same roof and mush have
independent goals.
zeroonetwothree wrote 7 hours 57 min ago:
There was a similar dynamic when FB bought WhatsApp. Although I think
people kind of forgot about it after a year or two.
haliskerbas wrote 8 hours 29 min ago:
same is true in many startups
hkt wrote 8 hours 25 min ago:
True enough, but do you think the usual level of disparity is so
vast that it ends up on the front page of international press
outlets? I'm thinking the $100m pay offers etc
ralph84 wrote 3 hours 33 min ago:
Happens with professional sports teams all of the time. I guess
the difference is with professional sports the criteria for
receiving the monster pay packages is a bit more objective.
Sol- wrote 8 hours 39 min ago:
> TBD Lab’s researchers have come to view many Meta executives as
interested only in improving the social media business
That cannot have been a surprise to anyone joining.
nayroclade wrote 7 hours 57 min ago:
Perhaps not, but you can bet that they were told the opposite when
Zuckerberg was recruiting them. Indeed, ring fencing the lab does
suggest some real attempt to do it.
mullingitover wrote 8 hours 30 min ago:
Meta doesn’t really have a social media business, they have an ad
business that’s driven by a massive dumping operation in social
media.
zeroonetwothree wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
That framing is silly. “NBC doesn’t have a television business,
they have an ad business”. “Google doesn’t have a search
business, they have an ad business.” “Amazon doesn’t have a
retail business, they have an ad business.”
It doesn’t provide any value to reframe it this way, unless you
think it’s some big secret that ads are the main source of
revenue for these businesses.
worik wrote 5 hours 2 min ago:
> “NBC doesn’t have a television business, they have an ad
business”.
They do broadcast TV, the purpose of which is to display ads.
That does make sense.
> “Google doesn’t have a search business, they have an ad
business.”
When Google started out, in the "don't be evil", simple home page
days, they were a search company. It is hardly true any more,
ads are now the centre of their business.
> “Amazon doesn’t have a retail business, they have an ad
business.”
Well, duh! Quite obvious these days. That is where they get the
lion's share of the revenue, outside AWS.
I am impressed, you hit the nail on the head!
mullingitover wrote 6 hours 51 min ago:
I'd contrast this with Flickr. Flickr was the original social
network. They have a modest loss leader, a reasonable free tier,
but nothing like the permanent money bonfire that the big tech
firms operate.
They were kinda the first real Web 2.0 social media site, with a
social graph, privacy controls, a developer API, tagging, RSS
feeds.
I feel that they never really got to their full potential exactly
because these big VC-backed dumping operations in social media
(like Facebook) were able to kill them in the crib.
If we're going to accept that social media is a natural monopoly:
great. Regulate them strictly, as you should with any monopoly.
nl wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
Flickr failed because they sold to Yahoo which was bad place to
end up. But a successful Flickr would look a lot like Instagram
Del.icio.us is the same story. Good product ahead of its time,
bought by Yahoo and died. Could have been Pinterest.
mullingitover wrote 50 min ago:
Fair point, there's a good chance we'd be living in a techno
utopia right now if someone was able to go back in time and
prevent Yahoo from murdering so many promising startups.
Conversely, if Yahoo had just spent the relative pocket
change that Google was asking for back in the day perhaps
we'd be living under the oppressive thumb of a trillion
dollar market cap Alta Vista.
rchaud wrote 7 hours 8 min ago:
NBC produces their own content, Facebook and Instagram meanwhile
are the equivalent of public access TV with ads. There is no
unique "brand" that Facebook has, anything posted on there is
also posted everywhere else.
PaulHoule wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
It’s crowded out craiglists and events boards.
TZubiri wrote 7 hours 51 min ago:
Restaurants don't have a food business, they have a charging
people money through bills business.
adventured wrote 6 hours 41 min ago:
They're in the food micro delivery business. They deliver food
from the expo to your table. Short hop logistics specialists.
MangoToupe wrote 8 hours 23 min ago:
What is the difference between the two? What kind of social media
business is there other than selling ads?
AndrewDucker wrote 7 hours 18 min ago:
Mastodon is not ad funded.
Dreamwidth has been about for fifteen years now and is entirely
user funded.
Scaling is harder. But you can have a niche which works fine.
mullingitover wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
I know we're so defeated as consumers that we can hardly imagine
it, but you could just...charge for the customers' access to
social media network. Kinda like every other service that charges
money.
It would have the side effect of making the whole business less
ghoulish and manipulative, since the operators wouldn't be
incentivized to maximize eyeball hours.
It's impossible to imagine this because government regulation is
so completely corrupted that a decades-long anticompetitive
dumping scheme is allowed to occur without the slightest
pushback.
musictubes wrote 3 hours 9 min ago:
App.net was a wonderful experience with great developer buy in.
It is also my understanding that it was operating at break even
when it was mothballed. The VC backing it wanted Facebook
returns. It was an amazing experience because it didn’t
depend on advertisers. I have no idea how it would have fared
through Covid and election dramas but it remains my platonic
ideal for a social network.
christina97 wrote 3 hours 32 min ago:
I hate the ad business model as much as the next person, but
this is a pipe dream. Meta had ~$50b in revenue on ads last
quarter, and 3.54b “daily active people” whatever that
means. That’s in the order of $1/“dap”/week, and there …
just absolutely no way any meaningful proportion of their
userbase would be paying that much for these apps.
zeroonetwothree wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
Unlike most business, social media relies on having a high
market saturation to provide value. So having a subscription
model doesn’t work very well.
Of course perhaps it’s a bit different now since most people
consume content from a small set of sources, making social
media largely the same as traditional media. But then
traditional media also has trouble with being supported by
subscriptions.
jeromegv wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
It's basically Mastodon. The infrastructure is paid by its
owner and often relies on donations from their users.
zeroonetwothree wrote 8 hours 0 min ago:
Is Mastodon a business?
dylan604 wrote 7 hours 43 min ago:
Seems like Mastadon is just the Kitchen Aid of socials.
Anyone can have their product(s), but not everyone can use
them the same way. Those that use them better stand out
from the rest to the point others might just stop using and
the product just takes up space
atonse wrote 4 days ago:
When I read that the dude was asked to take $2b from reality labs and
spend it on AI, I was shocked… that they were still spending $2b on
virtual reality nonsense in 2025.
That said, from what I understand, X is working on using grok to
improve the algorithm.
Why can’t fb do the same and coexist?
laweijfmvo wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
if you think Meta RL loses money wait until OpenAI goes public
lawlessone wrote 8 hours 22 min ago:
>from what I understand, X is working on using grok to improve the
algorithm.
>Why can’t fb do the same and coexist?
I'm sorry ,but what does this mean? Like are they prompting grok for
suggestions on improvements? or having it write code? or something
else?
apercu wrote 8 hours 38 min ago:
Meta prints money as an ad company but clearly resents being one.
VR was a ~$100B+ attempt to buy pivot, and it’s generated
~single-digit billions in revenue. The tech worked maybe, but the
vibe sucked, and the problem was that people don’t want to live or
work there. Also, Meta leadership personalities are toxic to a lot of
people.
Now they’re doing the same thing with AI e.g., throw money at it,
overpay new talent, and force an identity shift from the top.
Longterm employees are still well paid, just not AI gold rush paid
which is gunna create fractures.
The irony is Meta already had what most AI companies don’t in
distribution, data, and monetization. AI could have been integrated
into revenue products instead of treated as a second escape from ads.
You can’t typically buy your way out of your business model.
Especially with a clear lack of vision. Yes, dood got lucky in a
couple acquisitions, but so would you if you were throwing billions
around.
ribosometronome wrote 8 hours 27 min ago:
>clearly resents being one.
Do they? It seems to me that they're just aware that social media
and the internet is trendy and they need to be out there ready to
control the next big thing if they want to put ads on it. Facebook
has been dying for years. Instagram makes them more ad revenue per
user than FB but it's not the most popular app of its class.
apercu wrote 6 hours 48 min ago:
I may attribute this to a single individual in charge. I think he
is very mad that he is an advertiser.
lotsofpulp wrote 8 hours 23 min ago:
I imagine Whatsapp contains a lot of potential revenue.
matthewdgreen wrote 7 hours 52 min ago:
A lot of potential revenue to be exploited by agentic AI, if
you do things exactly right.
loeg wrote 8 hours 47 min ago:
Bro they spend $4B on RL every quarter.
leptons wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
Well it's probably nowhere near the size of the money-pit that "AI"
currently is in.
nl wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
You realize that AI is driving huge advertising growth at Meta,
right?
> Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, reported
strong second-quarter 2025 earnings, driven primarily by robust
advertising revenue growth. Total revenue reached US$47.52
billion, up 22% from last year, with advertising accounting for
$46.56 billion, an increase of 21%, surpassing Wall Street
expectations. The growth was fuelled by an 11% rise in ad
impressions across Meta’s Family of Apps and a 9% increase in
the average ad price. Net income climbed 36% to $18.34 billion,
marking ten consecutive quarters of profit outperformance. The
Family of Apps segment generated $47.15 billion in revenue and
$24.97 billion in operating income, while Reality Labs posted a
$4.53 billion operating loss.
> Much of this growth is credited to Meta’s AI advancements in
its advertising offerings, such as smarter ad recommendations and
campaign automation. Currently, over 4 million advertisers use
the AI-powered Advantage+ campaigns, achieving a 22% improvement
in returns. Building on this success, Meta plans to enable brands
to fully create and target ads using AI by the end of 2026.
(emphasis mine)
[1]: https://www.campaignasia.com/article/metas-q2-ad-revenue...
andy99 wrote 4 days ago:
That team, called TBD Lab (for “to be determined”), was placed in a
siloed space next to Mr. Zuckerberg’s office at the center of
Meta’s Silicon Valley headquarters, surrounded by glass panels and
sequoia trees.
Hooli XYZ? Silicon Valley was over 10 years ago and it seems to have
aged pretty well. I wonder if this is going to be like “Yes
Minister” that is close to 50 and still completely on point.
paulbjensen wrote 7 hours 40 min ago:
HBO's Silicon Valley was on point - they did their homework on
nailing some of the absurdities of the industry.
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