Meta in talks to reincorporate in Texas or another state, WSJ reports

$META is hitting 700, and RSU refresher price for 2022 performance was ~110.

My bet, is Yann got a huge set of packages with the AI talent race, and what may have been a $10M/4yr package may now suddenly be 70M+.

Unlikely any other AI lab would be liquid like that.

This type of idol worshipping has to stop. LeCun invented CNN but he also said world simulation using diffusion was a deadened, which has been proven very wrong. The money is better spent hiring new grads with open minds and something to prove.

"I'm not sure what's keeping LeCun at Meta at this point."

The most obvious options are

1) An insane amount of compensation.

2) Access to an insane amount of compute to train new LLMs.

I've seen him on record that he'd pretty much work for whoever pays him (in the context of research grants for military). Virtue signaling to feel good is only worth so much to people. Humans compartmentalize very well.

Yeah he could easily get Hinton (who hates nothing more than Sam Altman) to endorse a new proper open AI lab, similar to what was described in the OpenAI Charter.

Karpathy, Alec Radford, and a ton of their old students are practically free agents right now who could probably be convinced to join.

There's probably even a chance of someone like Wojciech Zaremba leaving OpenAI to join them.

EU would build them CERN style compute clusters to train healthcare, education, climate, etc models.

I'm sure there's plenty of people at HuggingFace, Eluther, old Stability AI group who'd also love to get involved.

>I'm not sure what's keeping LeCun at Meta at this point.

Maybe he's happy with his compensation, his coworkers, the food at the cafeteria and doesn't want to uproot his life or be burdened with running a company.

>I can imagine he's not happy with Zuck's capitulation

Who did Zuck capitulate to?

> I'm sure France would be willing to set him up

Are you familiar with realities of incorporating a startup in the EU?

The problem isn't that they are cutting 5%, it's that they use stack ranking. Within a team of 10, you may have the top 10 performers in the whole company, but the manager still has to rank them and assign at least one of them the bottom ranking, or engage in a lengthy battle to defend their high rankings.

They're not actually finding the bottom 5%, they're giving managers an excuse to get rid of people the don't like for whatever reason.

It's also terrible for morale to do it all at once. Sure, maybe there are some underperformers. Let managers deal with those people individually. Don't do a mass layoff where they have to select someone at a specific time when all their people might be doing well.

Taking this to its eventual conclusion, wouldn't you just fire everyone?

Say you fire 5% now, then another 5%, and another, and so on. Obviously, you'll still hire, so you can argue that not everyone will be fired, but you could potentially just be firing/pushing out all the people you have today over the next X years to replace them with what you believed to be better employees. However, those newer employees are not the ones that got you to where you are today where you make so much money that you can liberally fire "the bottom 5%". It feels like a bit of a paradox.

At some point, it's worthwhile to step back and ask if maybe the system is broken. The constant hiring/culling cycle is ruthless way to wring out performance from people who are already likely overperforming in the industry.

I'm talking about this: https://www.threads.net/@zuck/post/DFNf73PJxOQ

> "...we'll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts".

What do you think will happen when these models are good enough to do 90% of engineering work? He's already putting a squeeze on his employees now (https://africa.businessinsider.com/news/meta-ceo-mark-zucker...)

> "I think whoever gets there first is going to have a long-term, durable advantage towards building one of the most important products in history," Zuckerberg said, according to the recording.

> Zuckerberg also reiterated his belief that this would be the year Meta started seeing AI agents take on work, including writing software. Asked whether this would lead to job cuts, Zuckerberg said it was "hard to know" and that while it may lead to some roles becoming redundant, it could lead to hiring more engineers who can harness artificial intelligence to be more productive.

> you still need somebody to drive the AI and validate or correct their outputs

100% visual inspection catches only about 80% of the defects.

The following is a classic example from QC circles (I used to run incoming QC at a medical device factory). Count the number of F’s in the paragraph below:

> THE NECESSITY OF TRAINING HANDS FOR FIRST-CLASS FARMS IN THE FATHERLY HANDLING OF FRIENDLY FARM LIVESTOCK IS FOREMOST IN THE MINDS OF FARM OWNERS. SINCE THE FOREFATHERS OF THE FARM OWNERS TRAINED THE FARM HANDS FOR THE FIRST-CLASS FARMS IN THE FATHERLY HANDLING OF FARM LIVESTOCK, THE OWNERS OF THE FARMS FEEL THEY SHOULD CARRY ON WITH THE FAMILY TRADITION OF TRAINING FARM HANDS IN THE FATHERLY HANDLING OF FARM STOCK BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE IT IS THE BASIS OF GOOD FUTURE FARMING.

How many did you get?

The correct answer is four dozen (I wanted to make the number harder to calculate before you count them).

Having software devs become some sort of QC inspectors for AI code sounds like a fucking nightmare to me, and I know how much of a nightmare QC in a factory is and how many defects escape both the design and the manufacturing process even with very strict QC.

> He said that they anticipate the majority of new code to come from AI models rather than human engineers. He then adds that they expect developers to be augmented by these tools.

only 2 ways this can work:

1) Meta collectively generates 5x more code than it presently is capable of generating

2) Meta generates the same amount of code than it presently does, with fewer engineers since each engineer can (supposedly) generate 5x code

Unless Zuck announced some initiative that will require 5x more code than they currently can generate, you can be pretty sure the goal is #2.

>All talk of being about social change or diversity by large companies should now be exposed as purely performative

It was always understood as purely performative. You think Gay people actually thought Target cared about them? Do you think Trans people actually thought Budweiser was going to go out of their way to support the trans community just because they gave a trans person like $50k?

The only people who have ever insisted that corporate "we love the gays" was serious are the people who are yelling about how "woke" companies are. Except at the same time they will also yell about how it's just performative?

I can't help but feel what they were asking for was never genuine support of LGBTQ people either, since, uh, who they tend to vote for. Rather, their complaint seems to have come simply from any media, any images, any acknowledgement whatsoever that LGBTQ people are PEOPLE

Also, speaking of Musk, note that for all his fits of pique over losing in chancery court over his attempt to wriggle out of a terrible contract that he wrote (Twitter) and a pay package that was rubber-stamped by a conflicted-controller BoD, he also notched some notable wins on some non-slam-dunk cases there, such as upholding Tesla's acquisition of his cousins' failing company SolarCity.

> Which values exactly are being expressed by being incorporated in, say, California?

Depends on when. The whole point is that the incentives, and signal generated by responding to them, are changing a bunch.

Just my opinion, but between ~2008 and ~2016, incorporating in CA could at least potentially be read as "We're really serious about hiring the best talent and doing an unusually good job, to the point that we're willing to pay a premium."

Implied in the above is the idea that paying said premium would result in success that strongly outweighed the costs, and that you could more or less keep that success, without putting a huge target on ones back for additional taxation, regulation, social stigma, etc. California was highly regulated and expensive, but not quite punitively regulated and expensive.

Over time, that signal has weakened. The relationship between SV and CA feels more actively hostile. people do what everyone's doing, or really want to be near VCs and other network effects. These things have always been true, they've just lost the cover provided by that other more grand and inspiring explanation. despite the drawbacks I do think it's still the best place to start a very small tech startup. The pool of both talent and peer companies is completely unmatched, even in other large tech cities.

One thing that's hard to decouple: to what degree is this shift because of the regulatory and social environments becoming authentically hostile to tech (on many fronts: taxation, gentrification, looseness-for-speed, etc), and to what degree does it just seem that way to people that get some combination of cash and dopamine from shifting to see the world through that lens? IMO both things have certainly occurred, but I'm less sure of the proportions.

Edit — another thing that's very interesting to me: massive ideological decoupling in the C-suite vs IC classes. My experience during that time period felt much more "flat", both hierarchically and ideologically. I started out as a random intern and not only was it very easy to get in the room with some staggeringly rich and brilliant people, I genuinely felt a very strong and natural vibe-compatibility with them. They mostly seemed regular. Thiel was an exception, but only mildly. Intense vibes, but decent ones. I'd have guessed that as I aged out of my 20s and became more successful that I would, if anything, be better able to relate to some of those big dogs. Not the case at all. I think back then both classes were less aware that one was or was becoming an inhumane robber barron. Both sides know that now.

Maybe if you are a non profit based in CA. There's probably some other corner cases I'm not aware of, like it might be simpler in some cases like an LLC for holding family property, etc.

The comment acknowledges this. As they say a move from Delaware to Texas signals something, it signals that the company goes not particularly care about shareholder protections or governance. It implies that the leadership of the company is more interested in not being constrained than in serving their shareholders.

Musk got told he was too greedy about his salary. Which he was.

The angry people in the comments aren't from delaware.

One aspect that intrigues me is it's well positioned to take advantage of solar power. I think solar capacity is growing faster than any state and it's behind only California now?

I live in Chicago and just got finished with a 10F degree week, and I was sitting there feeling bad about how much natural gas my house was burning to stay warm. There are plenty of weeks here, where I have to raise the temperature in the house 60F degrees, whereas the worst in Texas is probably only a difference of a few dozen, tops. On top of which, cooling like that is vastly more efficient than warming. Heat pumps are getting to be useable at these low temperatures, and somewhat more efficient than just burning the fuel, but not nearly as efficient at cooling from, say, 100 to 80.

But the biggest difference is that when climate control needs are the highest here, we have the least sun: in the winter, at night. Whereas in Texas when the climate needs are the highest (in the summer, in the daytime), they have the most sun. There's something sort of pleasing about that to me.

> Texas heat

In other words, as someone who's a solar power optimist, dealing with Chicago cold, I feel like that's not such a drawback.

Of course, somewhere sunny and comfortable like California might be best, but who can afford that.

Maybe because it doesn't take 20 years to get a permit to build a treehouse. [0]

[0]: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/austin-ten-times-housin...

They don't. They're currently incorporated in Delaware, but HQ is (and will remain, so far) in California.

> The paperwork change would not relocate its corporate headquarters. A Meta spokesperson said that it does not plan on shifting its corporate headquarters out of Menlo Park, California, but declined to comment on reincorporation when contacted by Reuters.

Engineers don’t seem to be taking the bait, and people are very reluctant to move away from basically the most perfect weather in the entire world almost year round.

No state income tax.

Very business friendly, especially for the Good Ol' Boys club.

Why TF does everyone want to be in Texas heat or not be able to go outside?

Northwest Texas is almost southeast Colorado. Try to think beyond the stereotypes.

It's very libertarian. No taxes, few regulations. Some people die here and there from the lack of safety, but that's a sacrifice the government is willing to make.

Cheap housing and permissive regulations

I find it more likely that the cause and effect here are the other way around: people who are sociopaths tend to be more successful at becoming extremely wealthy and powerful.

So why the ketamine?

Is that true of something like NPD also?

A disorder needs to interfere with regular functioning but does not need to make one unhappy. Someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder doesn't necessarily even recognize that they're causing havoc, much less feel bad about it.

Not if it’s narcissism or sociopathy.

But this is about where the company is incorporated (Delaware), not about where it's headquartered. The article mentions that Meta headquarters is staying in California (at least, for now).

What do you mean by "illegally"? If the government allows SpaceX to block roads, then... SpaceX blocking roads is legal. What other definition of "legal road closure" is there?

Dude have a sense of perspective. It's like 20 acres arguably degraded. Louisiana melts that much coastline into the Gulf of [Whatever] every ~hour~[1].

In exchange for being the world leader in spaceflight.

There aren't like, vast stretches of unprotected coastline they can pick from. It's ALL either protected or densely populated. If you want ANY spaceflight, you have to give somewhere, and this is essentially the only place in the continental US that works. If you say "not good enough" for Boca Chica, you're saying "no rockets can be developed in the continental US". Just be honest.

[1] Edit: day

As they should. Being a slave to NEPA and her children has served us poorly. Onward America. Let the people vote with their feet.

Of course I’m not comparing Meta employees to slaves, but with a finite level of stretch, I can see a path where CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk might eventually say things like, ‘Companies need more slavery energy’ or ‘Make America great again—back to pre-emancipation efficiency levels.’"