Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

Some people even figured it out in the 80's. Sears founded and ran Prodigy, a large BBS and eventually ISP. They were trying to set themselves up to become Amazon. Not only that, Prodigy's thing (for a while) was using advertising revenue to lower subscription prices.

Your "Netflix over dialup" analogy is more accessible to this readership, but Sears+Prodigy is my favorite example of trying to make the future happen too early. There are countless others.

>I have an overwhelming feeling that what we're trying to do here is "Netflix over DialUp."

I totally agree with you... though the other day, I did think the same thing about the 8bit era of video games.

I'm starting to agree with this viewpoint. As the technology seems to solidify to roughly what we can do now, the aspirations are going to have to get cut back until there's a couple more breakthroughs.

There’s no evidence that it’ll scale like that. Progress in AI has always been a step function.

> We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do

I think this is one of the major mistakes of this cycle. People assume that AI will scale and improve like many computing things before it, but there is already evidence scaling isn't working and people are putting a lot of faith in models (LLMs) structurally unsuited to the task.

Of course that doesn't mean that people won't keep exploiting the hype with hand-wavy claims.

It's a cliche but people really underestimate and try to downplay the role of luck[0].

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/the-...

Past a certain point, skill doesn't contribute to the magnitude of success and it becomes all luck. There are plenty of smart people on earth, but there can only be 1 founder of facebook.

The answer is fairly straightforward. It's fraud, and lots of it.

A honest businessman wouldn't put their company into a stock bubble like this. Zuckerberg runs his mouth and tells investors what they want to hear, even if it's unbacked.

A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this valuable because so much of the value is derived from ad-fraud that Facebook is both party to and knows about.

A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this big because it's growth relied extensively on crushing all competition through predatory pricing, illegal both within the US and internationally as "dumping".

Bear in mind that these are all bad as they're unsustainable. The AI bubble will burst and seriously harm Meta. They would have to fall back on the social media products they've been filling up with AI slop. If it takes too long for the bubble to burst, if zuckerberg gets too much time to shit up Facebook, too much time for advertisers to wisen up to how many of their impressions are bots, they might collapse entirely.

The rest of Big Tech is not much better. Microsoft and Google's CEOs are fools who run their mouth. OpenAI's new "CEO of apps" is Facebook's pivot-to-video ghoul.

When you start to think about who exactly determines what makes a valuable company, and if you believe in the buffalo herd theory, then it makes a little bit of sense.

You should read Careless People if this boggles your mind.

Giving 1.5 million salary is nothing for these people.

It shouldn’t be mind boggling. They see revolutionary technology that has potential to change the world and is changing the world already. Making a gamble like that is worth it because losing is trivial.

You are where you are and not where they are because your mind is boggled by winning strategies.

Obviously mark is where he is also because of luck. But he’s not an idiot and clearly it’s not all luck.

I'll differ from the siblingposters who compare it to the luck of the draw, essentially explaining this away as the excusable randomness of confusion rather than the insidious evil of stupidity; while the "it's fraud" perspective presumes a solid grasp of which things out there are not fraud besides those which are coercion, but that's not a subject I'm interested in having an opinion about.

Instead, think of whales for a sec. Think elephants - remember those? Think of Pando the tree, the largest organism alive. Then compare with one of the most valuable companies in the world. To a regular person's senses, the latter is a vaster and more complex entity than any tree or whale or elephant.

Gee, what makes it grow so big though? The power of human ambition?

And here's where I say, no, it needs to be this big, because at smaller scales it would be too dumb to exist.

To you and me it may all look like the fuckup of some Leadership or Management, a convenient concept beca corresponding to a mental image of a human or group of humans. That's some sort of default framing, such as can only be provided to boggle the mind; considering that they'll keep doing this and probably have for longer than I've been around. The entire Internet is laughing at Zuckerberg for not looking like their idea of "a person" but he's not the one with the impostor syndrome.

For ours are human minds, optimized to view things in term of person-terms and Dunbar-counts; even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped. But last time I checked my hand wasn't shaped anything like the invisible network of cause and effect that the metaphor represents; instead I would posit that for an entity like Facebook, to perform an action that does not look completely ridiculous from the viewpoint of an individual observer, is the equivalent an anatomical impossibility. It did evolve after all from American college students

See also: "Beyond Power / Knowledge", Graeber 2006.

It all makes much more sense when you start to realize that capitalism is a casino in which the already rich have a lot more chips to bet and meritocracy is a comforting lie.

I agree with this, but how will these companies make money? Short of a breakthrough, the consumer isn't ready to pay for it, and even if they were, open source models just catch up.

My feelings are that most of the "huge advancements" are not going to benefit the people selling AI.

I'd put my money on those who sell the pickaxes, and the companies who have a way to use this new tech to deliver more value.

I think you could both be right at the same time. We will see a large number of VC funded AI startup companies and feature clones vanish soon, and we will also see current or future LLMs continue to make inroads into existing business processes and increase productivity and profitability.

Personally, I think what we will witness is consolidation and winner-takes-all scenarios. There just isn't a sustainable market for 15 VS Code forks all copying each other along with all other non-VS Code IDEs cloning those features in as fast as possible. There isn't space for Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, Opencode all doing basically the same thing with their special branding when the thing they're actually selling is a commoditized LLM API. Hell, there _probably_ isn't space for OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Mistral and DeepSeek and Alibaba and whoever else, all fundamentally creating and doing the same thing globally. Every single software vendor can't innovate and integrate AI features faster than AI companies themselves can build better tooling to automate that company's tools for them. It reeks of the 90's when there were a dozen totally viable but roughly equal search engines. One vendor will eventually pull ahead or have a slightly longer runway and claim the whole thing.

I don't see how this works, as the costs of running inference is so much higher than the revenues earned by the frontier labs. Anthropic and OpenAI don't continue to exist long-term in a world where GPT-5 and Claude 4.1 cost-quality models are SOTA.

You are welcome to share how AI has transformed a revenue generating role. Personally, I have never seen a durable example of it, despite my excitement with the tech.

In my world, AI has been little more than a productivity boost in very narrowly scoped areas. For instance, generating an initial data mapping of source data against a manually built schema for the individual to then review and clean up. In this case, AI is helping the individual get results faster, but they're still "doing" data migrations themselves. AI is simply a tool in their toolbox.

I'll say it again since I've said it a million times, it can be useful and a bubble. The logic of investors before the last market crash was something like "houses are useful, so no amount of hype around the housing market could be a bubble"

If you really think this, `baby` is an apt name! Internet, Smartphones, and social media will all be more impactful than LLMs could possibly be... but hey, if you're like 18 y/o then sure, maybe LLMs is the biggest.

Also disagree with missing the train, these tools are so easy to use a monkey (not even a smart one like an ape, more like a Howler) can effectively use them. Add in that the tooling landscape is changing rapidly; ex: everyone loved Cursor, but now it's fallen behind and everyone loves Claude Code. There's some sense in waiting for this to calm down and become more open. (Why are users so OK with vendor lock-in??? It's bothersome)

The hard parts are running LLMs locally (what quant do I use? K/V quant? Tradeoffs? Llama.cpp or ollama or vllm? What model? How much context can I cram in my vram? What if I do CPU inference? Fine tuning? etc..) and creating/training them.

Patrick Boyle on youtube has a good explanation of what's going on in the industry: https://youtu.be/3ef5IPpncsg?feature=shared

tl;dw: some of it is anti-trust avoidance and some of it is knee-capping competitors.

We should also say that "being really lucky is the best way to make sure that other people don't have as much luck as you do"

Its a great way to kneecap collective growth and development.

"Why Andrew Tulloch Turned Down a $1.5 Billion Offer From Mark Zuckerberg" - https://techiegamers.com/andrew-tulloch-rejects-zuckerberg/

Haven’t been there in a while, did they figure out how to give people, I don’t know, legs and stuff?

So it's not clickbait, even though the headline does not reflect the contents of the article, because you believe the headline is plausible?

I think AI is a bubble, but there's nothing in here that indicates they have frozen hiring or that Zuckerberg is cautious of a bubble. Sounds like they are spending even more money per researcher.

> 1000 people can't get a woman to have a child faster than 1 person.

I always get slightly miffed about business comparisons to gestation: getting 9 women pregnant won't get you a child in 1 month.

Sure, if you want one child. But that's not what business is often doing, now is it?

The target is never "one child". The target is "10 children", or "100 children" or "1000 children".

You are definitely going to overrun your ETA if your target is 100 children in 9 months using only 100 women.

IOW, this is a facile comparison not worthy of consideration.[1]

> So it depends on the type of problem you're trying to solve.

This[1] is not the type of problem where the analogy applies.

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[1] It's even more facile in this context: you're looking to strike gold (AGI), so the analogy is trying to get one genius (160+ IQ) child. Good luck getting there by getting 1 woman pregnant at a time!

In re Wendy’s, it depends on whether you have a standard plan for building the Wendy’s and know what skills you need to hire for. If you just hire 10,000 random construction workers and send them out with instructions to “build 100 Wendy’s”, you are not going to succeed.

It’s me. I’ve figured it out. Who’s got the offer letter so I can start?