[HN Gopher] Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy
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Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy
Author : theahura
Score : 43 points
Date : 2025-06-28 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theahura.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theahura.substack.com)
| duxup wrote:
| I guess OpenAI got a good deal at 6.5b for Jony Ive.
|
| >Supposedly, Llama 4 did perform well on benchmarks, but the user
| experience was so bad that people have accused Meta of cooking
| the books.
|
| This is one of those things that I've noticed. I don't understand
| the benchmarks, and my usage certainly isn't going to be wide
| ranging as benchmarks, but I hear "OMG this AI and benchmarks"
| and then I go use it and it's not any different for me ... or I
| get the usual wrong answers to things I've gotten wrong answers
| to before, and I shrug.
| theahura wrote:
| I think there's basically the benchmarks, and then "the
| benchmarks". The former is, like, actual stuff you can quantify
| and game. And the latter is the public response. The former is
| a leading indicator but it's not always accurate, and the
| latter is what actually matters. I knew Gemini 2.5 was better
| than Claude 3.7 based on the Reddit reaction lol
| niuzeta wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, what were the reactions like from what
| you saw? I had the opposite take from Reddit, which proved to
| be incorrect. So I'm just curious how you read(more correctly
| than me) the reactions vis-a-vis Reddit.
| theahura wrote:
| Idk just vibes. I haven't joined any subreddits except
| r/civ. The feed is inscrutable
| duxup wrote:
| Civ could sure use some AI...
| duxup wrote:
| I keep meaning to try Gemini for coding but honestly they've
| all gotten reasonably good for my use cases that I don't
| think I need to try a lot of new ones / new versions.
| triknomeister wrote:
| Any industry that cannot depend on artificial benchmarks, and
| instead has to depends on user benchmarks is a labor
| intensive industry. If it turns out that LLMs in their
| current form do depend a lot on manual user benchmarks, then
| they will always require human workers. Kind of like how AI
| means actually Indians.
| dangus wrote:
| In retrospect it's quite amazing how Jony Ive managed to make a
| superstar career out of almost directory copying Dieter Rams
| all the time.
|
| I can't imagine what kind of value he could bring to OpenAI.
|
| The dude ruined Apple laptops for 5 years, he really should be
| an industry castaway.
| krackers wrote:
| Not just hardware, he ruined UI design as well. Everything
| iOS 7+ (which hasleaked into macOS) is basically his doing,
| or at least had to be approved by him. Trading Scott Forstall
| for Johnny Ive was probably the the biggest blunder that Cook
| made, which put Apple on its current trajectory in terms of
| software & ui decline.
| blackguardx wrote:
| I learned to program C in high school on the original iMacs
| and thanks to OS 9's lack of true multi-tasking and Ive's
| penchant for lack of buttons, anytime our code crashed or
| made an infinite loop, we would have to reach around and
| unplug the computer from the wall. The single power button on
| the front was a soft button that required CPU cycles to
| operate.
|
| There was also a tiny hole in the front that you could insert
| a paperclip to reset the machine, but unplugging from the
| wall was faster.
| moffkalast wrote:
| In retrospect it wasn't really that the models were that bad
| compared to benchmarks, it was that Meta didn't work with
| inference engine providers ahead of time to integrate the new
| architecture like other teams usually do, so it was even more
| bugged than expected for the first few weeks.
|
| The second problem that compounded it was that both L4 models
| were too large for 99.9% of people to run, so the only opinion
| most people had of it was what the few that could load it were
| saying after release. And they weren't saying good things.
|
| So after inference was fixed the reputation stuck because
| hardly anyone can even run these behemoths to see otherwise.
| Meta really messed up in all ways they possibly could, short of
| releasing the wrong checkpoint or something.
| paxys wrote:
| The Llama 4 benchmarks published by Meta were proven to be fake
| immediately after it launched.
| dangus wrote:
| The last two paragraphs sure contorted my face into
| an...interesting expression.
|
| I'm confused at how Zuck has proven himself to be a particularly
| dynamic and capable CEO compared to peers. Facebook hasn't had
| new product success outside of acquisitions in at least a decade.
| The fact that a newcomer like TikTok came and ate Instagram's
| lunch is downright embarrassing. Meta Quest is a cash-bleeding
| joke of a side quest that Zuck thought justified changing the
| name of the company.
|
| The kind of customer trustworthiness gap between Meta and
| competitors like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon is astounding, and
| I would consider it a major failure by Meta's management that was
| entirely preventable. [1]
|
| Microsoft runs their own social network (LinkedIn) and Google
| reads all your email and searches and they are somehow trusted
| more than twice as much as Meta. This trust gap actively prevents
| Meta from launching new products in areas that require
| trustworthiness.
|
| Personally I don't think Meta is spending $14B to hire a single
| guy, they're spending $14B in hopes of having a stake in some
| other company that can make a successful new product - because by
| now they know that they can't have success on their own.
|
| [1] https://allaboutcookies.org/big-tech-trust
| paulpauper wrote:
| _Facebook hasn't had new product success outside of
| acquisitions in at least a decade._
|
| You don't need a 'new trick' when the main business is so
| frigging profitable and scalable. There is this myth that
| companies need to keep innovating. At a certain point, when the
| competition is so weak, you don't.
|
| Tobacco stocks have been among the best investment over the
| past century even though the product never changed. Or Walmart
| --it's the same type of store, but scaled huge.
|
| _The fact that a newcomer like TikTok came and ate Instagram's
| lunch is downright embarrassing._
|
| Not really. Instagram is more popular than ever and much more
| profitable. It's not all or nothing .Both sites can coexist and
| thrive, like Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
| dangus wrote:
| Sure, a lot of companies don't need to keep innovating.
|
| But still, TikTok passed Instagram active users. This would
| be like if Universal theme parks surpassed Disney Parks in
| revenue. Sure, they can both coexist, but it's an
| embarrassing reflection of mismanagement when a company that
| is so far ahead is surpassed by a competitor with better
| management working with fewer resources.
|
| And there are a lot of examples like IBM, Kodak, and General
| Electric where the company appears untouchable with no need
| to innovate until suddenly they really do need to innovate
| and it all collapses around them.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "TikTok passed Instagram active users. This would be
| like if Universal theme parks surpassed Disney Parks in
| revenue"_
|
| It's like if a Universal theme park surpassed Disneyland
| Paris in revenue.
|
| Meta has other properties too.
| babelfish wrote:
| ...have you seen $META?
| theahura wrote:
| I'm a Zuck fan, and I think I could mount a compelling case for
| that take. But that was not the article to do so. And people
| can def disagree, there's good arguments on the other side
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| > Facebook hasn't had new product success outside of
| acquisitions in at least a decade.
|
| Wrong metric to evaluate dynamism and capability.
|
| Also the Ray Ban Metas have been pretty successful. They
| consistently sell out
| paulpauper wrote:
| Meta is so profitable with its ad network it can spend tens of
| billions of dollars on money-losing losing projects and the stock
| still keeps going up, and the PE ratio is not that high either.
| Crazy.
| nothrowaways wrote:
| > Meta is falling behind in the AI race
|
| How so?
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| How much revenue do they make with it?
| speedgoose wrote:
| I'm not sure revenue is the best measurement of success.
| nradov wrote:
| How would you even begin to calculate that? They use AI to
| make their products more valuable to advertisers, but there's
| no way to say how much their revenue would decline if they
| suddenly eliminated AI.
| analog31 wrote:
| Same way companies fell behind during the original "dot com"
| era: By not burning money quickly enough.
|
| Disclosure: I work for one of the companies that fell behind.
| triknomeister wrote:
| Was that the real reason companues failed? By not burning
| money, instead of burning through it too fast?
| jnwatson wrote:
| Their latest Llama is a couple steps behind the frontier.
| Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI are all well ahead.
|
| They missed the boat on LLMs and have been playing catch up.
| jemmyw wrote:
| Why should they be in that market at all? I don't understand
| why we've got to this place where every big tech company
| needs to have it's fingers in every pie or "they're falling
| behind". AI / LLMs look to be on their way to being
| infrastructure more than product in and of themselves. A
| patient huge company could build on top of what others are
| doing and wait for the market to settle, then buy for
| vertical integration.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Deepseek is a solid competitor in their niche, the open-source
| LLM niche. Llama 4 didn't impress, and so they are very
| vulnerable even in the free niche they carved out for
| themselves
| ralusek wrote:
| They're not even in the same ballpark as the SOTA models, and
| they're not even in the same ballpark as the SOTA open source
| models, which was supposed to be their niche.
|
| But even if they were, it's not immediately clear how they plan
| to make any money with having an open source model. So far,
| their applications of their AI, i.e. fake AI characters within
| their social media, are some of the dumbest ideas I've ever
| heard of.
| blobbers wrote:
| It's an interesting take for a guy who's company labels data.
|
| Is it a hot dog? Yes, yes it is.
|
| 14 BILLIES!
| sh34r wrote:
| At least they could pivot Hotdog or Not into a dick-pic
| classifier, which was less trivial when that show was airing.
|
| $14 billion for a glorified mechanical turk platform is
| bananas. Between this, the $6 billion Jonny Ive acquisition,
| and a ChatGPT wrapper for doctors called Abridge having a $5
| billion valuation, this AI fraud bubble is making pets.com look
| like a reasonable investment.
| andrewparker wrote:
| This post doesn't quite comprehend why Meta made a 49% investment
| instead of an acquisition.
|
| The path Meta chose avoided global regulatory review. FTC, DOJ,
| etc and their international counterparts could have chosen to
| review and block an outright acquisition. They have no authority
| to review a minority investment.
|
| Scale shareholders received a comparable financial outcome to an
| acquisition, and also avoided the regulatory uncertainty that
| comes with govt review.
|
| It was win/win, and there's a chance for the residual Scale
| company to continue to build a successful business, further
| rewarding shareholders (of which Meta is now the largest), which
| is just like wildcard upside and was never the point of the
| original deal.
| theahura wrote:
| I agree that this is a possible reason. Meta wants to move fast
| and m&a is too slow for their tastes. I make the case in the
| article though that the actual acquisition doesn't really make
| sense for metas core business, but I agree it's possible.
|
| I disagree that this is a win/win. Scale stock is still
| illiquid, and people who remain at scale or have scale stock
| are now stuck with shares that are actually _less valuable_ --
| even though the market price has ostensibly gone up, the people
| who made the stock valuable are gone
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| >They have no authority to review a minority investment.
|
| That's just wrong. Partial acquisitions and minority
| shareholdings don't allow you to bypass antitrust
| investigations.
|
| See 15 U.S.C. SS18 for example. It is similar in the EU.
| linotype wrote:
| The current US administration allows you to bypass US
| antitrust regulations.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| But not because of majority/minority reasons as the other
| comment implies. It would be utterly ridiculous if you
| could just buy 49% of each of your competitors without any
| possibility for the government to interfere.
| linotype wrote:
| Utterly ridiculous is where we're at right now.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| In the US perhaps, but elsewhere antitrust laws still
| have some meaning.
| andrewparker wrote:
| You are literally correct, but not engaging in the point.
| Meta shares in Scale are explicitly non-voting shares.
| Influence/control post minority investment matters as to
| whether the deal can be reviewed via Clayton Act. Meta did
| everything they could to avoid regulatory review with this
| transaction, and it worked.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Reportedly the only reason they did this at all is that Wang
| asked to get a return for investors and employees. It was not
| Meta who wanted to own any part of Scale (makes sense too, they
| are already users of Scale data and don't really need anything
| they get from owning Scale as a company / business).
| DataDaemon wrote:
| Someone remember the Meta Universe? How much money burnt? And now
| the AI. In the meantime stock going up and up.
| vagabund wrote:
| I'd push back on a couple things here.
|
| The notion that Scale AI's data is of secondary value to Wang
| seems wrong: data-labeling in the era of agentic RL is more
| sophisticated than the pejorative view of outsourcing mechanical
| turk work at slave wages to third world workers, it's about
| expert demonstrations and work flows, the shape of which are
| highly useful for deducing the sorts of RL environments frontier
| labs are using for post-training. This is likely the primary
| motivator.
|
| > LLMs are pretty easy to make, lots of people know how to do it
| -- you learn how in any CS program worth a damn.
|
| This also doesn't cohere with my understanding. There's only a
| few hundred people in the world that can train competitive models
| at scale, and the process is laden with all sorts of technical
| tricks and trade secrets. It's what made the deepseek reports and
| results so surprising. I don't think the toy neural network one
| gets assigned to create in an undergrad course is a helpful
| comparison.
|
| Relatedly, the idea that progress in ML is largely stochastic and
| so horizontal orgs are the only sensible structure seems like a
| weird conclusion to draw from the record. Saying Schmidhuber is a
| one hit wonder, or "The LLM paper was written basically entirely
| by folks for whom "Attention is All You Need" is their singular
| claim to fame" neglects a long history of foundational
| contributions in the case of the former, and misses the prolific
| contributions of Shazeer in the latter. Alec Radford is another
| notable omission as a consistent superstar researcher. To the
| point about organizational structure, OpenAI famously made
| concentrated bets contra the decentralized experimentation of
| Google and kicked off this whole race. Deepmind is significantly
| more hierarchical than Brain was and from comments by Pichai,
| that seemed like part of the motivation for the merger.
| theahura wrote:
| - Could be wrong about Scale. I'm going off folks I know at
| client companies and at scale itself.
|
| - idk I've trained a lot of models in my time. It's true that
| there's an arcane art to training LLMs, but it's wrong that
| this is somehow unlearnable. If I can do it out of undergrad
| with no prior training and 3 months of slamming my head into a
| wall, so can others. (Large LLMs are imo not that much
| different from small ones in terms of training complexity.
| Tools like torch and libraries like megatron make these things
| much easier ofc)
|
| - there are a lot of fantastic researchers and I don't mean to
| disparage anyone, including anyone I didn't mention. Still, I
| stand by my beliefs on ml. Big changes in architecture, new
| learning techniques, and training tips and tricks come from a
| lot of people, all of whom are talking to each other in a very
| decentralized way.
|
| My opinions are my own, ymmv
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Meta has a culture issue.
|
| There are three centres of "AI" gravity: GenAI, FAIR & RL-R
|
| Fair is fucked, they've been passed about, from standalone, to
| RL-R then to "production" under industrial dipshit Cox. A lot of
| people have left, or been kicked out. It was a power house, and
| PSC (the 6month performance charade killed it)
|
| GenAI was originally a nice tight and productive team. Then the
| facebook disease of doubling the team every 2 months took over.
| Instead of making good products and dealing with infra scaling
| issues, 80% of the staff are trying to figure out what they are
| supposed to be doing. Moreover most of the leadership have no
| fucking clue how to do applied ML. Also they don't know what the
| product will be. So the answer is A/B testing what ever coke
| dream Cox dreamt up that week.
|
| RL-R has the future, but they are tied to either Avatars, which
| is going to bomb. It'll bomb because its run by an prick who
| wants perfect rather than deliverable. Moreover splats perform
| way better than the dumbarse fully ML end-to-end system they
| spend the last 15 billion trying to make.
|
| Then there is the hand interaction org, which has burnt through
| not quite as much cash as Avatars, but relies on a wrist device
| that has to be so tight it feels like a fucking handcuff. That
| and they've not managed to deliver any working prototype at
| scale.
|
| The display team promised too much and wildly underdelivered,
| meaning that orion wasn't possible as a consumer product. Which
| lets the write team off the hook for not having a comfortable
| system.
|
| Then there is the mapping team who make research glasses that
| hovers up any and all personal information with wild abandon.
|
| RL-R had lots of talent. But the "hire to fire" system means that
| you can't actually do any risky research, unless you have the
| personal favour of your VP. Plus, even if you do perfect
| research. getting it to product is a nightmare.
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