[HN Gopher] Mark Zuckerberg creating new Applied AI engineering ...
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Mark Zuckerberg creating new Applied AI engineering company,
reorganises teams
Author : matthieu_bl
Score : 90 points
Date : 2026-03-09 21:19 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
| briga wrote:
| What are the odds that Zuckerberg would still be CEO if he didn't
| have a majority stake in the company? From the outside it seems
| like he has made one terrible financial decision after the next.
| Can anyone be surprised that things aren't going smoothly given
| his track record?
| milesskorpen wrote:
| Facebook stock is up 6x in ~3 years, so the market does not
| agree with your assessment of his track record.
| dmix wrote:
| Some people in tech want companies to innovate and take risks
| by spending on R&D instead of just funneling it back to
| investors or safer existing markets, others will complain
| that they took those risks and failed despite still running
| profitable businesses.
| semiquaver wrote:
| meta is spending an absolute boat load on R&D and taking
| massive risks. It seems like your actual position is
| "company bad"
| dmix wrote:
| I'm in the former group where I personally support Meta
| taking risks on big ideas while still being profitable.
| Just like SpaceX and others. I don't blame Mark for
| getting excited about AR which is very likely a big
| market in the future, the gamble on the tech being
| affordable enough was just far too early for the scale of
| investment. Their investments there might still pay off
| as it gets cheaper.
| briga wrote:
| Astonishingly. I just find it funny that one person can be
| responsible for wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and
| still keep their job.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Because he made many more billions... Not sure why this is
| difficult to understand though. It's a simple subtraction.
| mosura wrote:
| Easy: be responsible at the same time for tens of billions
| in upside.
|
| Post VR it is not like investors don't know what this is.
| Meta bets and bets big.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| And in the last 4.5y it's up 70% while the S&P500 is up 51%
| in the same time period, not quite as exciting eh?
| function_seven wrote:
| Beating the index by 40% after 2 decades as a company?
| Yeah, still good.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| Well we just went from "6x" to "40%" and "good" so,
| yeah... not quite as exciting.
| carefree-bob wrote:
| Unfortunately looking at CEOs that don't have a majority stake
| but make one terrible decision after another ( _waves to Satya_
| ) I think odds are pretty good he'd still be around.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Given that he has been running the company for many years and
| the valuation/profit/or whatever has gone up 100x times, I'd
| say the board is probably gonna be patient with the guy.
|
| Imagine the guy made you $1.4 trillion dollars but lost $14
| billions. Would you fire him?
| carabiner wrote:
| I would.
| jjee wrote:
| After enough chances, yeah. Zuck probably has a few more big
| mistakes to go before the stock price is crushed and flat
| lines for awhile... in that environment a change of CEO would
| be needed.
| em500 wrote:
| You mean his terrible financial decisions of founding a company
| in 2004 that IPO at 104B within eight years, and now 14 years
| on is valued at 1.6T? Are we looking different track records?
| mips_avatar wrote:
| The striking thing I heard from Meta staff is that Alexandr Wang
| would walk around campus with very obvious bodyguards surrounding
| him. Like sure maybe security is needed, but the decision to be
| surrounded with bouncerish guys says something about him.
| DonThomasitos wrote:
| But even on campus? Weird.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| Yeah on campus apparently
| UltraSane wrote:
| That is just being obnoxiously self important.
| 0xy wrote:
| It could be required by the company. Many companies require top
| executives to have personal security. I'd be surprised if Zuck
| didn't have bodyguards even within the office. He has 24/7
| security outside, so why wouldn't he inside?
| mips_avatar wrote:
| I think the notes about Alexander I've heard is just how
| obvious his were
| measurablefunc wrote:
| It doesn't matter how many "wunderkinds" Zuckerberg pays off to
| work at Meta. Meta is not an AI company so they will never
| produce anything of relevance in that domain.
| jjee wrote:
| I don't see meta around in 10 years frankly. They are very
| vulnerable to technological shifts they aren't leading.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Same with apple
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Meta, Reddit, Twitter, they're staying around. Too much of
| the population has been captured in those places and is too
| passive and docile to seek out better options. The disruption
| we've seen in the last with social networks won't happen
| anymore. These places are so bad already that there's no
| reason to think the remaining people will leave for any
| reason.
| fmajid wrote:
| Meta is the smallest but also the most profitable of the
| FAANGs in terms of percentage profit margin at 30%, vs 25%
| for Apple and Google and much less for Amazon and Netflix.
| Their position in social networks is a license to print money
| and unless humanity goes fully autistic all of a sudden, this
| is unlikely to change, technological shifts notwhitstanding.
|
| The one thing that can kill them is the fact each successive
| generation avoids their fuddy-duddy parents' social network,
| so Boomers and Gen X are on Facebook, Millennials on
| Instagram and Gen Z on TikTok. If TikTok had been killed as
| was originally the plan, they would have benefited massively,
| but Trump does not trust Zuck and made sure it went to his
| son Barron and the Ellisons.
| nekitamo wrote:
| I've participated in some corporate shit-shows in my day, but man
| I don't think I've ever seen one burn cash this fast.
|
| Another thought: they say the software you ship reflects your org
| chart ("you ship your org chart"). Given how far Meta has slipped
| in the last year in the AI race, their org-wide dysfunction is
| starting to seriously harm them, from Financials to execution to
| talent. They need to get their act together, starting from the
| top.
|
| I'm not a fan of Meta, but I'm a big fan of Llama. It was the
| first notable open weights model, and paved the way for all the
| others. Just for that I want to say: I'm rooting for you guys.
| Hope an amazing Llama 5 release comes after all this pain and
| churn.
| rvz wrote:
| These sort of people do not care about any of us.
|
| Meta is building a more powerful version of Llama that is
| likely not going to be open-weight anymore and will move to
| being closed up. [0].
|
| You're more likely going to be using Deepseek v4 or Deepseek R2
| as an open weight model than Llama 5 at this point.
|
| [0] https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20251211PD206/meta-llama-
| dev...
| skeptrune wrote:
| shoutout Zuck for making the call. seems right given they haven't
| had any good model releases since bringing him on
| matt_daemon wrote:
| Hard to not delight in the schadenfreude
| bagxrvxpepzn wrote:
| Keep coping. Dude got billions of dollars out of it and you
| spend your free time commenting on Hacker News.
| railgunmerlin wrote:
| can't even really blame Alex for taking the deal, why would
| Zuckerberg not do more due diligence? Wang has created (a
| relatively) successful subcontracting operation but that doesn't
| mean anything about research or new models
| isahers wrote:
| The decision to buy scale and put Wang in charge was a bad one,
| but I think people are too focused on the $14B (which doesn't
| matter to Meta in the slightest) instead of the actual logic
| behind the purchase. Meta didn't need more labeled data, and a
| data labeling expert is not the person to lead your AI
| initiatives. I think spending $14B to try and get ahead in the AI
| race is a great idea, and Meta should be spending more money
| (there is some level of existential risk if they don't play in
| this market), but spending it on companies like Scale makes no
| sense.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This seems like the right take to me. Meta made $60 bil net
| profit on their last earnings report. With Mark unaccountable
| to investors effectively all of that can be funneled into their
| AI initiative. With their massive distribution network I think
| it makes sense for them to take big risks because if they fall
| behind they dont suffer a penalty from declining user base. It
| just never made sense for this to be the risk they took
| alexbike wrote:
| I have a feeling we will start seeing a lot of this...
| grim_io wrote:
| I wish I could fuck up this much this often and still get richer
| every day.
| bgun wrote:
| Say what you will about Zuck, he's made investors a trillion
| dollars. If they cared about his occasionally being wrong and
| losing a few billion here or there, it's not showing up in the
| stock price.
| spenvo wrote:
| I guess this comment got merged into a different thread (the
| times of india one). This comment was originally posted to this
| article's thread
| https://www.idnfinancials.com/news/61918/zuckerberg-has-fini...
|
| This looks like a slop article. It seems to be referring (without
| a link) to https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-
| news/mar... which itself appears to be referring to this (without
| a link) https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-to-create-new-applied-
| ai-en... Neither of these articles include the word "finished" in
| them.
|
| Update: and fwiw here is Andy Stone saying it's false
| https://x.com/andymstone/status/2031129981267620314
| bitpush wrote:
| This is the only sensible take. This article is based on an
| Indian publication. It is true we'll never get the full story
| but this is pretty weak.
|
| I mean, I'll be happy when this happens but today aint it.
| pants2 wrote:
| The HN post[1] eight months ago about the Scale acquisition is
| full of comments questioning Zuck's choice to have Wang lead
| their AI division. I guess HN was right this time.
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44268197
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Who could have predicted that a guy who has no experience
| developing superintelligence will fail at developing
| superintelligence.
| dzonga wrote:
| zuck panicked.
|
| the metaverse didn't pan out.
|
| other companies were making inroads on A.I and zuck felt flat-
| footed.
|
| the crazy shit is in an era where most content on social media is
| A.I generated - zuck should've pivoted to banning A.I content but
| eh what do I know
| gdulli wrote:
| I don't know how he could ban it. AI can't be used to reliably
| detect AI for the same reasons it's unreliable at other tasks.
| He didn't really have a choice but to sell the same grift
| everyone else is selling. He's stuck in a prisoners' dilemma
| that everyone is losing except a few people at the top.
| adverbly wrote:
| Fail fast
| mikert89 wrote:
| People seriously underestimate how many founders were just right
| place at the right time/had their startups pumped full of VC
| cash. Meet some of these unicorn founders in person behind closed
| doors and it will throw you into an existential crisis
| siva7 wrote:
| the fun part - it doesn't matter if his professional reputation
| is that of a clown. He is still a billionaire clown and you, my
| friend, may be a genius but dependent on the hand that feeds
| you.
| neko_ranger wrote:
| Unfortunate isn't the right word, but it's unfortunate they are
| going to spend all this money and have nothing to show for it.
| Maybe wasteful is the right word.
| tomhow wrote:
| Can anyone find any more authoritative sources for this story
| than I can?
|
| The original source submitted was
| https://www.idnfinancials.com/news/61918/zuckerberg-has-fini...,
| with the headline _Zuckerberg has "finished" with Alexandr Wang,
| worth US$14 billion_.
|
| The second paragraph says "According to a report by Times of
| India...". I found that article -
| https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/mar... -
| and changed the URL and title on this submission (though I find
| it hard to read the article without freezing/crashing Chrome on
| my quite-new Apple laptop).
|
| I can't find a source for the claim that _Zuckerberg has
| "finished" with Alexandr Wang_ in either article. Nobody is
| quoted using the word "finished" or making any other assertions
| about Wang 's status at Meta. It all just seems to be IDN
| Financials handwavingly connecting dots to create a
| sensationalist story and headline.
|
| Also, the Times of India article says "According to The Wall
| Street Journal...", which must mean this article: _Meta to Create
| New Applied AI Engineering Organization_ -
| https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-to-create-new-applied-ai-en....
|
| That article also makes no assertions about Wang's status at
| Meta.
|
| As that article is the original source for this whole story, it
| should be the URL and title for this submission. But I can't get
| an archive link for it.
|
| For now I'm downweighting this submission and I want the last 30
| minutes of my life back!
| siva7 wrote:
| ai slop meets clickbait. what a future
| stevenicr wrote:
| A new applied AI? A new team with access to fbook?
|
| Challenge: take all the real estate / house for rent / sale
| scammers and make them only be seen by each other and not waste
| so many other people's time.
|
| I'm sure an agent could of taken the fb message and then engaged
| in the sms phone texts and deciphered the affiliate scam I dealt
| with today faster than I did.
|
| Save users time, money and make fbook better. I think this is
| possible.
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