Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
(telegraph.co.uk)794 points by pera 3 days ago
794 points by pera 3 days ago
Haven’t been there in a while, did they figure out how to give people, I don’t know, legs and stuff?
the metaverse push is the perfect analogy
cool fun concepts/technology fucked by the worlds most boring people who only have desire to dominate markets and attention.. god forbid anything happen slowly/gradually without it being about them
Fucked? Have you tried the latest Quest3 experience? It would be nowhere near this if it was not for Meta and other big corps.
Second, did you see the amount of fun content on the store? It's insane. People who are commenting on the Quest have obviously never even opened the app store there.
People seem very confused thinking that something can't both be valuable AND a bubble.
Just look at the internet. The dot com bubble was one of the most widely recognised bubbles in history. But would you say the internet was a fad that went away? That there was no value there?
There's zero contradiction at all in it being both.
We might see another AI winter first, is my assumption. I believe that LLMs are fundamentally the wrong approach to AGI, and that bubble is going to burst until we have a better methodology for AGI.
Unfortunately, the major players seem focused on 'getting to AGI pretention through LLM'.
Yeah, it truly IS transformative for industries, no denying anymore at this point. What we have will remain even after a pop. But I think AI was special in how there were massive improvements the more compute you threw at it for years. But then we ran out of training material and suddenly things got much harder. It’s this ramping up of investments to spearhead transformative tech and suddenly someone turns off the tap that makes this so conflicted. I think.
There is potential but it does seem like just throwing more money at LLMs is not going to get us to where the bubble expects
It's, like, a vision thing. You know?
https://www.threads.com/@professor_neil/post/DNiVLYptCHL/im-...
... people said the same thing about the "metaverse" just a few years ago. "You know people are gonna live their entire lives in there! It's gonna change everything!" And 99% of people who heard that laughed and said "what are you smoking?" And I say the same thing when I hear people talk about "the AI machine god!"
I just did a phone screen with Meta, and the interviewer asked for Euclidean distance between two points; they definitely have some nerds in the building.
That's like 8th grade math, what am misunderstanding about your comment?
E: wasn't the only one.
K closest points using Euclidean distance and a heap, is not 8th grade math, although any 8th grade math problem can be transformed into a difficult "adult" question. Sums are elementary, asking to find a window of prefix sums that add up to something is still addition, but a little more tricky
They actually need to know so that they can train Llama.
there's a youtube channel made by a meta engineer, he said to memorize the top 75 LeetCode Meta questions and approaches. He doesn't say fluff like "recognize patterns. My interviewer was 3.88/4 GPA masters Comp Sci guy from Penn, I asked for feedback he said always be studying its useful if you want a career...
it wasn't just euclidean distance of course, it was this leetcode problem k closest points to origin https://leetcode.com/problems/k-closest-points-to-origin/des..., I thought if I needed a heap I would have to implement it myself didn't know I can use a library
Does this mean the ai companies will start charging more? I only just started figuring this AI thing out.
They're all bleeding money so yes it's inevitable.
It's always the same thing, uber, food delivery, escooter, &c. they bait you with cheap trials and stay cheap until the investors money run out, and once you're reliant on them they jack up the prices as high as they can.
they are just following the thiel playbook: race to monopoly position as fast as possible, then extract profits afterwards (which inevitably leads to the inevitable shitnization)
> Sam is the main one driving the hype, that's rich...
It's also funny that he's been accusing those who accept better job offers as mercenaries. It does sound like the statements try to modulate competition both in the AI race and in acquiring the talent driving it.
Or now that he has the money he wants people to stop investing in the competition.
GPT-5 was a massive disappointment to people expecting LLMs to accelerate to the singularity. Unless Google comes out with something amazing in the next Gemini, all the people betting on AI firms owning the singularity will be rethinking their bets.
But then, he's purposely comparing it to the .com bubble - that bubble had some underlying merit. He could compare it to NFTs, the metaverse, the South Sea Company. It wouldn't make sense for him to say it's not a bubble when it's patently clear, so he picks his bubble.
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44968111
The article got me thinking that there's some sort of bottle neck that makes scaling astronomical or the value just not really there.
1. Buy up top talent from other's working in this space
2. See what they produce over say, 6mo. to a year
3. Hire a corpus of regular ICs to see what _they_ produce
4. Open source the model to see if any programmer at all can produce something novel with a pretty robust model.
Observe that nothing amazing has really come out (besides a pattern-recognizing machine that placates the user to coerce them into using more tokens for more prompts), and potentially call it on hiring for a bubble.
> Observe that nothing amazing has really come out
I wouldn't say so. The problem is rather that some actually successful applications of such AI models are not what companies like Meta want to be associated with. Think into directions like AI boyfriend/girlfriend (a very active scene, and common usage of locally hosted LLMs), or roleplaying (in a very broad sense). For such applications, it matters a lot less if in some boundary cases the LLM produces strange results.
If you want to get an impression of such scenes, google "character.ai" (roleplaying), or for AI boyfriend/girlfriend have a look at https://old.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/
While I think LLMs are not the pathway to AGI, this bubble narrative appears to be a concerted propaganda campaign intended to get people to sell, and it all started with Altman, the guy who was responsible for always pumping up the bubble. I don't know who else is behind this, but the Telegraph appears to be a major outlet of these stories. Just today alone:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/20/ai-report-tr... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/21/we-may-be-fa... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/21/zuckerberg-f...
Other media outlets are also making a massive push of this narrative. If they get their way, they may actually cause a massive selloff, letting everyone who profited from the giant bubble they created buy everything up cheap.
Nothing would give me a nicer feeling of schadenfreude than to see Meta, Google, and these other frothing-at-the-mouth AI hucksters take a bath on their bets.
Can we try to not turn HN into this? I come to this forum to find domain experts with interesting commentary, instead of emotionally charged low effort food fights.
Because companies like Google and Meta, which are responsible for so much social damage, deserve a little comeuppance every once in a while.
Just until some month ago, people on HN were shouting people down who argued that spending big money on building an AI might not be a good idea ...
I think I have said it before here (and in real life too) that AI is just another bubble, let alone AGI which is a complete joke, and all I got is angry faces and responses. Tech always had bubbles and early adopters get the biggest slice, and try as much as possible to keep it alive later to maximize that cut. By the time the average person is aware of it and is talking about it, it's over already. Previous tech bubbles: internet, search engines, content makers, smartphones, cybersecurity, blockchain and crypto, and now generative AI. By the way, AI was never new and anyone in the field knows this. ML was already part of some tech before generative AI kicked in.
Glad I personally never jumped on the hype and still focused on what I think is the big thing, but until I get enough funds to be the first in the market, I will keep it low.
Did the board realize Zuck was out of his mind or what?
all news is being manipulated to short stock and make a ton of money shorting stock, based on perceived bad news
To be fair it worked for him the first time. And for Apple too multiple times for that matter.
He and his company have not innovated since they created facebook. They bought their success after that
It never really made sense for Meta to get into AI, the motivations were always pretty thin and it seemed like they just wanted to ride the wave.
I somewhat disagree here. Meta is a huge company with multiple products. Experimenting with AI and trying to capitalize on what's bound to be a larger user market, is a valid company angle to take.
It might not pan out, but it's worth trying from a pure business point of view.
Meta's business model is to capture attention - largely with "content" - so they can charge lots of money to sprinkle ads amongst that content.
I can see a lot of utility for Meta to get deeply involved in the unlimited custom content generating machine. They have a lot of data about what sort of content gets people to spend more time with them. They now have the ability to endlessly create exactly what it is that keeps you most engaged and looking at ads.
Frankly, content businesses that get their revenue from ads are one of the most easily monetizable ways to use the outputs of AI.
Yes, it will pollute the internet to the point of making almost all information untrustable, but think of how much money can be extracted along the way!
The whole point is novelty/authenticity/scarcity though, if you just have a machine that generates infinite infinitely cute cat videos then people will cease to be interested in cat videos. And its not like they pay content creators anyway.
It's Spain sinking their own economy by importing tons of silver.
We have services that will serve you effectively infinite cat videos, and neither cat videos or the websites that do that have ceased to be popular.
It is actually the basis for the sites that people tend to spend most of their time and attention on.
Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok all live on the users that only want to see infinite cat videos (substitute cat video for your favorite niche). Already much of the content is AI generated, and boy does it do numbers.
I am not convinced that novelty, authenticity, or scarcity matter in the business model. If they do, AI has solved novelty, has enough people fooled with authenticity, and scarcity... no one wants their cat video feed to stop.
It depends on your oracle. According to the Shiller PE of the S&P 500 it's only November '98! [0]
All that's missing is an analogue to the pets.com Superbowl ad!
They should put AI into a blockchain and have a proper ICO.
you laugh, but someone actually did that and raised like $300m.
https://0g.ai/blog/0g-ecosystem-receives-290m-in-financing-t...
its all bullshit obviously, grift really seems like the way to go these days.
>...and then reveal the next big advancement they are sitting on right now.
Anyone got any predictions?
Its almost like nobody asked for the dramatic push of ai, and it was all created by billionaires trying to become even richer at the cost of people's health and the environment.
I still have yet to see it do anything useful. I've seen several very impressive "parlor tricks" which a decade ago i thought were impossible (image generation, text-parsing, arguably passing the turing-test) but I still haven't seen anybody use AI in a way that solves a real problem which doesn't already have an existing solution.
I will say that grok is a very useful research assistant for situations where you understand what you're looking at but you're at an impasse because you don't know what its name is and are therefore unable to look it up, but then it's just an incremental improvement over search-engines rather than a revolutionary new technology.
Good call in this case specifically, but lord this is some kind of directionless leadership despite well thought out concerns over the true economic impact of LLMs and other generative AI tech.
Useful, amazing tech but only for specific niches and not as generalist application that will end and transform the world as we know it.
I find it refreshing to browse r/betteroffline these days after 2 years of being bombarded with grifting LinkedIn lunatics everywhere you look.
I don’t think it’s entirely a bubble. Definitely this is revolutionary technology on the scale of going to the moon. It will fundamentally change humanity.
But while the technology is revolutionary the ideas and capability behind building these things aren’t that complicated.
Paying a guy millions doesn’t mean shit. So what mark zuckerberg was doing was dumb.
> on the scale of going to the moon
Of all the examples of things that actually had an impact I would pick this one last... Steam engine, internet, personal computers, radios, GPS, &c. but going to the moon ? The thing we did a few times and stopped doing once we won the ussr vs usa dick contest ?
Impact is irrelevant. We aren’t sure about the impact of AI yet. But the technology is revolutionary. Thus for the example I picked something thats revolutionary but the impact is not as clear.
Is this the stage of the bubble where they burst the bubble by worrying that there’s a bubble?
> Mark Zuckerberg has blocked recruitment of artificial intelligence staff at Meta, slamming the brakes on a multibillion-dollar hiring spree amid fears of an AI bubble.
> amid fears of an AI bubble
Who told the telegraph that these two things are related? Is it just another case of wishful thinking?
Mark created the bubble. Other investors saw few opportunities for investment. So they put more Money into a few companies.
What we need is more independent and driven innovation.
Right right now the greatest obstacle to independent innovation is the massive data bank the bigger companies have.
Is it just me or does it feel like billionaires of that ilk can never go broke no matter how bad their decisions are? The complete shift to the metaverse, the complete shift to LLMs and fat AI glasses, the bullheaded “let’s suck all talents out of the atmosphere” phase and now let’s freeze all hiring. In a handful of years.
And yet, billionaires will remain billionaires. As if there are no consequences for these guys.
Meanwhile I feel another bubble burst coming that will hang everyone else high and dry.
the top100 richest people on the globe can do a lot more stupid stuff and still walk away to a comfortable retirement, whereas the bottom 10-20-.. percent doesn't have this luxury.
not to mention that these rich guys are playing with the money of even richer companies with waaay too much "free cash flow"
"Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring after he personally offered 250M to a single person and the budget is now gone."
If AI really is a bubble and somehow imploded spectacularly for the rest of this year, universities would continue to spit out AI specialists for years to come. Mr. Z. will keep hiring them into every opening that comes up whether he wants to or not.
Silicon Valley has never seen a true bubble burst, even the legendary dot-com bubble was a minor setback from which the industry was fully recovered in about 5-10 years.
I have been saying for at least 15 years now that eventually Silly Valley will collapse when all these VCs stop funding dumb startups by the hundreds in search of the elusive "unicorns", but I've been wrong at every turn as it seems that no matter how much money they waste on dumb bullshit the so-called unicorns actually do generate enough revenue to make funding dumb startup ideas a profitable business model....
The most likely explanation I can think of are drugs.
Offering 1B dollar salaries and then backtracking, it's like when that addict friend calls you with a super cool idea at 11pm and then 5 days later they regret it.
Also rejecting a 1B salary? Drugs, it isn't unheard of in Silicon Valley.
> Pays 100 million for people, wonders if theres a bubble
as an outsider, what I find the most impressive is how long it took for people to realize this was a bubble.
Has been for a few years now.
Note: I was too young to fully understand the dot com bubble, but I still remember a few things.
The difference I see is that, conversely to websites like pets.com, AI gave the masses something tangible and transformative with the promise it could get even better. Along with these promises, CEOs also hinted at a transformative impact "comparable to Electricity or the internet itself".
Given the pace of innovation in the last few years I guess a lot of people became firm believers and once you have zealots it takes time for them to change their mind. And these people surely influence the public into thinking that we are not, in fact, in a bubble.
Additionally, the companies that went bust in early 2000s never had such lofty goals/promises to match their lofty market valuations and in lieu of that current high market valuations/investments are somewhat flying under the radar.
> The difference I see is that, conversely to websites like pets.com, AI gave the masses something tangible and transformative with the promise it could get even better.
The promise is being offered, that's for sure. The product will never get there, LLMs by design will simply never be intelligent.
They seem to have been banking on the assumption that human intelligence truly is nothing more than predicting the next word based on what was just said/thought. That assumption sounds wrong on the face of it and they seem to be proving it wrong with LLMs.
I agree with you fully.
However, even friends/colleagues that like me are in the AI field (I am more into the "ML" side of things) always mention that while it is true that predicting the next token is a poor approximation of intelligence, emergent behaviors can't be discounted. I don't know enough to have an opinion on that, but for sure it keeps people/companies buying GPUs.
> but for sure it keeps people/companies buying GPUs.
That's a tricky metric to use as an indicator though. Companies, and more importantly their investors, are pouring mountains of cash in the industry based on the hope of what AI may be in the future rather than what it is today. There are multiple incentives that could drive the market for GPUs, only a portion of those have to do with today's LLM outputs.
You really can't compare "AI" to a single website, it makes no sense
It was an example. Pets.com was just the flagship (at least in my mind), but during the dot com bubble there were many many more such sites that had an inflated market value. I mean, if it was just one site that crashed then it wouldn't be called a bubble.
Ah Michael Burry, the man who has predicted 18 of our last 2 bubbles. Classic broken clock being right, and in a way, perfectly validates the "no one can see a bubble" claim!
If Burry could actually see a bubble/crash, he wouldn't be wrong about them 95%+ of the time... (He actually missed the covid crash as well, which is pretty shocking considering his reputation and claims!)
Ultimately, hindsight is 20/20 and understanding whether or not "the markers" will lead to a major economic event or not is impossible, just like timing the market and picking stocks. At scale, it's impossible.
I feel 18 out of 2 isn't a good enough statistic to say he is "just right twice a day".
What was the cost of the 16 missed predictions? Presumably he is up over all!
Also doesn't even tell us his false positive rate. If, just for example, there were 1 million opportunities for him to call a bubble, and he called 18 and then there were only 2, this makes him look much better at predicting bubbles.
what happened to the metaverse??? I thought we finally had legs!
Seriously why does anyone take this company seriously? Its gotta be the worst of the big tech, besides maybe anything Elon touches, and even then...
1. They've developed and open sourced incredibly useful and cool tech
2. They have some really smart people working there
3. They're well run from a business/financial perspective, especially considering their lack of a hardware platform
4. They've survived multiple paradigm shifts, and generally picked the right bets
Among other things.
all of those are basically true for every big tech company
... the bubble that he created? After he threw $100,000,000,000 into a VR bubble mostly of his making? What a fucking jackass manchild.
They would deny bubble fears even if leaked emails proved that it was the only thing they talked about.
Would anyone seriously take Meta's or any megacorps statements on face value ?
A hiring freeze is not something you do because you are planning well.
Hey were only get huge options / stock based on the growth of the business.
Plus they will of had a vesting schedule
Besides the point that it was mental but the dude wanted the best and was throwing money at the problem.
That's a man with conviction