They have now turned into wise old people. Let’s use wisdom on this one instead of hunger…
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Apple Loses Another Key AI Leader to Meta's Superintelligence Labs
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META can go ahead and burn through that cash. Maybe one day there will be an AI function to auto reply to all the marketplace messages I get of “is this still available” 🤣
I’m not sure what your beef is; look at how well she does crosswords! Look closely 🤣 how are those 6 letter words coming along 😂
Sure, wisdom is needed, but you need hunger and the extra drive to keep up with the competition. Especially in the tech space.
It might make no material difference. Apple is not catching up soon either way.
But “catching up” with/to what exactly? Why catch up with the front-runners if the front-runners are running off a cliff?
As yet there is no sustainable profitable use-case for an AI product except to sell to other AI developers.
The AI industry is not a Ponzi scheme, but it does look a lot like a pyramid scheme.
Lol. I really want to know how this will all play out for Meta in 5 to 10 years. Hopefully it's worth it.
That's not true. Co-Pilot and ChatGPT are excellent tools for improving productivity. They're great if you ask them to quickly create an Excel formula, or to input a bunch of poorly typed notes and get them summarised in seconds, churn out mood-board images to brief creatives, or even workshopping a concept into something that is ready to be implemented.
They're being 'sold' (mostly by the media) as a replacement for people and creative production. But that's not what they're capable of, or even what they're good at. They're amazing tools for people to use to enhance their productivity, not replace those people. It's like using Adobe Lightroom with digital photos is faster, more accurate and better than processing film negatives in a physical light room. It's a tool for a job that helps a photographer be better and more productive.
A dumb and untalented person using AI might be able to pass themselves off as a smarter more talented person with a 2-5x improvement, but an actual smart and talented person will improve their productivity 100x.
Apple is running a business where the only thing that matters is shareholder value - and Cook is managing to that. In that sense he is doing his job. ‘Ol Zuck on the other hand is a dangerous messianic narcissist on a vision quest to create a new human reality. He doesn’t care about throwing money away now or in the future.
Apple is too big to innovate internally, this isn’t Jobs and Woz in a garage anymore. It would be easier to buy a startup and lock in their I-Cap with stay packages for key talent for a few years. Maybe that will happen.
Apple is too big to innovate internally, this isn’t Jobs and Woz in a garage anymore. It would be easier to buy a startup and lock in their I-Cap with stay packages for key talent for a few years. Maybe that will happen.
But they are NOT making a sustainable return on investment. The value of the companies behind these SaaS Silurian’s is based on speculation, the actual revenue doesn’t come close to validating it.
AI is fun, but AI is expensive, and there really aren’t as many paying end-users as assumed. The main purchasers of AI services are other AI developers building solutions on top of those services, without a large enough base of paying end-users.
AI is fun, but it’s expensive to run. Unless investors / parent companies like Meta keep pouring billions every year indefinitely into it, with no direct return on investment, the merry-go-round will stop turning.
It will be interesting to see the state of the AI industry in 12 months. As it is, the massive amounts of investment, with only an intangible return, is a phase, not a destination.
Apple will continue to bleed people if they're not willing to pay what the market is offering. AI is the new space race and the first company to achieve true AGI will have an extreme economic advantage. Meta has been falling behind their competitors and that is why they're quite literally spending billions of dollars buying up the best talent to catch up and hopefully reach AGI first.
I'm not saying any of this is a good thing, I'm not saying they'll be first to achieve it. I'm just explaining their rationale and why they're willing to give a single individual a $200 Million dollar contract. Apple doesn't see individuals as being worth that much they look at everything as a team effort so to them it's a foreign concept to offer those kinds of contracts.
I'm not saying any of this is a good thing, I'm not saying they'll be first to achieve it. I'm just explaining their rationale and why they're willing to give a single individual a $200 Million dollar contract. Apple doesn't see individuals as being worth that much they look at everything as a team effort so to them it's a foreign concept to offer those kinds of contracts.
That’s reasonable, and I’d add that Apple would be in no hurry to buy a start up now. That time has passed. Even if they did want to but a start up, they might delay until early / mid 2026, and wait to see which companies are still around, and which have imploded.
In the mid- / late- 1990s, every business in the world we told they had to have an e-commerce website. So they all bought / developed one, whether they needed one it not. Many failed, the ones that didn’t ended up consolidating.
The same is probably going to happen to AI. Just offering “AI” is not going to make a company viable. That phase of the AI hype machine is coming to an end. Because it loses money.
Let the others go broke, break stuff, get sued out of existence. Once the dust settles, pick up the scraps for pennies on the dollar. Apple does not NEED to develop their own models. As long as they provide access to said models on their platforms, they can save their pennies and energies for stuff that actually can make our lives easier and better.
Of course AI is a bubble. All these companies raise money as if they will each own 100% of marketshare. There will be millions of investors that will loose their shirts. Look at all other industries. We have a small number of market leaders. This will not shake out in a way that there are 50 competing models.
1.What the news report is a narrative formed from a sliver of news leak compounded by bad info.
2.Someone confirmed to be leaving today, means their negotiation would have started weeks/months back.
You can have simultaneously have groups shut and people let go, and at the same time have new groups formed and people promoted or hired into. Typical corporate reorg to serve a tweak in strategy.
Need to say, even though Metaverse is a total mess, Meta did invest and make some breakthrough in both VR/MR and AI.
These "talents" that were at Apple didn't do much there. Siri, Apple Intelligence, etc. still nowhere near where they should be. Only thing produced is Image Playground.
As for Meta, does anyone use its AI for anything? It seems completely pointless.
These people are just following the money, but how much worth they bring is anyone's guess, rather than calling them "talent"
As for Meta, does anyone use its AI for anything? It seems completely pointless.
These people are just following the money, but how much worth they bring is anyone's guess, rather than calling them "talent"
How have those investments paid off? Do you know any "normies" that have a Meta Quest? I have lots of geeky friends and not one has one.
He’s throwing salaries of $100-200M at individual people and laying off several hundred at a time to offset it.
Tim Cool is a finance guy and he's good at being a finance guy. He never was the visionary in product development. Admittedly, the M chip is a decent piece of hardware and I still think the Vision Pro is a great idea, wrapped in too-large and too-heavy hardware. Plus the fact that it costs what it costs.
Those millions are offered in various shapes and forms. Some in stock, some depend on goals. I'd be very surprised if any of those people actually end up with $200M more at the end.
But hey, if these people can make a big step forward financially doing what they love doing, and they're willing to look the other way when it comes to working for Meta and a weirdo like Zuck, then that's their choice.
To be fair ... I don't think Apple is a nice company to work for. Sure, you see the smiles in the ads but behind the scenes I think it's a very different story.
Are they paying people there?
Apple has had yet another AI executive poached by Meta, despite reports that the social networking company is slowing hiring (via Bloomberg).
Frank Chu, one of Apple's team leaders focused on cloud infrastructure, training, and search, will join Meta's Superintelligence Labs, a division tasked with building advanced AI systems capable of performing at or beyond human-level intelligence.
Chu was involved with managing Apple's cloud-based large language models (LLMs), and was also influential in developing search features for Siri and Apple's entertainment services. For Meta, Chu will work on a new team called MSL Infra, responsible for AI infrastructure development.
Meta has spent billions of dollars on recruitment for its Superintelligence group in recent months, but the company is said to be slowing down hiring over concerns of an overheated market. The pause went into effect last week amid a broader restructuring of the group.
Fears that investments in AI are moving too fast weren't helped by reports earlier this week that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told a group of journalists that he believes AI is in a bubble. There was a broader sell-off of U.S. technology stocks following the news.
Apple has hemorrhaged around a dozen artificial intelligence staff to rivals since January. The exodus of staff from Apple's AI team over the last seven months has seen senior researchers leave variously for Meta, OpenAI, xAI, Cohere, and others.
One of the most notable recent departures was Ruoming Pang, head of Apple's Foundational Models team, who joined Meta last month after being lured by CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a $200 million pay package.
The talent drain coincides with Apple's struggle to update Siri by integrating LLMs. A chatbot-like version of the virtual assistant was one of the key Apple Intelligence features that Apple promoted at last year's WWWDC, but it has yet to arrive.
Apple is said to be considering using third-party AI models for Siri rather than its in-house technology, following an executive restructuring. During Apple's recent earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company is "making good progress on a more personalized Siri" that is powered by Apple Intelligence, and he reiterated that the features will be available next year.
Article Link: Apple Loses Another Key AI Leader to Meta's Superintelligence Labs
Let's remember that this is a reboot by Zuck after it lost its best AI talent after years of falling behind everyone else and losing all of its top AI talent.
Also reminds me of of how Blackberry set about poaching as much of the top talent in the telecom industry after the iPhone launch with exorbitant stock option deals just before it faded away. Having said that, Zuck has the money to play the long game.
Apple will be fine, no one is clamoring for more AI features on the iPhone. This is just more made up imaginary nonsense by Wall Street to manipulate the market.
As long as Apple can take the current not-ready-for-prime-time LLMs and make them ready for mainstream consumers they will be fine. LLM's today are more proofs of concepts than polished consumer products.
Also reminds me of of how Blackberry set about poaching as much of the top talent in the telecom industry after the iPhone launch with exorbitant stock option deals just before it faded away. Having said that, Zuck has the money to play the long game.
Apple will be fine, no one is clamoring for more AI features on the iPhone. This is just more made up imaginary nonsense by Wall Street to manipulate the market.
As long as Apple can take the current not-ready-for-prime-time LLMs and make them ready for mainstream consumers they will be fine. LLM's today are more proofs of concepts than polished consumer products.