Mark Zuckerberg Freezes AI Hiring Amid Bubble Fears

Remember when he pivoted the entire company to the meta-verse and it was all about avatars with no legs? And how proud they trumpeted when the avatars were "now with legs!!" but still looked so pathetic to everyone not in his bubble. Then for a while it was all about Meta glasses and he was spamming those goofy cringe glasses no one wants in all his instagram posts- seriously if you check out his insta he wears them constantly.

Then this spring/summer it was all about AI and stealing rockstar ai coders from competitors and pouring endless money into flirty chatbots for lonely seniors. Now we have some bad press from that and realizing that isn't the panacea we thought it was so we're in the the phase where this is languishing so in about 6 months we'll abandon this and roll out a new obsession that will be endlessly hyped.

Anything to distract from actually giving good stewardship and fixing the neglect and stagnation of Meta's fundamental products like facebook and insta. Wish they would just focus on increasing user functionality and enjoyment and trying to resolve the privacy issues, disinformation, ethical failures, social harm and political polarization caused by his continued poor management.

As a board member, I'd rather see a billion-dollar bubble test than a trillion-dollar mistake.

It’s not perfectionism, it’s a desire to dunk on what you don’t like whenever the opportunity arises.

> If you do, your perfectionism is probably something you need to think about.

> Or please reply to me with your exact perfect predictions of how AI will play out in the next 5, 10, 20 years and then tell us how you would run a trillion dollar company.

It's the effect of believing (and being sold) meritocracy, if you are making literal billions of dollars for your work then some will think it should be spotless.

Not saying I think that way but it's probably what a lot of people consider, being paid that much signals that your work should be absolutely exceptional, big failures just show they are also normal flawed people so perhaps they shouldn't be worth million times more than other normal flawed people.

The other thing - Peter's principle is that people rise until they hit a level where they can't perform anymore. Zuck is up there as high as you can go, maybe no one is really ready to operate at that level? It seems both him and Elon made a lot of bad decisions lately. It doesn't erase their previous good decisions, but possibly some self-reflection is warranted?

Facebook made the transition to mobile faster than other competitors and successfully kept G+ from becoming competition.

The instagram purchase felt insane at the time ($1b to share photos) but facebook was able to convert it into a moneymaking juggernaut in time for the flattened growth of their flagship application.

Zuck hired Sheryl Sandburg and successfully turned a website with a ton of users into an ad-revenue machine. Plenty of other companies struggled to convert large user bases into dollars.

This obviously wasn't all based on him. He had other people around him working on this stuff and it isn't right to attribute all company success to the CEO. The metaverse play was obviously a legendary bust. But "he just got lucky" feels more like Myspace Tom than Zuckerberg in my mind.

It is no secret that the person who turned Facebook into a money-printing machine is/was Sheryl Sandberg.

Thus, the evidence is clear that Mark Zuckerberg had the right idea at the right time (the question is whether this was because of his skills or because he got lucky), but turning his good idea(s) into a successful business was done by other people (lead by Sheryl Sandberg).

Maybe he's just gambling that Altman is right, saving his money for now and will be able to pick up AI researcher and developers at a massive discount next year. Meta doesn't have much of a presence in the space market right now, and they have other businesses, so waiting a year or two might not matter.

How many people also where at the right place and right time and were lucky then went bankrupt or simply never made it this high?

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/19/meta-tried-to-buy-safe-super...

At the research level it’s not just about being smart enough, or being a good programmer, or even completely understanding the field - it’s also about having an intuitive understanding of the field where you can self pursue research directions that are novel enough and yield results. Hard to prove that without having done it before.

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!