These changes in direction (spending billions, freezing hiring) over just a few months show that these people are as clueless as to what's going to happen with AI, as everyone else. They just have the billions and therefore dictate where money goes, but that's it.
This is a structural problem with our economy, much larger than just Facebook. Due its large scale concentration, the allocation of capital in the economy as a whole has become far less efficient over the last 20 years.
Many of us in the antitrust/competition law community are trying. One issue, specific to digital markets, is that the field has very few people who are both legally and technically literate. If you're a technical person looking for a career shift, moving into legal policy/academia has the potential to be quite high impact for that reason.
Gods I would love to work more in a policy space, tho my background is entirely technical.
A friend of mine has been trying to get into law school for a few years; she's technically competent and plenty intelligent, but it's been hard going for her to get in, plus multiple years of education to even attempt the bar. All of that sounds like far too much sunk-cost to me to dally in and figure out if it's a path I would truly enjoy.
What ways could I engage with policy coming from a technical background that would serve as a useful stepping stone to a more policy based career, but doesn't require such an upfront cost as a law degree?
I guess it depends on your circumstances. In Europe, for instance, the cost of a degree is sometimes quite low. My gateway from tech to law was a part-time masters degree in political science, and which cost around 200 euros a semester (in Germany). That degree gave me enough experience to then apply for a PhD in law.
Which brings me to the next point. Doing a law degree and passing the bar is perhaps the obvious path to doing policy things. It’s basically the only way that you can end up actively participating in courts, for example. But there are many other options! For myself, the plan is to stay in academia and not take any bar courses (then again, who knows what will happen!). Academics have lots of potential to shift policy, especially as neutral agents who aren’t paid by either side of particular debates. Our papers are read by policymakers and judges, who often don’t have the time or resources to think deeply about particularly gnarly topics. But there are lots of other options which could also work, and I guess finding a "niche" would depend on your specific circumstances, connections and skillset.
If you’re looking to spend more time thinking about policy issues, I’d start by simply sleuthing online. Bruce Schneier, for example, regularly writes excellent pieces at the intersection of technology and policy, which are very well hyperlinked to other high quality stuff. These kinds of blogs are a great way to get into the space, as well as to learn about opportunities which are coming up. Reading journal articles that sound interesting is a good option too (and US law journal articles are often quite accessible). There are also spaces offline, such as conferences which encourage both law and tech people (there’s one happening in Brussels soon [1]), or even institutions set up specifically to operate in this space and which have in-person events (Newspeak House comes to mind [2]).
May I ask if you make comparable money to when you were in tech? This sounds like a good career-shift for me but I wouldn't want to sacrifice current quality of life.
Call up TechCongress and offer to volunteer for a cycle.
Law school is the same as med school: if you can’t see yourself living life as something that requires a JD, skip it. Just do the thing you want to do; unless that’s “dispense legal advoce to paying clients and represent them in legal disputes” you can probably do it legally without a JD.
Also be aware you are a lawyer when you graduate law school and you don’t have to pass the bar unless that’s a requirement for your practice. For example, a general counsel of an internet startup might not have to be a member of the bar, but someone going into trial court to represent clients does. I would think you could be a staffer for a congressperson with a JD and without bar membership prettt easily.
Once, out of curiosity, I looked into how easily someone without a formal law degree and work experience could take the bar exam "for fun", and IIRC in my state it wasn't really possible.
World would benefit greatly if EU went ahead with tech tax. It's crazy how much IT companies get away with that would be the end of any other business.
CEO's were never credible to begin with, but what about Nobel laureate in Physics, Geoffrey Hinton, telling us to stop training radiologists? Nothing makes sense anymore.
Well, clearly he should stick to physics. Even if it's likely that AI would replace them soon, a lot of people would likely die unnecessarily if we ran overly low on radiologists by ending the pipeline too soon. They're already overworked and that can only go so far. It's not a bet we should make.
Social Media is basically what enabled me to actually be social during the Friendster/Early Myspace era. It helped me get to know people I'd met in real life, and meet other people within the city I lived in.
Now if you're not on linkedIn, people question whether you are a real person or not.
I hope AI ends up like blockchain. It's there if you have a use-case for it, but it's not absolutely embedded in everything you do. Both are insanely cool technologies.
The media was saying nfts are a reasonable investment and web3 is the future, so I am not sure if they have any remaining credibility.
We are at the awesome moment in history when the AI bubble is popping so I am looking forward to a lot of journalists eating their words (not that anybody is keeping track but they are wrong most of the time) and a lot of LLM companies going under and the domino crash of the stocks of Meta, OpenAI to AWS, Google and Microsoft to Softbank (the same guys giving money to Adam Neumann from WeWork).
I personally have just 20% of my net worth in stocks, as they seem very expensive right now. A crash would allow me to increase my allocation at reasonable prices.
I suppose if you’re operating on the assumption that tech stocks are vastly overinflated then this makes sense. Otherwise I would expect the people that are regularly buying these securities would be happy that they’re increasing in value, no?
The ponzu scheme of SPY is great until it stops. 10% of America’s payroll gets lumped into it each month and generational wisdom is you get a 10% ROI despite the economy growing 2%.
At some point that will collapse, and it won’t be pretty.
Valuation of companies tied to their real current profits! If a company is unprofitable now, it doesn't make sense and is wholly wrong that its stock is trading 1000x more than other companies which actually turn a profit.
The difference from public ownership to public gambling is huge in its impact to society, especially when the markets crashes.
So rather that someone auto-investing a slice of their paycheck into a s&p fund in their 401k, they should instead learn how to evaluate company financials so they can pick winners from a non tax advantaged account?
This is a losing strategy for the large majority, and it's been demonstrated repeatedly that even professional investors can't beat the market especially after considering fees.
No. The 'goal' of investing (e.g. regularly buying) means attempting to own as many shares as possible. That is achieved by buying low and selling high. Buyers benefit from lower prices, not higher.
So many investors get this concept wrong. I suppose they get excited because what they bought went up in value and they have a sense of being enriched. But, that is backwards. That is what they want 20-40 years from now when it will almost certainly be the case that prices are not just higher, but much higher, than today. But, when they are buying shares, the goal is to pay the lowest price possible. If I am 20 years old, I am screaming: crash and burn baby! Crash and burn! Gimme those shares at 50% off yesterday's price.
> I am screaming: crash and burn baby! Crash and burn! Gimme those shares at 50% off yesterday's price.
Sure, but once you reach the point where you have a lot of money in the market you probably won't enjoy watching 50% of it disappear, even if it means your next auto investment is for a nice bargain price.
Also, when the stock market crashes usually bad things accompany it. Like a depressed economy and job losses.
> Also, when the stock market crashes usually bad things accompany it. Like a depressed economy and job losses.
It's our own fault for tying the stock market performance to our economy's performance. Why would I, a train worker, should have my pension affected by Sam a
Altman's bad decision making or by Enron's lies and deception.
It's our own fault that the stock market is so volatile and that we tie so much of our economy to a financial gambling machine that's become increasingly divorced from reality in the last couple of decades. Like you are putting money on a stock that trades at 1000 on a company that is 10 years away from being profitable? You deserve your money to go poof.
> Like you are putting money on a stock that trades at 1000 on a company that is 10 years away from being profitable? You deserve your money to go poof.
Who is suggesting that?
NVDA trades at 57x earnings, MSFT 37, GOOG 22. The article is about META and they are 27x. These are the big companies that dominate the s&p that we're talking about.
I don't think anyone is suggesting to put their life savings into Anthropic. They can't anyway, it's not public.
The s&p PE is 30, which is high, but still lower than it was in 2020 before the AI "bubble" started.
With stock prices divorced from reality, the ones who benefit are the having the funds to buy in volume, the gamblers, and the ones hyping the stocks and creating the illusion of profitability and growth. Years ago it would have been unthinkable to have so many unprofitable companies with unclear path to profitablility having such a high valuation, but we have normalized frenzied gambling as a society.
The current absolute balloon of a market is about to pop, and sadly, the people who hyped the stocks are also the ones knowing when to jump ship, while the hapless schmucks who believed the hype will most likely lose their money, along with a lot of folks whose retirement investment funds either didn't due their diligence or were outright greedy.
In a way, as a society we deserve this upcoming crash, because we allow charlatans and con people like Musk, Zuck and Sam to sell us snake oil.
That's one interpretation, but nobody really knows. It's also possible that they got a bunch of big egos in a room and decided they didn't need any more until they figured out how to organize things.
Especially when there are hours of public footage of the decision maker in question not sounding particular astute as a technical or strategic thinker.
That was my point, if someone thinks that Meta is overvalued, they can put their money where their mouth is. The fact that the share price hasn’t cratered is a kind of collective belief in the opposite.
Edgy prediction: Meta is irrelevant and on a path to even further irrelevancy, and, fingers crossed, a bankruptcy or at least Zuck being removed as the main man
Edgier prediction: Meta is too (big, but more importantly) relevant to (be allowed to) fail, because it can be co-opted by TLAs due to its apps being pre-loaded on mobile devices.
It will be chaos for those working at Meta and those invested in them too much without an appropriate hedge. I doubt I will notice much, to be honest.
Even if Meta tanked, unless Messenger/Whatsapp stop working, it’s kind of beside the point how much their stock trades for. Everyone will just use whatever has or keeps the most public interest, whether that is Meta-owned or something else.
The worrying aspect is that for Meta to really tank in value, the shit has to have already hit the fan, and it probably would not be isolated to Meta.
My point in my prior comment was that Meta serves the purposes of the IC status quo just by doing what they’re already doing. Cloudflare too, in a way.
I meant that if meta actually goes under, since they are clearly a decent part of S&P 500, it might create a spiraling effect similar to lehman brothers which can affect the world economy and thus you and me both.
The problem is that their products are getting worse and worse. Signal is already taking a huge share from WhatsApp (ads and AI chat bots, really?) and Messenger.
TikTok absolutely obliterated Instagram. Facebook is sliding into irrelevancy, and most importantly, they have a lot of failed products like Oculus, Metaverse (wtf is it anyway), LLAMa, etc. Now they are sliding into even more irrelevance and burning money even faster trying to poach extremely expensive OpenAI folks. My conspiracy theory is that Facebook ads earning numbers are somehow a scam.
After so many bad decisions on their part, so much waste and bad execution that I can't see them surviving the next 5 years.
They can just buy other companies for 5 years and coast, or they would have done if not for antitrust concerns under Biden. They can afford to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to rockstars for well over 5 years, and acquihire their way to acquiring the next big thing. I think they’re probably appropriately valued alongside other trillion dollar companies, but they will likely find that it’s less lonely at the top than anticipated.
Signal serves IC interests too by requiring phone numbers.
> They can just buy other companies for 5 years and coast
No, what they could do in the past is not at all how they can operate today. They can't afford to pay the rockstars anymore, they went through multiple rounds of layoffs. They can't afford to drop the stock too low also. Basically they are in a corner, and I love it. Fingers crossed that within the next five years they shake up upper management and Zuck is out.
They’re laying off folks, but that doesn’t mean they’re doing it due to payroll pressure. They’re a megacorp. They can’t go broke from payroll, they have accountants for that. The folks getting acquihired and poached aren’t at risk of being laid off as long as they’re producing value. If the value they bring at Meta is also not being provided elsewhere, so much the better for Meta. It hurts Meta’s competitors more than it hurts Meta, because Meta won’t miss the money. They don’t need high headcount, they need folks who are irreplaceable. It’s a different hiring process for different jobs.
I doubt Zuck is out anytime soon, unless folks stop using their products compared to alternatives. I think it’s possible, but I think the odds are at best even for him to go in 5 years. In 10 years, who can say? Facebook users are pretty locked in because there’s nothing else like it for the users that regularly use it. Facebook users who aren’t on alternatives aren’t just going to switch to Reddit or TikTok overnight. Why would they? I can’t follow your reasoning, but I understand not being a fan of Zuck or Meta, I guess, but I think their business seems pretty strong right now, though that is subject to change along with consumer whims.
I can't/won't short the stock because shorting usually is for 14 days etc. and I can't be certain in that timeframe about meta or any company
I mean, theoretically you could short a company for a really long time it seems like, I just searched, I always assumed it to usually be of 14 days but still.
Isn’t that the reason options even exist? You need to know you won’t starve and die if your harvest doesn’t come in. I’ll admit that I’m no expert on finance and innovations in financial instruments, but I think short selling has been around in some form or another for centuries.
> The practice of short selling was likely invented in 1609 by Dutch businessman Isaac Le Maire, a sizeable shareholder of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC in Dutch).
Maybe also like adding ads in WhatsApp cause we gotta squeeze our users so we can spend on... AI gurus?
Meta has not had a win since they named themselves Meta. It's enjoyable to watch them flail around like clueless morons jumping on every fad and wasting their time and money.
It makes me feel better / more comfortable with myself seeing what meta does. Almost being childish.
Maybe this sounds selfish but its a little fun to me to see them lose. I just don't like meta and its privacy in sensitive ad network bullshit.
Like the fact that if someone clicked a photo and deleted it then show them beauty ads because they are insecure. I can't give 2 cents about the growth of such a black mirror -esque company
> I can't give 2 cents about the growth of such a black mirror -esque company
I would donate my two cents or even more to witness their downfall though. I left WhatsApp years ago, and haven't used any of their other services like fb or Instagram. I don't want to contribute to a company that actively helped a couple of genocides (Myanmar), help elect a dictator or two (Philippines) and spread racist propaganda and, most recently, allowing women to be called 'personal objects'.
Their tech is far from impressive, their products are far from impressive, the only impressive thing is that they are still in business.
Yes, yes I do. How much practical experience does someone with billions of dollars have with the average person, the average employee, the average job, and the kind of skills and desires that normal people possess? How much does today's society and culture and technology resemble society even just 15 years ago? Being a billionaire allows them to put themselves into their own social and cultural bubble surrounded by sycophants.
