Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

From a quick online search:

- OpenAI's mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible.

- Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

- Meta's mission is to build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.

Lets just take these three companies, and their self-defined mission statements. I see what google and openai are after. Is there any case for anyone to make inside or outside Meta that AI is needed to build the future of human connection? What problem is Meta trying to solve with their billions of investment in "super" intelligence? I genuinely have no idea, and they probably don't either. Which is why they would be laying of 600 people a week after paying a billion dollars to some guy for working on the same stuff.

EDIT: everyone commenting that mission statements are PR fluff. Fine. What is a productive way they can use LLMs in any of their flagship products today?

Kinda ignoring Grok there which is the leader in many benchmarks.

Maybe the future of human connection is chatting with a large language model, at least according to Meta. Haven't they added chatbots to messenger?

i've been wondering this for some time as well. what's it all for? the only product i see in their lineup that seems obvious is the meta glasses.

Other then that I guess AI would have to be used in their ad platform perhaps for better targetting. Ad targetting is absolutely atrocious right now, at least for me personally.

Why care what they say their mission is? Its clearly to be on top of a possible AI-wave and become or remain a huge company in the future, increasing value for their stock owners. Everything else is BS.

each of those is of course an answer to the question "what's some PR bullshit we can say to distract people while we get rich"

After all it is clear that if those were their actual missions they would be doing very different work.

X.ai's stated goal is "build AI specifically to advance human comprehension and capabilities," so somewhat similar to OpenAI's.

Why are you asking questions about their PR department coordinated "Company missions"?

Let me summarise their real missions:

1. Power and money

2. Power and money

3. Power and money

How does AI help them make money and gain more power?

I can give you a few ways...

100% spot on. It boggles the mind how many corporate simps are out there. You'd think it's rare, but no. Most people really are that dumb.

To be even more specific, the company making money is merely a proxy for the actual goal: increased valuation for stockowners. Subtle but very significant difference

- OpenAI wants everyone to use them without other companies getting angry.

- Google wants to know what everyone is looking for.

- Facebook wants to know what everyone is saying.

Sometimes they mix it up and go for money and power.

I guess from these cosmetic "company missions" we can make out how OpenAI and Google are envisioning to get that "Power and Money" through AI.

But even Meta's PR dept seems clueless on answering "How Meta is going to get more Power and Money through AI"

Because a CEO with happy shareholders has more power. The shareholder value thing is a sop, and sometimes a dangerous one.

We keep trying to progressively tax money in the US to reduce the social imbalance. We can’t figure out how to tax power and the people with power like it that way. If you have power you can get money. But it’s also relatively straightforward to arrange to keep the money that you have.

But they don’t really need to.

By replacing the cost of human labor? By improving the control of human decision making? By consolidating control of economic activity?

Just top of the head answers.

That’s not “the future of human connection”

The critical word in there is… Never mind. If you can’t already see it, nothing I can say will make you see it.

>Is there any case for anyone to make inside or outside Meta that AI is needed to build the future of human connection?

No, Facebook's strategy has always been the inverse of this. When they support technologies like this they're 'commoditizing the complement', they're driving the commercial value of the thing they don't have to zero so the thing they actually do sell (a human network) differentiates them. Same reason they're quite big on open source, it eliminates their biggest competitors advantages.

Targeting ads better. Better sentiment analysis. Custom ads written for each user based on their preferences. Features for their AR glasses. Probably try to take a piece of the Google search pie. Use this AI search to serve ads.

Ads are their product mostly, though they are also trying to get into consumer hardware.

Re: "What is a productive way they can use LLMs in any of their flagship products today" - with LLMs users would not interact with other users and also users would not leave the platform.

Meta's actual mission is to keep people on the platform and to do what can be done so users do not leave the platform. I found out that from this perspective Meta's actions make more sense.

The traditional way of responding to this is the usual collective emulation of Struggle Sessions but I can easily come up with a couple of plausible answers for you:

* LLM translation is far better than any other kind of translation. Inter-language communication is obviously directly related to human connection.

* Diffusion models allow people to express themselves in new ways. People use image macros and image memes to communicate already.

In fact, I am disappointed that no one has the imagination to do this. I get it. You guys all want to cosplay as oppressed Marxist-Leninists having defoliants dropped on you by United Fruit Corporation. But you could at least try the mildest attempt at exercising your minds.

sometimes they manage to meld it into one goal, because money is power.

I mean...what you say is not, in the face of it, false; however...

For the past few decades, the ways and the degree to which we have been genuinely trying (at the government level) to "progressively tax money" in the US have been failing and falling, respectively.

If we were genuinely serious about the kind of progressive taxation you're talking about, capital gains taxes (and other kinds of taxes on non-labor income) would be much, much higher than standard income tax. As it stands, the reverse is true.

Meta's mission is to build the future of human connection -- this totally makes sense if you assume they believe that the future of human connection is with an AI friend.

That https://character.ai is so enormously popular with people who are under the age of 25 suggests that this is the future. And Meta is certainly looking at https://character.ai with great interest, but also with concern. https://character.ai represents a threat to Meta.

Years ago, when Meta felt that Instagram was a threat, they bought Instagram.

If they don't think they can buy https://character.ai then they need to develop their own version of it.

You are looking at it wrong. Meta is a business. You know what they sell? Ads.

In fact, they are the #1 or #2 place in the world to sell an ad depending on who you ask. If the future turns out to be LLM-driven, all that ad-money is going to go to OpenAI or worse to Google; leaving Zuck with no revenue.

So why are they after AI? Because they are in the business of selling eyeballs placement and LLM becoming the defacto platform would eat into their margins.

It is all lies.

Their mission is to make money. For the principals

These "missions" cannot coexist with the single mission of every publicly traded company, which is to maximize shareholder value.

It is really depressing how corporations don't look like they are run by humans.

If they go after AI, they’ll for sure need power

And the more power you have, the easier it gets to make more money, so it's self-reinforcing.

This got me good.

> sometimes they manage to meld it into one goal, because money is power.

Money is a measure of power, but it is not in fact power.

Who needs real friends when you can have Meta-Friends (tm)

Power is a measure of money, but it is not in fact money.

See https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma

or the fact that John D. Rockefeller was furious that Standard Oil got split up despite the stock going up and making him much richer.

It's not so clear what motivates the very rich. If I doubled my income I might go on a really fancy vacation and get that Olympus 4/3 body I've been looking at and the fast 70-300mm lens for my Sony, etc. If Elon Musk changes his income it won't affect his lifestyle. As the leader of a corporation you're supposed to behave as if your utility function of money was linear because that represents your shareholders but a person like Musk might be very happy to spend $40B to advance his power and/or feeling of power.

True, though money can buy influence and the opportunity to obtain power.

Even if we assume you're correct and every company's true mission is to maximize power and money, the stated mission is still useful in helping us understand how they plan to do this.

The questions in the original comment were really about the "how", and are still worth considering.

If your friends are human then you could collectively decide to leave for another platform, that's not very cash money for Meta. They want to go past you being on Facebook cause all your friends are there, they want you to be friends with the platform itself.

Side note, has black mirror done this yet or are they still stuck on "what if you are the computer" for the 34th time?

Have you considered that people can just say things?

Same difference with social media too. I thought Twitter was for micro-blogging, LinkedIn for career-networking, Instagram for pictures, and youtube for video-sharing etc. Now everything boiled down to just a feed of pictures, videos and text. So much for a "network", graph theory, research, ...

But we can still consider the consistency of their story, because they are telling that story to influence the perception of their actions.

To clarify you can have power without money, for example initial revolutionaries. Money buys power, and power could convert into money depending the circumstances.

the people with all the firepower won't let you buy your own private military (or develop your own weapons systems without being under their control). The end-of-line power (violence) is a closely guarded monopoly.

I usually try not to be so cynical but just couldn't resist here: What if the future of human connection is to replace it with para social relationships that can be monetized?

That said I am not cynical about mission statements like that per se, I do think that making large organizations work towards a common goal is a very difficult problem. Unless you're going to have a hierarchical command and control system in place, you need to do it through shared culture and mission.

The consistency of a mission statement? Are you guys for real?

To be clear: I'm not arguing that everyone at OpenAI or Meta is a bad person, I don't think that's true. Most of their employees are probably normal people. But seriously, you have to tell me what you guys are smoking if a mission statement causes you to update in any direction whatsoever. I can hardly think of anything more devoid of content.

This is too reductionist. When you go to work, do you go maximize shareholder value? Were you ever part of a team and felt good about the work you were doing together? Was it because you were maximizing shareholder value?

But, on the flip side, coercive power cannot stand on its own without money too. The CCP's Politburo know beyond a doubt that they have coercive power over billionaires like Jack Ma, but they try to accommodate these entrepreneurs who help catalyze economic growth & bring the state more foreign revenue/wealth to fund its coercive machine.

America's elected leaders also have power to punish & bring oligarchs to book legally, but they mostly interact symbiotically, exchanging campaign contributions and board seats for preferential treatment, favorable policy, etc.

Putin can order any out-of-line oligarch to be disposed of, but the economic & coercive arms of the Russian State still see themselves as two sides of the same coin.

So, yes: coercive power can still make billionaires face the wall (Russian revolution, etc.) but they mostly prefer to work together. Money and power are a continuum like spacetime.

Character.ai over raised, the leadership team left, and there's no appreciable revenue AFAIK and have heard. Kids under 25 role playing with cartoons are hard to monetize.

Then there's also the reputational harm if Meta acquires them and the journalists write about the bad things that happen on that platform.

> - Meta's mission is to build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible

Meta arguably achieved this with the initial versions of their products, but even AI aside, they're mostly disconnecting humans now. I post much less on Instagram and Facebook now that they almost never show my content to my own friends or followers, and show them ads and influencer crap instead, so it's basically talking to a wall in an app. Add to this that companies like Meta are all forcing PIP quotas and mass layoffs which in turn causes everyone in my social circle to work 996.

So they have not only taken away online connections to real humans, they have ALSO taken away offline connections to real humans because nobody has time to meet in real life anymore. Win-win for them, I guess.

minute after minute, hour after hour

> When you go to work, do you go maximize shareholder value?

Yes. The further up the ladder you go, the more this is pounded into your head. I was in a few Big Tech and this is how you write your self-assessment. "Increased $$$ revenue due to higher user engagement, shipped xxx product that generated xxx sales etc".

If you're level 1/2 engineer, sure. You get sold on the company mission. But once you're in senior level, you are exposed to how the product/features will maximize the company's financial and market position. How each engineer's hours are directly benefiting the company.

> Were you ever part of a team and felt good about the work you were doing together? Maybe some startups or non-profits can have this (like Wikipedia or Craigslist), but definitely not OpenAI, Google and Meta.

See also certain orange people not sweating bankruptcy because they can just go get more money.

They copied character.ai in the first year. Remember those snoop Dogg personas?

They have the tech, if they still fail it's just marketing.

The nouveau riche find out this is definitely not at all true the hard way. Easy come, easy go. If your children remain rich, they may get some respect. Your grandchildren will be powerful. You’ll be a crass old coot.

Most of the work I as an engineer do is jumping through hoops that engineers from other departments have drawn up. If someone up high really cared, wouldn't they have us work on something that matters?

> What is a productive way they can use LLMs in any of their flagship products today?

It's kind of the other way around, isn't it? Meta has the posts of a billion users with which to train LLMs, so they're in a better position to make them than most others. As for what to do with it then, isn't that that pretty similar no matter who you are?

On top of that, sites are having problems with people going to LLMs instead of going to the site, e.g. why ask a question on Facebook to get an answer tomorrow if ChatGPT can tell you right now? So they either need to get in on the new thing which is threatening to eat their lunch or they need to commoditize it sufficiently that there isn't a major incumbent competitor posed to sit between the users and themselves extracting a margin from the users, or worse, from themselves for directing user traffic their way instead of to whoever outbids them.

Look into the Laffer curve if you want to know why tax rates are what they are. Basically, using tax avoidance strategies have both a cost (accountants and lawyers) and a risk. Making the tax rate too high and the percentage of the wealthy that choose to utilize tax avoidance strategies increases (also the aggressiveness of those strategies increases). The change in this rate forms a curve with a maximum. There is a tax rate that maximizes tax revenue. That rate is far less than 100%. In fact, US tax rates are probably pretty near those Laffer maximums.

Please keep in mind that at these maximums, taxes are still progressive just probably not as much as you want. You really want to make taxes more progressive? Either get rid of SS or make it taxable on all income. SS contributions are by far the least progressive part of the tax code.

I frankly don't believe this. (edit for clarity: the proposition that our current rates are highly likely to be towards the top end of what's feasible, not the existence of such a curve)

It's been cited as unshakable truth many times, including just before places like Washington State significantly raised their top tax brackets—and saw approximately zero rich people leave.

There's a lot of widely-believed economic theory underlying our current practice that's based on extremely shaky ground.

As for how SS taxes are handled, I'm 100% in agreement with you.

> We keep trying to progressively tax money in the US to reduce the social imbalance.

The former does not lead to the latter.

Of course the business needs to work as a business too. I'm not saying that's not real, I'm saying it's reductionist to say it's only that.

Put another way, you need to have an answer to the question: Why should I work towards optimizing the success of this business rather than another one's.

If there isn't a great answer to this, you'll have employees with no shared sense of direction and no motivation.

A lie still tells you what the liar things you should believe of him, in this case what the public is supposed to think of these layoffs.