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Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

(www.theverge.com)
492 points Lionga | 4 comments | 22 Oct 25 16:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.728s | source
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Rebuff5007 ◴[22 Oct 25 18:46 UTC] No.45673440[source]▶
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?

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gloomyday ◴[22 Oct 25 19:38 UTC] No.45674124[source]▶
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.

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1. svara ◴[22 Oct 25 20:24 UTC] No.45674691[source]▶
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?
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2. joshl32532 ◴[22 Oct 25 20:46 UTC] No.45674922[source]▶
> 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.

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3. wkat4242 ◴[22 Oct 25 22:06 UTC] No.45675750[source]▶
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?
4. svara ◴[23 Oct 25 07:32 UTC] No.45679212[source]▶
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.