Comment by alt227
5 hours ago
Meta certainly do give the impression that they are burning through ridiculous amounts of cash with not much to show for it, and thats just from the outside.
5 hours ago
Meta certainly do give the impression that they are burning through ridiculous amounts of cash with not much to show for it, and thats just from the outside.
its the same (or was) from the inside.
Someone had a poster up of Pam "this is the same thing" on the one side had the apollo space missions, and the other a picture of Zuck avatar next to the Eiffel tower. At the top it had the current RL spend (something like 45billion) they like me working in RL.
there were three teams for everything, sometimes in the same org.
Take hand interactions for example.
There was production hand detection, they were in the OS/product team. They spent a lot of time trying to make sure it was reliable and useable.
Then there was a near research team, who took old state of the art and salmi sliced it until it worked well enough on either current or next gen hardware.
Then there was the production research people, who were derived from control labs, who for some reason were not in RL-research but buried deep in "production"
Then in RL-Research, the biggest org was agios, who also did hand interaction, but hardly any of their work actually made it near to prod. They liked wrist mounted cameras with no privacy systems, because why would you need it on your wrist? its not like those head mounted twats who spent two years trying to master privacy.
You also have to demonstrate "impact" every 6 months. which is really great when your delivery pipeline is 1-7 years.
If you scroll Instagram for a few minutes you'll see what they have been working on and that are also making a ridiculous amount of cash by selling and serving ads while burning some on side projects like that.
I had to laugh to the point of tears the other day when I saw my friend scrolling through Instagram and they encountered an "Ad Break". The app simply doesn't let you scroll through another post, story or reel until you sit there like a good boy and let the ad sit for 10 seconds or whatever.
How people put up with that kinda crap and continue to use these apps daily for hours on end is mind blowing to me.
I wonder if the prevalence of adblock has helped make a lot of things like this possible. Like, it's hard to imagine people putting up with this without literally protesting in the streets. But the people who can't tolerate it have mostly gone through the effort of opting out, and those who can just put up with it. And thus, the frog boils.
Yeah and if you look at there numbers, they can just afford it. When you realize how big zuckerberg still is.
How is it a bad thing if a company goes all in on burning cash but at the time have never reported a net loss quarter since its IPO? Its their money to burn at this point who cares
But what you say is not entirely true. There is much to love about companies burning cash on R&D. That's how a lot of greatness happened.
But what is wrong in the meta situation is that while Meta officially projects its 2026 AI capital expenditures to be between $130 billion and $145 billion, investigative reports indicate its true future liabilities exceed $690 billion once unlisted back-end deals and lease commitments are factored in. They have used shadow accounting in many places to hide these things. As it's a publicly traded company so if that goes south it hits a lot of 401ks. So that in a nutshell is why its kinda a bad thing. But you are still kinda right in that its not an existential threat and it's not going to wipe Meta out even though those numbers could totally destroy the vast majority of public companies.
I would have to say that its tragic more than bad. Meta consumed whole industries that used to spend the money on a bunch of different things. Now all the revenue goes to Meta shareholders and whatever it is Zuck is wasting billions of dollars on pursuing.