[esics6A]

When these sort of highly sought after researcher and ML/AI talent begin to leave a company in large groups even if it's just a small number of people at first it's a sign that something is profoundly wrong at that company. These people work on the long term big roadmap items and can typically see the the future initiatives clearly. Essentially means that innovation at Meta has slowed to a trickle or has completely dried up.

[losvedir]

I think you're generalizing too much.

These are AI/ML researchers, and so you can probably talk about that area at Meta, but it doesn't apply to other departments necessarily.

But I think it's kind of obvious that AI/ML is a dicey proposition there. See for example[0] how they decided to stop doing facial recognition. I can easily imagine a lot of AI projects being canned or back-burnered like that now. What's ML used for at Meta? Feed recommendations, social graph inferences, face identification, etc? All those are under heavy scrutiny, and a lot of the work of doing it "right" is not even an ML question at all, but one of policy, regulation, and product. It's not like self-driving cars where people can generally agree that "getting from A to B without crashing" is a good thing, and where the obvious ML and engineering problems line up with product problems. But if you "increase engagement" with your feed recommendations, that could be good or bad in ways that ML can't really tell you. If you get better at identifying people in pictures, people are going to hate you and there will news articles about stalking. If you identify who a potential friend might be, that's a privacy consideration, etc, etc.

But what's going on there is pretty independent of the "metaverse" stuff, I think.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29084081

[esics6A]

> I think you're generalizing too much.

> These are AI/ML researchers, and so you can probably talk about that area at Meta, but it doesn't apply to other departments necessarily.

When you look at their products as a whole at their root are essentially AI/ML driven or rely on the capability. This is very relevant to and applies to those that are most directly revenue generating like advertising.

> I can easily imagine a lot of AI projects being canned or back-burnered like that now. What's ML used for at Meta? Feed recommendations, social graph inferences, face identification, etc? All those are under heavy scrutiny, and a lot of the work of doing it "right" is not even an ML question at all, but one of policy, regulation, and product

Correct due to multiple factors there's little growth or innovation possible in the main products that Meta generates revenue from. Right now they only sell a single product which is advertising.

Metaverse is a highly speculative venture that may not work and there are companies like Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft Gaming that are better positioned to rely on existing technologies, platforms and synergies that have a major edge here.

That's why I would interpret AI/ML researchers leaving as a sign that Meta's best days are behind it and Metaverse is an act of desperation.