I thought that their Dear Leader, Zuck
was a robot the first time I saw him. Zero personality, Zero empathy. Zero everything.
Meta cuts about 700 jobs as it shifts spending to AI
Meta has begun laying off employees as it focuses more of its cash on building out datacenters, training its own large language models, and recruiting talent for AI. A person familiar with the cuts told The Register they would number about 700. According to The Information, the job losses will fall hardest on Meta’s Reality …
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Wednesday 25th March 2026 23:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I thought that their Dear Leader, Zuck
Someone once described Facebook as a schizoid person's version of a social network.
Zuckerberg has often been mockingly compared to Data from Star Trek, but the irony is that, despite his intentionally unemotional personality, the fictional Data comes across as having far more obvious humanity and empathy than the merely cold and robotic Zuck.
He somehow combines the self-serving nature of Lore (i.e. Data's evil and more human "twin") with Data's emotionlessness.
That infamous quote from his college days where he calls the people who trusted him with their data "dumb fucks" (since admitted as true) is telling. I'm quite prepared to cut some slack for the fact that people can be dicks when they're younger and grow out of it. However, Facebook- a company made in its creator's image- has had an obvious, self-serving lack of respect for peoples' privacy and control over their data as its hallmark since the beginning, and this has never changed.
Zuck is the same sociopathic POS he's always been.
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Wednesday 25th March 2026 19:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
It amuses me that for all the spending and focus on AI that they have, they barely have a presence in the space. If it weren't for how unique the Llama models are, I'd forget they did anything with AI at all. I barely use any of their services that have AI integrated into it (who does? no wonder they're firing people in their social media departments) so I never have exposure to it. Nobody thinks of them when it comes to AI. You got ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Copilot. Does Meta even have a name for their AI? I don't even know. It reminds me of how people point out that Aperture Science went bankrupt because they never even sold any of their products, they just kept them in perpetual testing hell for no actual reason.
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Wednesday 25th March 2026 21:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
The Llama models are unique in that they are very personable, they're the most charismatic open models out there (in my opinion, although people also seem to like Gemma a lot). Most open models, especially more recent ones, are really off-putting and cold, built more for agent tasks rather than talking. Llama is dumber than them, but it's way better at having an actual enjoyable conversation. I actually plan to use two models in the assistant I'm building, Qwen or Gemma for classification tasks, and Llama to do the actual talking (neither for decision-making, this is a symbolic system because I don't want it to delete all my emails)
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Wednesday 25th March 2026 19:45 GMT Clausewitz4.1
Winklevoss
Better call the Winklevoss brothers for ideas
Metaverse ? Flop
VR Glasses ? Likely flop
AI ? There are legitimate use cases, not that many, and the circular money invested into it will tell. And no, it will never approach human intelligence
Which reminds me, what is the name of the company ?
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Wednesday 25th March 2026 23:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Given how many billions have been squandered on the Metaverse to so little effect...
...I'd be exceptionally surprised if there are many people working in Reality Labs who hadn't already been able to see this coming for some time now.
Not sure how much sympathy they warrant working for a POS company like Meta anyway, but one assumes they would- or should- already have been pushing for a transfer to another part of the company or seeking work elsewhere. Maybe the pay was good enough for them to stick around until the shit hit the fan?
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Thursday 26th March 2026 05:27 GMT Bebu sa Ware
We have to be willing to sort of make temporal bets…
"We have to be willing to sort of make temporal bets"
Which "sort of" are ? Different from a mug punter's wager on the 3:30 or a "spatial bet" or cadastral bet ? Or the "sort of" stickiness of shit to the wall thing ?
"that's a big part of what we have to do in an intelligent and thoughtful way.”
I know it is easy but you could have fooled me.
I might expect this drivel from an unpaid intern reluctantly fronting the media but this is the CFO of the firm who is presumably making a motza in compensation.
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Thursday 26th March 2026 11:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Double speak culture
"my role was impacted by the recent reduction in force today", what is with all this word salad crap? You got laid off. "Own it" as they say. "The gratitude I feel far outweighs the disappointment.”
It's crap when people get laid off and gratitude doesn't pay the bills, but if this kind of thing is how Zuckversians think, then I think I see the problem.
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Thursday 26th March 2026 12:27 GMT Roland6
Re: Double speak culture
It was probably written with the assistance of an AI and had to be worded to get through an AI filter: you and I can understand “reduction in force”, I doubt an AI agent looking for negative postings about Meta would and so pass it as “harmless”.
As for the “gratitude”. Sometimes it is really helpful for businesses to make you redundant - it not only can avoid the fallout arising from resigning, but it can also leave you financially better off, particularly if you have a job offer in hand…
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