I'm confused. If you have detailed, specific expectations, why aren't using the best model available? Even if you were using Opus 4.7, I would inquire if you're using high/xhigh effort by default.
Feels crazy to me for people to use anything other than the best available.
I also have the same question. That said, for some problems, at least over the last week or so, I did sometimes get better results from lower-effort Opus or even Sonnet. Sometimes I get (admittedly this is by feels) a better experience from voice mode which uses Haiku. This is somewhat surprising in some ways but maybe not in others. Some possible explanations include: (a) bugs relating to Anthropic's recent post-mortem [1] or (b) a tendency for a more loquacious Claude to get off in the weeds rather than offering a concise answer which invite short back-and-forth conversations and iteration.
Yeah but in a discussion about technology it’s a little silly. It’s like someone complaining about their phone and then finding out they still use a Nokia.
Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.
Yeah, but, just objectively speaking, look at how many _more_ business lines and units and actual PRODUCTS each of those other companies ship in comparison.
Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years).
Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on.
Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc.
If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail...
Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...
I am convinced Mark Zuckerberg does more harm than good for Facebook
like literally they lucked out on the landing the business model early but it feels it has been in an ongoing decline and everything else they have tried has failed spectacularly (and particularly things Mark has put his whole weight behind)
They never became anything more than the ad company
Pretty sure they bought Insta and Whatsapp. I mean, that's not nothing, buying a successful business and keeping it successful for over a decade. But neither Zuck nor Meta made those platforms; they were both established successes in their own right before acquisition.
The "amazing acquisitions" should be antitrust. Whatsapp is a non starter given what Brian Acton reported. I'll never use it. People widely report they ruined Instagram and Zuck came back furiously explaining in an email chain later "oh sorry I didn't mean to say we're killing the competition" probably after a lawyer scolded him
I feel like you just cherry picked from my examples. YouTube was certainly successful - Google bought them because their own Google Video competitor was a flop. DoubleClick was also obviously huge. Where 2 had a successful product, it just wasn't web based (nor do I think free), so didn't have anywhere near the distribution that Google enabled once the team ported it to run in a browser.
I think there is a difference in at least degree here (maybe in kind, idk) that's lost by lumping them purely on acquisition or not, but I do largely agree with your point.
But just wanted to correct for the historical record:
> Where 2 had a successful product, it just wasn't web based (nor do I think free), so didn't have anywhere near the distribution that Google enabled once the team ported it to run in a browser.
Where 2 did not have a product, successful or not. They were an unreleased demo looking for investors and luckily got into a room with Larry Page of 2004.
Indeed, I think they used bad examples as neither Android or Where 2 were successful, but it also shows that Google has done a mix of buying something successful to fill a gap or find someone with a good tech that they help to get over the line and make successful.
I’m sure the others saw the value too. It just wasn’t worth as much to them as Zuckerberg was prepared to pay. Not surprising given it’s a service that directly competed with FB in the social space.
Probably because Instagram wasn't a direct competitor to any of those other companies (except maybe Google+, which wasn't even a year old at the time that FB bought Instagram). I don't know why softbank didn't get them.
Instagram had around 10mn users at acquisition, so they might not have gotten to where they are without FB. Whatsapp was a successful product that didn't make any money.
One step further. Besides Facebook itself whqt has zuck been visionary about ? Instw and WhatsApp was bought. He thought chatbots was the thing in ‘17, then abandoned it for VR and metaverse, all the while chatbots start taking off. Every time he’s in an interview he talks like he’s some savant, really he got lucky with fb and done nothing since
The continual success of fb and instagram has not come from zuck but through glorified A/B testing on steroids whilst lighting employee’s asses on fire each quarter to move the metrics. Visionary genius? My ass. Only Steve Jobs proved he is worthy of that title.
Bro is a fraud. He always was - remember he stole the idea for fb. Thankfully he’s getting found out.
i argue that most ideas aren't necessary novel, so stealing idea isn't necessary bad.... e.g. i don't think google search was entirely novel, but was well executed.
honestly - meta has built quite a lot of cool things, but c-suite is probably to be blamed for what's going on today.
No the strategy of having a professional looking social space in the web, specifically focused on college folks solely was novel - this is what he stole and without this it wouldn’t have gotten to the place of success it is today. Knowing about the technology is no good without a solid strategy - with a solid strategy anyone can raise the funding to go build it. It’s easy to know what to build when you have a vision specifically of what you’re building into.
was it actually? I don't know the full technical behind this but wiki does suggest: "A search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services, designed by Robin Li in 1996, developed a strategy for site-scoring and page-ranking.."
If he didn’t steal anything why did winklevoss and another person at Harvard involved in the original project get a pay off…?
Do we really need to discuss this? He tried to screw another founder - the Brazilian - who got a pay off and now has a reported net worth in the billions.
Meta profits are good but they’re closing in on the $100 billion dollar mark in their Meta Quest/AI fiasco just because you can afford it doesn’t mean you should do it. See another company called Oracle for a similar path.
Besides selling democracy for pennies on the dollar, Zuckerberg knew what to buy before everyone else knew what it was worth.
In 2012, everyone around me was lauging at the absurdity of a 0 revenue photo app getting acquired for $1bn. My peers/superiors in the ad business thought Facebook would flail in digital marketing. Oops.
The metaverse might be a big pile of bollocks, but isn't the whole point of being a billionaire to indulge peculiar unpopular obsessions?
No he bought everything out of paranoia to shut out competition.
They tried organically to replicate instagram etc but they failed even though they had wayyyy more resources. Their attempts sucked. So their approach was to target for acquisition or copy features if they couldn’t.
There’s plenty of evidence of this re. His comms around those events.
Zuckerberg copied Snapchat like... 5 times at least? It should have signified to EVERYBODY he has sociopath-like behavior (in fact apparently on the Zuckerberg-owned Instagram, Snapchat content got demoted, or something) and how he is absolutely the same person that was willing to fuck the Winklevosses ("in the ear")
But I suppose that doesn't count because Winklevii "never would have come up with anything anyway"
> Social media is an extremely competitive landscape, with competitors rising overnight.
This is not true at all. There are two players. FB/Instagram and TikTok. Using one does not preclude using the other. Other than tiktok, who was the last new player in social?
> Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.
There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.
Telegram has 1B users (which is surprising to me, I thought it was an ex-Soviet thing), and there are entire geographic strongholds, such as Russia and China.
Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
> There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.
Your own link has Meta with 3 of the top 4 platforms. Can you really see any of the competitors overtaking them in even the medium term?
> Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
China doesn't use Google either, and while they might use Windows they're staying off Azure which is where Microsoft's main business is these days.
Yes there are countries which stay off Meta. But they are just as embedded in the workings of the world as any of the companies you mentioned, probably more so. Government decisions are made by people using a mix of Apple, Google and Microsoft hardware - but all of them are communicating over WhatsApp.
And for all the scorn it gets on HN, Facebook still works for some of my use cases: high school friends, low-contact relatives, obscure geography groups, the Philippines.
> Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.
Short of social media being classified as something like alcohol or cigarettes, you will lose money on this trade. You’re betting against ingrained human nature.
And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft. Also their hardware business is roughly 50-100X the size of Google's hardware business in scale and distribution.
The headcount analog for Google is Apple. And if you subtract out the retail employees Apple looks surprisingly efficient, having much less non-retail staff than Google (although both heavily use contractors).
Meta on the other hand...is pretty much the definition of bloat.
It's been more than a few years since I worked at Apple, but they were always unique in the tech space in that their retail division dwarfed headcount. If I recall correctly all of OS X Lion was produced by around 3,000 engineers (and probably less, since I think that count included iLife and iWork).
> And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft.
Not even close, if you include Office and Mail/Outlook. And if you include corporate clients, Apple is just not on the map. I've gone from a Windows first company to an Apple first company, and it's a night and day difference when you see how well integrated things were for Windows.
I mean, individually you can say Teams sucks (terrible, really). And Outlook sucks as a consumer. But the way you can get all these things working with Office was very convenient.
Meta has Facebook which was OG enough. MySpace was the real movement although you could argue LiveJournal was before that. Instagram was bought, WhatsApp was too. So really all Meta has is Facebook, everything else has been synergy.
Apple / Google and as I hate to admit are innovators of the modern tech world. While they've bought their fair-share they still produce and create and have existed prior 00's. Two devices dominate the market and it's not going to change any time soon.
You either use iOS or Google. Urgh, this is how the world has become. Windows or Linux, X or Y; why did Z have to die.
Yep - It's nearly impossible to assign profit to those things - we have X revenue from Android licenses, what's the cost of an android license? Is it all the R&D that goes to UI or hardware research? What's the cost of a Youtube Ad?
Google makes money on ads, because its products span the entire internet.
Youtube, Gmail, Search, Maps, Android, Devices, Photos and Drive are how they get the data to make money on ads. Cloud, Android & Youtube would be a 2 trillion dollar company even without Google. They don't make money on these, because they don't need to make money on it.
Apple makes cutting edge hardware, at least two operating systems and lots of user applications. Google makes search, cloud, a decent office suite with the largest mail server in the world and of course cutting edge AI. It's easy to see why either of them needs twice as many people as Meta
That’s like saying email powers entire economies. It’s not WhatsApp that’s providing the value there, and if they press to hard to try and pull revenue from it, all that communication would flow into another channel.
WhatsApp is one of the buggiest UIs I use daily. Random things like images/messages stacking on top of each other, seeing the HD and low definition videos as two separate things in favorites, never being able to view the HD one, sometimes the messages never scrolling quite to the bottom, just amateur level stuff, I'm a bit impressed with how bad it is.
Google and Microsoft have significantly more products. That's even just counting their consumer products, their cloud providers are a whole other kettle of fish.
I would expect a company that makes some web pages to have less than half the people than:
- a company that makes the leading search engine, the leading browser, one of the two major mobile OSes, one of the major desktop OSes, some of the best ai hardware, and is in the running to win the ai race
- a company that makes the leading mobile and desktop OSes and the leading desktop and os hardware, one of the top consumer cloud offerings, a major online media store, and a popular consumer electronics retail store
Think about the scope of Apple's business (Hardware, Processors, Operating Systems, Software competitors for every app category, Physical Retail, Global Ecommerce, Global distribution networks, App stores, Payments, Credit cards, Banking, Music streaming, Film/TV studio, etc).
Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc.
Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta.
Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.
Meta bought Rivos, and as far as I can see do a ton of work related to Linux kernel stuff (I heard about this in the context of eBPF). But datacenter side, not consumer.
about half (80k) of the equivalent fulltime employees at Apple are involved in the store footprint, so they're retail staff in one of their main sales channels.
And as other's have pointed out, Apple has a far wider range of products and services than Meta, and produce far more hardware products, including their own cutting-edge SOC's. Meta, meanwhile, get Broadcom to largely produce their "custom ASIC's", not just fab, but deeply involved in design, tape out, and validation.
> They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Meta is the youngest company of that group. Apple and Microsoft have been around for over twice as long.
Meta also has the narrowest scope of those companies.
Really it's kind of amazing that Meta has so many employees relative to those other companies given how much narrower their business is. Puts the overhiring into perspective.
Not familiar with Microsoft. But it's definitely amazing that Google managed to grow itself to one of the most bureaucratic companies in the past 15 years. And yeah, it's bloated as hell.
choosing 2021 is itself a really odd cutoff date to choose. The really bizarre hiring happened between 2016 and 2021 https://i.redd.it/c94hnp9kvzy91.png
They had 17k employees in 2016 and 80k in 2022. And given that a lot of the big tech companies looked like this albeit not quite so extreme I think it's right to say they might all have a glut of employees.
Both Google and Microsoft are bigger, and with more products than Meta.
But both Google and Microsoft also massively overhired around the same timeframe as Meta, and are still digging themselves out of the mess of their own making. And making their teams pay for such stupidity.
Not Apple, but if you see Apple join the layoff party, then you know things are really bad, however Google and Microsoft like Meta seem to go through this every five or six years.
>Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021.
So? They likely already had too many in 2021.
>They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Technology (hw/sw) wise, they also have 1/10 the internal tech and public product breadth and scope of Google or Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 1/50 even. They do like 4-5 social media and chat apps (that they hardly ever update anymore), and some crappy VR stuff nobody cares for.
This is actually a false premise pushed later to justify layoffs. They started overhiring in 2018-2019. They just continued a preexisting trend through 2021.
It's hard to compare these numbers directly since valuations have increased quite a bit since a quarter century ago. As a proportion of the S&P 500, Tesla (2.3%) is about 4x of Enron at that $70b (0.6%).
So funny to see the recommendation here (track bedtime/wake-time, compute your average cycle length, predict the next bedtime from it, and don't deviate in either direction) be similar to how spaced repetition is typically sold to people: high expectations from users, no affordances for flexibility. These kinds of systems are just not realistic unless you are willing to be a loner that can never deviate from their routine.
I do agree that caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, sleeping pills, and (as much as we can) alarm clocks are all things to stay away from.
GPT-4o vs. Google I/O (May 2024): OpenAI scheduled its "Spring Update" exactly 24 hours before Google’s biggest event of the year, Google I/O. They launched GPT-4o voice mode.
Sora vs. Gemini 1.5 Pro (Feb 2024): Just two hours after Google announced its breakthrough Gemini 1.5 Pro model, Sam Altman tweeted the reveal of Sora (text-to-video).
ChatGPT Enterprise vs. Google Cloud Next (Aug 2023): As Google began its major conference focused on selling AI to businesses, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Enterprise.
Feels crazy to me for people to use anything other than the best available.
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