Sure helps to be born wealthy, go to private school, and Ivy League college.

And timing

Win a monster pot and you can play a lot of more interesting hands.

Except you can play hundreds of thousands of poker hands in your lifetime, but only have time/energy/money to start a handful of businesses.

This might be true for a normal definition of success, but not lottery-winner style success like Facebook. If you look at Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Google, and so on, the founders all have few or zero previous attempts at starting a business. My theory is that this leads them to pursue risky behavior that more experienced leaders wouldn't try, and because they were in the right place at the right time, that earned them the largest rewards.

What "massive string of failed attempts" did Zuckerberg or Bezos ever accumulate?

This is just cope for people with a massive string of failed attempts and no successes.

Daddy's giving you another $50,000 because he loves you, not because he expects your seventh business (blockchain for yoga studio class bookings) is going to go any better than the last six.

IMO this strengthens the case for luck. If the probability of winning the lottery is P, then trying N times gives you a probability of 1-(1-P)^N.

Who's more likely to win, someone with one lottery ticket or someone with a hundred?

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

Some will read this and laser in on the "socialism" part, but obviously the interesting bit is the second half of the quote.

this is also just cope

Plenty of them do try and fail, and then one succeeds, and it doesn't mean that person is intrinsically smarter/wiser/better/etc than the others.

There are far, far more external factors on a business's success than internal ones, especially early on.

What risk was there in creating facebook? I don't see it.

Dude makes a website in his dorm room and I guess eventually accepts free money he is not obligated to pay back.

What risk?

There is another dimension, which is mostly but not fully characterized as perseverance, but many times with an added dose of ruthlessness

Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, google and many others all had strong doses of ruthlessness

Or you can just have rich parents and do nothing, and still be considered successful. What you say only applies to people who start from zero, and even then I'd call luck the dominant factor (based on observing my skillful and hardworking but not really successful friends).

>luck, skill and hard work.

Another key component is knowing the right people or the network you're in. I've known a few people that lacked 2 of those 3 things and yet somehow succeeded. Simply because of the people they knew.

I'm thinking of exactly what I said[^1] :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People

The not-so-secret is that the "killer apps" for deep neural networks are not LLMs or diffusion models. Those are very useful, but the most valuable applications in this space are content recommendation and ad targeting. It's obvious how Meta can use those things.

The genAI stuff is likely part talent play (bring in good people with the hot field and they'll help with the boring one), part R&D play (innovations in genAI are frequently applicable to ad targeting), and part moonshot (if it really does pan out in the way boosters seem to think, monetization won't really be a problem).

>But how is it worth for meta, since they won't really monetize it.

Meta needs growth as there main platform is slowing down. To move forward they need to gamble on potential growth. VR was a gamble. They bombed that one. This is another gamble.

They're not stupid. Like all the risks you're aware of, they're also aware of. They were aware of the risks for VR too. They need to find a new high growth niche. Gambling on something with even a 40% chance of exploding into success is a good bet for them given there massive resources.

Isn't Meta doing some limited rollout of Llama as an API? Still I haven't got my hands on it so I cannot say for sure whether it is currently paid or not, but that can drive some revenue.

Zuckerberg started as a sex pest and got not an iota better.

But we could, as a society, stop rewarding him for this shit. He'd be an irrelevant fool if we had appropriate regulations around the most severe of his misdeeds.

I used to work in adtech. I don't have any direct information but, I assume this relates to the persistent rumours that Facebook inflates impressions and turns a blind eye to bot activity.

This is pretty common on HN but not unique to it. Lots of rationalist adjacent content (like stuff on LessWrong, replies to Scott Alexander's substack, etc) has it also. Here I think it comes from users that try to intellectualize their not-very-intellectual, stream of consciousness style thoughts, as if using technical jargon to convey your feelings makes them more rational and less emotional.

Between “presumes a solid grasp of which things out there are not fraud besides those which are coercion, but that's not a subject I'm interested in having an opinion about,” before going on and sharing an opinion on that subject, and “even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped,” I think it may just be AI slop.

>why is there so much of this on HN?

Where?