I don’t know anything about him, but if he is running a department at Meta, he as at the very least a political genius and a teenage data labeller

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tim333 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I was just watching the Y Combinator interview with Alexandr Wang who I guess may be being referred to https://youtu.be/5noIKN8t69U

The teenage data labeler thing was a bit of an exaggeration. He did found scale.ai at nineteen which does data labeling amongst other things.

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tomrod 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a simple heuristic that will save a lot of time: something that seems too good to be true usually is.

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antonvs 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Presumably this is all referring to Alexander Wang, who's 28 now. The data-labeling company he co-founded, Scale AI, was acquired by Meta at a valuation of nearly $30 billion.

But I suppose the criticism is that he doesn't have deep AI model research credentials. Which raises the age-old question of how much technical expertise is really needed in executive management.

	▲	KaiserPro 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> how much technical expertise is really needed in executive management. For running an AI lab? a lot. Put it this way, part of the reason that Meta has squandered its lead is because it decided to fill it's genAI dept (pre wang) with non-ML people. Now thats fine, if they had decent product design and clear road map as to the products they want to release. but no, they are just learning ML as they go, coming up with bullshit ideas as they go and seeing what sticks. But, where it gets worse, is they take the FAIR team and pass them around like a soiled blanket: "You're a team that is pushing the boundaries in research, but also you need stop doing that and work on this chatbot that pretends to be a black gay single mother" All the while you have a sister department, RL-L run by Abrash, who lets you actually do real research. Which means most of FAIR have fucked off to somewhere less stressful, and more concentrated on actually doing research, rather than posting about how you're doing research. Wangs misteps are numerous, the biggest one is re-platforming the training system. Thats a two year project right there, for no gain. It also force forks you from the rest of the ML teams. Given how long it took to move to MAST from fblearner, its going be a long slog. And thats before you tackle increasing GPU efficiency.
	▲	tomrod 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Which raises the age-old question of how much technical expertise is really needed in executive management. For whomever you choose to set as the core decision maker, you get out whatever their expertise is with minor impact by their guides. Scaling a business is a skill set. It's not a skill set that captures or expands the frontier of AI, so it's clearly in the realm to label the gentleman's expensive buyout is a product development play instead of a technology play.
	▲	NewsaHackO 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Hopefully he isn’t referring to Alex Wang, as it would invalidate anything else he said in his comment

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lijok 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They hired a teenager to run one of their departments and thought that meant the teenager was smart instead of realizing that Meta’s department heads aren’t

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antonvs 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> They hired a teenager to run one of their departments

Except they didn’t. The person in question was 28 when they hired him.

He was a teenager when he cofounded the company that was acquired for thirty billion dollars. But the taste of those really sour grapes must be hard to deal with.

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KaiserPro 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The person in question was 28 when they hired him.

Comic hyperbole darling. I know that's hard to understand, especially when you're one of the start up elect, who still believes.

But, FAIR is dead, meta have a huge brain drain, and Alex only has hardware and money to fix it. Worse for him, is he's surrounded by poisonous empire builders, and/or much more effective courtesans who can play zuck much more effectively than him.

Wang needs Zuck, and Zuck needs results. The problem is, people keep on giving zuck ideas, like robotics, and world models and AI sex bots.

Wang has to somehow keep up productivity, and integrate into meta's wider culture. Oh, and if he wants any decent amount of that 30billion, he's gotta stick out for 4 years.

I did my time and got my four years of RSUs from the buyout. my boss didn't neither did the CTO or about 2/3rds of the team. Meta will eat you, and I don't envy him.

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NewsaHackO 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I could not imagine being as salty as the original poster seems to be about Alex Wang. To hold that amount of hate for a superior that is more successful than you can’t be good for the soul

	▲	lijok an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You’re taking this a tad too seriously