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dazamarquez | 2 months ago

Is Wang even able to achieve superintelligence? Is anyone? I'm unable to make sense of Wang's compensation package. What actual, practical skills does he bring to the table? Is this all a stunt to drive Meta's stock value?

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this_user|2 months ago

The way it sounds, Zuckerberg believes that they can, or at the very least has people around him telling him that they can. But Zuckerberg also though that the Metaverse would be thing.

LeCun obviously thinks otherwise and believes that LLMs are a dead-end, and he might be right. The trouble with LLMs is that most people don't really understand how they work. They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart. But that may have created the illusion the true artificial intelligence is much closer than it really is in the minds of many people including Zuckerberg. And obviously, there now exists an entire industry that relies on that idea to raise further funding.

As for Wang, he's not an AI researcher per se, he basically built a data sweatshop. But he apparently is a good manager who knows how to get projects done. Maybe the hope is that giving him as many resources as possible will allow him to work his magic and get their superintelligence project on track.

milowata|2 months ago

Wang is a networking machine and has connected with everyone in the industry. Likely was brought in as a recruiting leader. Mark being Mark, though, doesn’t understand the value of vision and figured getting big names in the same room was better than actually having a plan.

antonvs|2 months ago

> they are really just good at appearing to be smart.

In other words, functionally speaking, for many purposes, they are smart.

This is obvious in coding in particular, where with relatively minimal guidance, LLMs outperform most human developers in many significant respects. Saying that they’re “not smart” seems more like an attempt to claim specialness for your own intelligence than a useful assessment of LLM capabilities.

irjustin|2 months ago

> They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart

There are too many different ways to measure intelligence.

Speed, matching, discovery, memory, etc.

We can combine those levers infinitely create/justify "smart". Are they dumb? Absolutely, but are they smart? Very much so. You can be both at the same time.

Maybe you meant genius? Because that standard is quite high and there's no way they're genius today.

Eisenstein|2 months ago

> They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart.

Can you give an example of the difference between these two things?

Mistletoe|2 months ago

What are the differences between a person that is smart and an LLM that seems smart but isn't?

nl|2 months ago

Humans aren't smart, they are really just good at appearing to be smart.

Prove me wrong.

ActionHank|2 months ago

Wang is able to accurately gauge zuck’s intelligence.

hshdhdhj4444|2 months ago

If Zuck throws $2-$4Bn towards a bunch of AI “superstars” and that’s enough to convince the market that Meta is now a serious AI company, it will translate into hundreds of billions in market cap increases.

Seems like a great bang for the buck.

PessimalDecimal|2 months ago

Oracle also briefly convinced the market it was a serious AI company and received a market cap increase. Until it evaporated.

fmajid|2 months ago

Wang never led a frontier lab. He founded a company that uses hlow-paid uman intelligence to label training data. But clearly he is as slick a schmoozer as Sam Altman to have taken in a seasoned operator like Zuckerberg.

ginnyaang|2 months ago

> What actual, practical skills does he bring to the table?

This hot dog, this no hot dog.