Meta To Lay Off Employees in Metaverse Silicon Unit Tomorrow (reuters.com) 55
Meta is planning to lay off employees on Wednesday in the unit of its metaverse-oriented Reality Labs division focused on creating custom silicon, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: Employees were informed of the layoffs in a post on Meta's internal discussion forum Workplace on Tuesday. The post said they would be notified about their status with the company by early Wednesday morning, one of the sources said. Reuters was not able to determine the extent of the cuts to the silicon unit, called Facebook Agile Silicon Team, or FAST, which has roughly 600 employees, according to the other source. The FAST unit is tasked with developing custom chips to power the augmented and virtual reality hardware produced by Meta's Reality Labs division. Meta currently makes a line of mixed reality headsets called Quest and smart glasses designed with Ray-Ban eyeglass maker EssilorLuxottica that can stream video and speak with wearers through a new artificial intelligence virtual assistant.
The High Spend of Meta (Score:1)
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Metastabook gets a great big cuppa sad reality.
Re:The High Spend of Meta (Score:4, Insightful)
Metastabook gets a great big cuppa sad reality.
That'll teach them not to try to make fake virtual silicon DD big cuppas!
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Wait, their avatars had boobs but no legs?
The chauvinist cynic in me would say that they know what matters to their user base...
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That's nothing compared to what they do in Italy in Sicilicon Valley!
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I think what we're talking about here is more about the hills rather than the valley.
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This is just their custom silicon operation and Fuckerberg continues to throw good money after bad in the rest of that vanity project. But when Carmack left everybody knew it is ultimately doomed.
They failed, plain and simple. (Score:4, Interesting)
Their job was to make chips that would give Meta's hardware an edge over other hardware.
Instead, Meta went with Qualcomm, because their stuff was better.
At least, that's the narrative presented by the article.
After all the money Meta spent on this unit, Apple out-engineered them anyway! Axing the project seems like the rational thing to do, at this point.
Re:They failed, plain and simple. (Score:5, Insightful)
Developing their own silicon makes sense for Apple because they sell hundreds of millions of units.
Facebook developing silicon for a new product without a pre-existing market made no sense. They should've used off-the-shelf tech until they had an idea of the market size.
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What I *dont* get though was the astonishing amount of money that went into this thing though.
Facebook spent moew on R&D for VR than most major hardware companies spend on their entire portfolio. Where did it go?!
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Facebook spent moew on R&D for VR than most major hardware companies spend on their entire portfolio. Where did it go?!
No they didn't. Facebook's R&D spending is actually reasonably in line for any tech major that produces a mix of hardware or software. $20bn over 2 years sounds like a big scary number, only if you fail to realise that even after this investment they made $40bn in net profit over the same timeframe.
In fact in terms of R&D invested as a percentage of revenue Facebook is not very high in the tech industry.
By the way "this thing" is actually quite big. $20bn went into 2 released products, 5 very divers
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Agreed in principle, but claiming there is no pre-existing market is somewhat silly. There are well over 20million Quest 2 sold.
The thing is, VR isn't as special purpose as it sounds. There's no actual need for custom silicon here. Even if they did have an Apple sized market, the only reason Apple made their own silicon is because of a desperate corporate culture of vertically integrated independence.
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There's no actual need for custom silicon here.
i agree in principle, but in practice they might need to make the jump
i think the reason its not taken off is because theyre just relying on the current state of the art desktop GPU to power it all. Compared to a PC, VR will always be this laggy, low res mess in comparison. I cant see exactly how this would happen but maybe they do need custom silicon.
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i think the reason its not taken off is because theyre just relying on the current state of the art desktop GPU to power it all
Huh? Meta's headset which has sold upwards of 20million units with the most recent model and even more with the model previously do not rely on any desktop GPU, or a desktop at all. At least until 6 days from now, at which point my post will apply to the current model and 3 previous models.
Compared to a PC, VR will always be this laggy, low res mess in comparison.
The problem with standalone VR is neither lag nor low res. Either you've not used it or you are using the incorrect terms to describe what you've seen.
I cant see exactly how this would happen but maybe they do need custom silicon.
Why custom? What makes you think Meta has either a magical capability
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Huh? Meta's headset which has sold upwards of 20million units
big woop, its still a novelty. top selling games are all on other platforms
the model previously do not rely on any desktop GPU, or a desktop at al....The problem with standalone VR is neither lag nor low res....l
and i bet a desktop gpu is faster. if they arent doing anything magic on new silicon, by default this remains true forever.
Re:They failed, plain and simple. (Score:5, Funny)
So shocked I nearly choked on my handlebar mustache wax.
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Ah. Nothing says idealism or naivety like a team of 600 people working in vaporware silicon.
Vaporware? These people would swear it in court, after all what engineer hasn’t heard of vaporware deposition?
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Actual Reality (Score:5, Insightful)
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Empirical evidence suggests otherwise.
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Re: Actual Reality (Score:2)
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Of course you are a woman if you feel like it. You don't even need a dress.. You can even get pregnant and breastfeed and demolish top notch real women in sports. Just feel like it. It's all good, bro.
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I think the woke kids who modded me to troll were too stupid to realise you were being sarcastic and modded you up.
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Amusing, isn't it? :-)
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wherever theres talk of men wearing dresses, theres this guy in the comments
So when are they going to lay off Mark Zuckerberg (Score:3)
And no matter how many times we bend over and get it without lube we always get right back up again and say, please sir can I have another. Are we ever going to learn?
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Zuckerberg controls 53% of the voting shares.
Nobody can fire him.
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Nobody can fire him.
Find me a cannon and we'll test that hypothesis.
For science!
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Nobody can fire him.
Find me a cannon and we'll test that hypothesis.
For science!
Cannon? I got a can of gas in the back of the truck and a lighter that'll get the job done.
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I fail to see the scientific value.
Though I do grant the entertainment value.
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Fire = chemical reaction = science! It's win-win!
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The parallels end there. If Zuck curbstomps his own company into the pavement, absolutely nothing of value will be lost and a replacement company will be in place within 36 hours. Regardless of whether you love or hate Musk, Tesla and SpaceX a
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Are we ever going to learn?
No.
However, just wait till you see this small language AI model, you can emulate soo many CXOs with one of these puppies *pats server rack*
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There is nothing to learn. Powerful people use their power to avoid the consequences of their bad decisions. It just comes with the territory.
Proles like you and me take the stick we are given because our options are limited. It's not like either one of us can just decide its our turn to run Facebook. We play the hand we are dealt, just like everyone else.
There is no option for some sort of crowd sourced utopia where all the important decisions are made purely democratically. The sorts of decisions tha
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Most animals live mostly solitary lives or live in small family groups with no hierarchies of power other than the adults over the juveniles. Social insects do not have hierarchies of power, but are self-organizing populations (the queen bee is not a leader, but a egg-laying slave to the hive), and ants outnumber people about 2 million to
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Here is a list [wikipedia.org]. Though it seems to be incomplete. I am surprised that lobster, for example, is not on the list, despite the very clear and rigid hierarchy that lobsters have and the amount of energy they put into establishing and maintaining it. I wonder what other species are missing from this list.
Re: So when are they going to lay off Mark Zuckerb (Score:2)
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Not to mention that usually they could retain thousands of people and even save money in the process by simply firing the dud at the top.
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To what end? Does it magically make sense for Facebook to have a department to develop custom VR silicon simply because one less manager is gone? If you want a make-work governance style, move to China. They are all too happy to employ people literally to do nothing other than make the unemployment figure look better.
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Does it make sense for Facebook to have a CEO that makes decisions that couldn't be worse if they were made by a magic-8-ball?
I don't say retain the superfluous developers, I just say get rid of the most expensive dud in the company.
Re:So when are they going to lay off Mark Zuckerbe (Score:4, Interesting)
Because this entire fiasco was his baby.
What fiasco? Meta invested $20-30bn in a strategy that has yet to pay off, but has currently put them as the leading VR provider in the industry. They invested this money while making ludicrous amounts of profits. I know it sounds like a big scary number but the fact is their R&D budget is not out of line with any tech major.
It's funny how CEOs make decisions that absolutely wreck the value of a company and they are a-okay.
What value was wrecked? Meta's share price and company value is trending close to an all time high, beaten only by the COVID spike of the tech industry. Relative to the NASDAQ Meta's value is outperforming all their peers.
For some reason whether it's cranking interest rates to tame inflation via mandatory austerity or mass layoffs it's always us it takes it in the shorts.
Why is a company investing in VR and making a few staffing decisions making you take it in the shorts? Do you work in the department in question?
Are we ever going to learn?
Yeah we've all learned a lot here. Everyone hates the Zucking idiot. But you seem to have some irrational connection to him that makes you come up with a wild alternate reality that doesn't exist. We've learnt you have absolutely no idea what is going on at Meta, in the VR market, or in the wider tech industry.
When are they going to lay off Zuckerberg
And to address the title, Zuckerberg has a controlling share holding. The only one who can fire Zuckerberg is Zuckerberg. The shareholders he reports to is himself. It's his company, and his wallet his decisions are affecting. And based on the share price today I'm sure he crying tears of happiness into his billions.
You're kidding right? (Score:2)
If he spend $1m on that it would've been a fiasco, let alone $30bn. And of course little dictator Zuck in his fiefdom got to order everyone to march to their dooms. Every single person on that project knew it was doomed to failure becau
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Facebook makes both hardware and software. Their software sucks, and that's the bit nobody wants. Both because Zuck is not properly in touch with reality, and because there's no way for a huge conglomerate like Meta to make something people actually want.
Second Life and the like still exist and are doing fine, but the tricky thing with them is that they cater to a weird and quirky audience that's not the kind of users anybody wants to bring up in the board room. SL still survives because its weirdness still
Get a clue (Score:2)
At one point the Metaverse software had 14 users, all of them facebook employees.
You're confusing their abortion of a second life clone (Horizion Worlds) with their entire metaverse division. They didn't spend $30bn on that. They spent a tiny miniscule fraction on it. They spent $30bn on multiple pieces of hardware (released as products) multiple pieces of hardware (released as tech demos), massive updates to APIs, R&D into optics and sensors, got a fuckton of patents in the process, developed a content incubator, and bought 2 game studios. They released one massive dud of a product
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We who? Zuck literally owns his company. How were you personally hurt by Zuck doing stupid shit with his own company?
(I like how autocorrect desperately wants to turn his name into Suck).
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We who? Zuck literally owns his company. How were you personally hurt by Zuck doing stupid shit with his own company?
(I like how autocorrect desperately wants to turn his name into Suck).
What's really funny about the "ruining" arguments is that it's usually being said by the same people that decry that facebook even exists. In short, Zuck screwing up his company is a net win for civilization and humanity on the whole. I'm over here with popcorn and prepared to hire a cheering section. Go Zuck. Keep dreaming, big guy! If you try hard enough, I'm sure you can come up with a bigger fumble than the metaverse. Come on, buddy. Don't let us down. We're counting on you to destroy the malevolent cre
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Lol, I wish it would die. Maybe one day but dropping $10 billion on the StupidVerse barely made a scratch. Unfortunately, FB is doing just fine.
But... (Score:2)
Violation of disability act (Score:2)
Zuck is mass firing legless workers in a clearly targeted act against the disabled.
Yikes! (Score:2)
Employees were informed of the layoffs in a post on Meta's internal discussion forum
Imagine participating in a company run employees forum with all the algorithmic tools to trace and analyze your comments that Facebook has.