> If you want to work on something big you probably want to be in a big corp to have the resources to do the big thing.

If anything, the reverse seems to be true, if you want to work on something big, you want to be in a small company, sufficiently funded, filled with great people, yet not "big", that's when "something big" seems to be more likely to happen.

In contrast, as far as I can think, the bigger a company gets, the less likely they are to actually come up with "something big", it seems like most of the times you need (creative) constraints in order for the results to end up being actually innovative, otherwise you end up like IBM and Meta, throwing money on stuff and getting some results, but nothing really out of the ordinary considering what's happening elsewhere in their ecosystems.

Well he left so whatever is coming next, AI related or not, "small" or not (small for them might be reaching just a million people, he wrote that he "lead the software layer that powers the entire AI industry." so his notion of scale is probably unlike mine, maybe yours too) is more exciting to him that whatever he could do next with all of Meta's resources.

Edit: to be clear, I didn't mean to imply their next thing is AI related, solely that they obviously know more about AI at Meta than e.g. XR at Meta, just because that's their expertise.

Your assumption is a bad read because it only works if his set of life priorities contains nothing else but maximizing his impact in the world of AI.

If he has just one other priority in that set (which could still include a robotic min/max of AI impact), then your assumption fails.

It reads to me as if he was the victim of office politics and decided to say "fuck it" instead of being transferred to something else within Meta.

Pretty crazy/bizarre that a VP/Fellow engineer would have such little say in what they do at Meta. In my mind, companies would do everything possible to retain them. They are a special and rare breed.

> It reads to me as if he was the victim of office politics and decided to say "fuck it" instead of being transferred to something else within Meta.

It looks like he'd already been transferred once (to Infra) and maybe didn't want to do it again.