> Today's investment also allows us to give back in recognition of your hard work and dedication to Scale over the past several years. The proceeds from Meta's investment will be distributed to those of you who are shareholders and vested equity holders, while maintaining the opportunity to continue participating in our future growth as ongoing equity holders. The exceptional team here has been the key to our success, so l'm thrilled to be able to return the favor with this meaningful liquidity distribution.
As someone who is a US Citizen, what is something about the immigration process that I probably do not know about, but causes a lot of issues/could be improved.
* By law, the US can only issue 140,000 employment-based green cards per year, and no more than 7% to one country. This means people from India or China can face a 100+ year backlog, even after they have proved they qualify for a green card. There's no cap on marriage-based green cards.
* Processing times for many green cards (i.e. for people who have already qualified, but just need the physical green card), are 12-24 months.
* USCIS still expects many applications to be sent by mail. Some applications (like O-1s, EB-1s) require hundreds of pages of evidence, and it all needs to be printed out on 8.5x11" paper, for USCIS to scan it in on B+W scanners. This means that there is no error checking (e.g. on fee amounts), and if you have made a mistake, you might not know about it for weeks. Also, it means your petition cannot include working hyperlinks, webpages, or videos - the USCIS officer judges the petition by scrolling through a 400+ page PDF.
* The 'standard' post-graduate work visa is the H-1B. It's entirely lottery-based, not merit-based, and typically there are 400,000+ people competing for 85,000 visas. Many qualified people are forced to leave the US each year because they didn't get selected in the lottery.
Hyperlinks are often banned in various kinds of petitions and applications. Mostly to ensure that the entire application is submitted at once and does not change afterwards. Then you can process the application in multiple passes (maybe first for the formal requirements and then for the actual content), confident that the conclusions from the earlier passes are still valid.
The standard for employment-based permanent residency (green card) is extraordinarily high. As in, would likely place you in the top 1-5% of the most successful people in the country.
That, or you have to invest $800k and create 10 jobs.
No other country in the world requires foreigners to be significantly more qualified than its own population. You can move to France with a regular paying job no problem or just a few thousand euros in savings. Impossible in the US. You have to be extraordinary (they literally call their criteria, "extraordinary abilities") or you have to make top 5% money (so if you work in tech, that would be at least $500k-1M/year in many cases).
The only other way is to get married. This means there is a massive discrepancy between the qualifications of self made immigrants, versus those simply lucky enough to fall in love. It's pretty unfair, but that's how it works. But that's also the reason so many immigrants are so successful in the US, the bar is so high, that it creates a massive motivation to succeed to become eligible for the criteria.
> You can move to France with a regular paying job no problem or just a few thousand euros in savings
Unless something has changed dramatically in the last decade this is patently false. Getting an EU work permit was historically very hard with employers having to demonstrate that a position can't be filled by an EU citizen before a non-EU citizen candidate can be considered.
The difference in the US is that it's (comparably) extremely difficult to change status from a temporary visa to a permanent one. Even if you are highly qualified. For example the most common academic visa, the J1, is explicitly a temporary exchange program and you can't have immigrant intent (on application). Most universities won't give out academic H1Bs even though they're cap-free.
In most European countries, once you're in, you can find a way to stay. One exception I can think of is Switzerland, which can be pretty annoying for temporary visas because they don't count for time accrual.
Austria has a pretty good system (RWR) that lets you job seek and is a pathway to permanent residency as a 3rd country citizen. I think there are similar programs in France and Germany.
For example "very highly qualified" in Austria is satisfied by almost anyone with a STEM degree, being under 35 and (amazingly) being an English speaker. If you have that initial visa, companies can hire you without worrying about sponsorship.
You could also use that as a route to the Blue card I think. I wouldn't say the bar is exactly low, but a lot of mobile people are sufficiently educated and are paid enough. As in, a typical European STEM salary would cover it.
But also the grandparent's comment is out of touch. Of course countries want people who are more skilled than local labor, that's the whole point. Aside from the benefit of attracting talent and higher tax revenue, it's much harder for your voters to argue that immigrants are taking your jobs this way.
You are correct, however the criteria are a lot more relaxed in Europe comparatively. Most positions in tech, engineering and healthcare are often exempt from labor market tests. Also, there are plenty of options for "entrepreneurs" and self-employed digital nomads, often requiring some savings to prove sufficiency. I live in Portugal, and I believe the amount required when we moved was about 12k. In France, I believe it is closer to 21k (which is basically minimum wage multiplied by 12). Still dramatically easier than 800k in the US.
Indeed those are the rules but on a practical level it seems pretty simple to get a visa if the company had an even reasonably competitive process. Though I moved to Europe 12 years ago (and went through getting work permits twice), maybe it's gotten harder.
Nah it's still very easy. The logic is pretty simple. Europe could really use more talent... and the bar is quite low. Any developer/engineer of any grade will easily get a visa. Any retiree will also easily get a non-work long-term visa with just 1 year worth of minimum wage (around 20k in most of Western Europe) as savings to prove self-sufficiency. So it's extremely easy and almost a non-issue compared to the other side of the pond.
Maybe for instant green card you have to be extraordinary, but for regular employment-based immigration you don’t have to be.
The path is H1-B -> Green Card -> US citizen (I have done it), and to get H1-B your potential employer gotta post that $60-80k/year job and show that there were no qualifying US applicants for it.
Not related, but to add some woes of the american immigration system.
There is no instant green card.
If a truly extraordinary Indian-born person (say a Nobel laureate or olympic gold medalist) files for a green card today, they will be waiting for 7-10 years to get a green card. At this point, it may be worse too, because this category's priority date has not moved a single day in 8 months.
This is true, I have omitted this path because I am not so familiar with it. The trouble however is that this only works for employees, not for self-employed or startup founders. So in some way I guess they make it kind-of easier if you just get a job, versus try to create jobs... which is pretty strange?
Many countries have quite strict limitations on immigration for work. Many countries do not permit any immigration without visa sponsorship. The U.S. permits sponsored immigration with a quite reasonable bar (e.g: H1B, L-1). Many countries have similar lottery systems, quotas and minimum salary requirements. Given the demand for immigration into the U.S., it's not too surprising to see the limits (and restrictions) be more prominent.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is the extraordinary ability does not have to germane to your employment. I am aware of the the story of Gabby Franco - who appeared on a season of Top Shot years ago. She was on the Venezuela Olympic pistol team for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Australia. This status as an Olympian got her entry into the USA and eventually citizenship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar%C3%ADa_Gabriela_Franco
IMO this is going to create a wave of product offerings from security startups that "monitor for corporate espionage" similar to what Meta was doing tracking copy/paste into whats app, but do it across all apps. Like detect for seldom searched keywords, etc.
or lets calm down, this much espionage doesnt actually happen that much, and when it does, separating out people on need-to-know basis and introducing honeypots have been routine parts of the process for decades and costs nothing, no startup to be built here
"security startups that "monitor for corporate espionage"" imply introducing yet another third party that literally has access to all the things (or logs thereof) thereby introducing a nice fat pwn factor for everyone
Eh. DLP’s alright when the data is neatly identifiable. Like, a social security number has a well defined format. When you get into the abstract it’s less helpful.
A fruitful avenue may be in quantum simulation, i.e. simulating a quantum system and computing its properties. This is why the other commentor mentioned biochemistry and material science, since these are two domains where quantum effects are important to understanding.
To give two concrete examples:
In biochemistry, we could hope to understand how bacteria are able to do nitrogen fixation, possibly leading to a more energy efficient and less GHG-emitting alternative to the Haber process.
In material science, we could hope to better understand the mechanism for current high-temperature superconductivity, possibly leading to the development of superconductive materials at even higher temperatures, lower pressures, and with more convenient other properties (such as toughness, ductility).
Ken Griffin had an interview where he said something along the lines of the technologies dot com bubble pretty much turned out to be what everyone thought they would become at the time. The issue was valuations grew way too fast and it took much longer than expected for the companies to build out their products.
I think a similar thing is playing out with AI. In 5-10 more years these LLMs will replace a google search today (and maybe be even better).
What do the 5xxx series cards have that this doesn't which makes them use way more power and need massive coolers?
I have a feeling the software workflows will not run as well as the marketing claims, but the idea is really interesting and in a few years I bet the workflow will be really smooth.
Way more memory bandwidth and performance (GDDR7 vs LPDDR5). I didn't see fp32 detailed, but this may be more focused on low precision.
This is probably closer to quad-channel threadripper/second tier apple levels of bandwidth than to modern GPU bandwidth, but maybe it gets up to 800GB/s like the M1 Ultra. 5090 is 1.8GB/s, four of them for the same amount of RAM (3X as expensive with a system), would be 7200GB/s, maybe 10-20X more.
With the lower power consumption, if this has full performance FP32, it may be pretty killer though for home use, especially if the bandwidth of the ConnectX is more than thunderbolt 5.
The NIC that has matters, in addition to the very large memory that supports much larger models than a consumer GPU. This thing has a proper ConnectX NIC.
Yeah there needs to be a common format for all of the headsets to adopt or at least apple needs to provide an easy way to convert into their format (maybe they already do in final cut pro).
IMO vision pro is like the first iPhone/iPad and in a few years if they keep refining it there will be a larger adoption.
I think the main thing is that it should support full mac os apps without tethering to an external macbook/mac mini. They need to move the compute out of the headset itself and into the battery module. Apple probably would never do this, but imagine if you bought a mac mini sized compute module that could go on an external display or connect to a vision pro device. If the compute was separate the headset would be significantly lighter and more comfortable.
Yeah Big tech is running out of ways to grow profits YoY. So the next solution is the consulting approach of just laying people off. Eventually it will catch up to them and they will become the next IBM/Boeing/etc. where people ask what happened to these companies they used to be great.
Bezos said in an all hands one time amazon would go out of business in 50-60 years and that is happens to every company eventually. I think you get too big and too bureaucratic where everyone is just looking out for themselves because you are more worried about getting laid off or fired than you are building great products.
> Bezos said in an all hands one time amazon would go out of business in 50-60 years and that is happens to every company eventually.
That’s a weird thing for him to say because a) it’s patently false and b) he might still be alive at that point and would need to liquidate his AMZ holdings before everyone else who believes his prediction does.
> you are more worried about getting laid off or fired than you are building great products
Just like the government: you are more worried about your re-election campaign than serving your constituents. Where those two align, great, but the priority is remaining in office.
