5 ms·

They are behind commercially, very behind. They also don't have the same economic setup and DNA as MS/OpenAI. Large corporate customers don't pay for access to

They are behind commercially, very behind. They also don't have the same economic setup and DNA as MS/OpenAI. Large corporate customers don't pay for access to the FB cloud, nor are they likely to -- Ellison has spent years building out Oracle Cloud, and he's on the FB board, for example. And I bet you didn't think of using Oracle's Cloud for your last project. So, your company DNA is free-to-all social based on ad monetization, with a large bet on metaverse / AR / experiential social compute being next. You aren't a trusted corporate partner for anything but gatekeeping your immense community through ad sales. And, it's clear you a) have some of the most interesting private social data in the world, including photos and DMs and texts, and b) this AI thing is huge. A play that doesn't f with your existing corporate structure too much is to build this stuff, give it away, keep publishing, build your AI team internally, and see where it takes you. This isn't the only play, but I think it's reasonable. It's pretty clear large enterprises are going to need their own, internally built / owned, Foundation models to be competitive in a bunch of arenas in the next decade. In this case, if FB can get a little mindshare, keep the conversation going, and as a sidenote, be a disruptor by lowering Azure/OpenAI revs with open releases at-the-edge, that's probably a strategy win. If I were in charge of AI strategy at FB, I'd probably double down more on generative AI, and I'd be working hard on realtime multimodal stuff -- their recent very large multimodal speech to text in multiple languages work is good. If a team could eyeball realtime-ish video chat with translations, that would be something the platform has a natural advantage in pushing out. Generative hits existing customers, and metaverse asset creation, which is going to experience radical changes in costs and productivity over the next few years, and impact Oculus 100% no matter what anybody wishes were true.

tyre 3y ago
I don’t believe they’re going for the same hosted monetization as Oracle or Google. I’m sure they’ll play around with assistant AIs but you can imagine them leveraging their graph and data for this. Who is better positioned to answer a question like, “What should I get my friend Sophia for her birthday?” Facebook/Instagram already have huge volumes of data to specifically target ads. They can feed those into a chat interface pretty easily. Customers would then buy per impression by describing their product and trusting Facebook to place it correctly. They already do this today, it’s just a different medium.
- cvhashim04 3y ago
  > Who is better positioned to answer a question like, “What should I get my friend Sophia for her birthday?” Facebook/Instagram already have huge volumes of data to specifically target ads. They can feed those into a chat interface pretty easily. Interesting idea but sounds risky and intrusive in practice.
  - roughly 3y ago
    > Interesting idea but sounds risky and intrusive in practice. That’s pretty much the entire Meta empire in a single sentence.
  - hiatus 3y ago
    I think this suggestion lacks subtlety. More likely, around the time leading up to Sophia's birthday, you will see more ads for things (maybe even gift idea ads) that just so happen to be things Sophia would love (at least, according to their data).
- Paradigma11 3y ago
  Medication for her new std?
throwaway290 3y ago
Commercially it's not clear if there is a reliable "ahead", I'd be surprised if copyright lawsuits don't start hitting MS/OAI when publishers wake up and if you take out that training data where does it leave their models?
- visarga 3y ago
  Countries putting copyright above AI progress will just fall behind. It's one thing to demand no exact replication of copyrighted content, another to forbid training on copyrighted works. Ideas were not supposed to be under copyright, only expression, from what I remember.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    The argument that copyright abuse is required for "AI progress" is sus. It is required for quick easy buck to be made by the likes of Microsoft-- that I agree...
roughly 3y ago
That’s interesting. I tend to lump FB, Amazon, Google, and MS in my head when thinking about the tech giants, but you’re right, FB is the only one of those not offering a commercial platform. For them, building out the capabilities of the LLMs is something to be done in the open with community involvement, because they’re not going to monetize the models themselves. They’re also getting a fantastic amount of press from all this, which is good for attracting talent and helping improve their image, at least among the nerd set.
- vladms 3y ago
  Depends what you mean by platform and depends what you mean by FB. If by FB you mean Meta, they have also https://www.workplace.com/ https://www.workplace.com/ (which is like an internal facebook), instagram, whatsapp and some others. Integration of LLMs technology in those "platform" might give them some advantage.
  - roughly 3y ago
    Right, but they’re not competing directly on offering the LLM - they benefit from having a better LLM as a feature, but their value add is elsewhere in the product.
- basch 3y ago
  I'm in the camp that its a mistake for Meta to not be competing in the commercial compute space. wrote about and diagramed it here - https://telegra.ph/Facebook-Social-Services-FbSS-a-missed-opportunity-02-03 https://telegra.ph/Facebook-Social-Services-FbSS-a-missed-op...
  - CuriouslyC 3y ago
    Meta absolutely could not overcome the barriers to entry and technical mismatch for any sort of traditional IAS style product, and it would be foolish for them to try. They might be able to pull off some sort of next generation Heroku style service aimed at smaller shops with built in facebook integration and authn/z management, but that's tangential.
jatins 3y ago
In times like these Facebook/Zuck probably wonders how things would have turned out had they not killed Parse. Had they continued with it, they'd have likely had some semblance of a public cloud today and would be able to sell these models.
- liuliu 3y ago
  Yes. But it also needs a very different org structure to support that. Their internal infra from what I heard is dated (monolithic PHP binary deployment, no federated authorization management etc.). It is doable (FAIR's org structure was very different in the first a few years), but would also be a distraction for a long time. Very interesting to ponder for sure.
nabusman 3y ago
I would add that having open source gen AI will enable the creation of content for metaverse / AR / VR, which will improve the chances that all of that will take off.
- vessenes 3y ago
  Right, exactly this. Ratcheting the costs down two orders of magnitude in both dollar and expertise/human costs is going to make huge changes. You better believe FB is thinking about this hard.
hutzlibu 3y ago
"b) this AI thing is huge." Yeah, there are tons of opportunities for AI to do something with facebooks private user data and sell new services. For users to create engagement - and for ad companies to get very good targeted ads delivered. It is of course a challenge, to update the models on the fly, to include the latest private data, but then you can tailor an ad, that has subtil references to the latest shared wishes of the user. Probably quite effective. So for now they mainly need top talent, to make some of it work. And open source is the best bet, for creating a ecosystem they can control and get talents who already trained on their tools. And they loose allmost nothing, because yes, they ain't in the cloud buisness. So I will continue to not use facebook. But the models I will try.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
You ought to think about using Oracle Cloud for your next LLM/GPU project, because they sell access to A100/H100s for cheap and they actually have them in stock!

tyre 3y ago

I don’t believe they’re going for the same hosted monetization as Oracle or Google. I’m sure they’ll play around with assistant AIs but you can imagine them leveraging their graph and data for this. Who is better positioned to answer a question like, “What should I get my friend Sophia for her birthday?” Facebook/Instagram already have huge volumes of data to specifically target ads. They can feed those into a chat interface pretty easily. Customers would then buy per impression by describing their product and trusting Facebook to place it correctly. They already do this today, it’s just a different medium.

cvhashim04 3y ago
> Who is better positioned to answer a question like, “What should I get my friend Sophia for her birthday?” Facebook/Instagram already have huge volumes of data to specifically target ads. They can feed those into a chat interface pretty easily. Interesting idea but sounds risky and intrusive in practice.
- roughly 3y ago
  > Interesting idea but sounds risky and intrusive in practice. That’s pretty much the entire Meta empire in a single sentence.
- hiatus 3y ago
  I think this suggestion lacks subtlety. More likely, around the time leading up to Sophia's birthday, you will see more ads for things (maybe even gift idea ads) that just so happen to be things Sophia would love (at least, according to their data).
Paradigma11 3y ago
Medication for her new std?

throwaway290 3y ago

Commercially it's not clear if there is a reliable "ahead", I'd be surprised if copyright lawsuits don't start hitting MS/OAI when publishers wake up and if you take out that training data where does it leave their models?

visarga 3y ago
Countries putting copyright above AI progress will just fall behind. It's one thing to demand no exact replication of copyrighted content, another to forbid training on copyrighted works. Ideas were not supposed to be under copyright, only expression, from what I remember.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  The argument that copyright abuse is required for "AI progress" is sus. It is required for quick easy buck to be made by the likes of Microsoft-- that I agree...

roughly 3y ago

That’s interesting. I tend to lump FB, Amazon, Google, and MS in my head when thinking about the tech giants, but you’re right, FB is the only one of those not offering a commercial platform. For them, building out the capabilities of the LLMs is something to be done in the open with community involvement, because they’re not going to monetize the models themselves. They’re also getting a fantastic amount of press from all this, which is good for attracting talent and helping improve their image, at least among the nerd set.

vladms 3y ago
Depends what you mean by platform and depends what you mean by FB. If by FB you mean Meta, they have also https://www.workplace.com/ https://www.workplace.com/ (which is like an internal facebook), instagram, whatsapp and some others. Integration of LLMs technology in those "platform" might give them some advantage.
- roughly 3y ago
  Right, but they’re not competing directly on offering the LLM - they benefit from having a better LLM as a feature, but their value add is elsewhere in the product.
basch 3y ago
I'm in the camp that its a mistake for Meta to not be competing in the commercial compute space. wrote about and diagramed it here - https://telegra.ph/Facebook-Social-Services-FbSS-a-missed-opportunity-02-03 https://telegra.ph/Facebook-Social-Services-FbSS-a-missed-op...
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  Meta absolutely could not overcome the barriers to entry and technical mismatch for any sort of traditional IAS style product, and it would be foolish for them to try. They might be able to pull off some sort of next generation Heroku style service aimed at smaller shops with built in facebook integration and authn/z management, but that's tangential.

jatins 3y ago

In times like these Facebook/Zuck probably wonders how things would have turned out had they not killed Parse. Had they continued with it, they'd have likely had some semblance of a public cloud today and would be able to sell these models.

liuliu 3y ago
Yes. But it also needs a very different org structure to support that. Their internal infra from what I heard is dated (monolithic PHP binary deployment, no federated authorization management etc.). It is doable (FAIR's org structure was very different in the first a few years), but would also be a distraction for a long time. Very interesting to ponder for sure.

nabusman 3y ago

I would add that having open source gen AI will enable the creation of content for metaverse / AR / VR, which will improve the chances that all of that will take off.

vessenes 3y ago
Right, exactly this. Ratcheting the costs down two orders of magnitude in both dollar and expertise/human costs is going to make huge changes. You better believe FB is thinking about this hard.

hutzlibu 3y ago

"b) this AI thing is huge." Yeah, there are tons of opportunities for AI to do something with facebooks private user data and sell new services. For users to create engagement - and for ad companies to get very good targeted ads delivered. It is of course a challenge, to update the models on the fly, to include the latest private data, but then you can tailor an ad, that has subtil references to the latest shared wishes of the user. Probably quite effective. So for now they mainly need top talent, to make some of it work. And open source is the best bet, for creating a ecosystem they can control and get talents who already trained on their tools. And they loose allmost nothing, because yes, they ain't in the cloud buisness. So I will continue to not use facebook. But the models I will try.

Der_Einzige 3y ago

You ought to think about using Oracle Cloud for your next LLM/GPU project, because they sell access to A100/H100s for cheap and they actually have them in stock!