6 ms·

This reminds me of Steve Jobs's famous comment to Dropbox about storage being 'a feature, not a product.' Zuckerberg - by open-sourcing these powerful models, h

by ben30 2y ago

This reminds me of Steve Jobs's famous comment to Dropbox about storage being 'a feature, not a product.' Zuckerberg - by open-sourcing these powerful models, he's effectively commoditising AI while Meta's real business model remains centred around their social platforms. They can leverage these models to enhance Facebook and Instagram's services while simultaneously benefiting from the community improvements and attention. It's not about selling AI; it's about using AI to strengthen their core business. By making it open, they get the benefits of widespread adoption and development without needing to monetise the models directly.

lolinder 2y ago
Also don't underestimate the value they're getting from making more overtures to the developer community. It could be a coincidence, but it's only since they started releasing these models that I started noticing people on HN calling them "Meta", and attitudes towards them have been far more positive of late than usual. Good will isn't worth as much as cheap moderation automation and fancy features, but it's worth something.
- ecocentrik 2y ago
  It would be strange if they didn't also use these models to generate much more sophisticated models of their user's interests and hyper-targeted advertising that always looks and feels like trusted friend recommendations for the exact product that's been missing from your life.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    There's the old HN! I knew it was around here somewhere!
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    > It would be strange if they didn't also use these models to generate much more sophisticated models of their user's interests and generate the hyper targeted advertising You have the sequence reversed as Meta already created ad targeting models. Meta was forced to scale its AI competence for ad targeting when Apple sent out a privacy update that destroyed tracking-based ad-serving and tanked Meta's share price by deleting billions in revenue for Meta over many quarters. Now that Meta has this skill as a core-competence, they are creating new models for public release. Why they are doing so is debatable[2], but I imagine the cost is marginal since they already had the GPU clusters, talent and know-how for survival purposes. 1. https://www.businessinsider.com/metas-bet-on-ai-has-saved-its-ad-business-from-apples-privacy-update-2023-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/metas-bet-on-ai-has-saved-it... 2. I suspect Zuckerberg is not enthused by the idea of a future AI Apple-analog unilaterally shutting him out of the market. Having your net worth cut in half by a press-release has got to hurt.
    - ecocentrik 2y ago
      Thanks for the article but I don't think I have the sequence reversed. Without access to the tracking signal, it's been more important to build out a system that can recreate the value from that lost signal by analyzing what users are actually sharing and saying on their platform. Hence the importance of chat (VR, text, video...) and AI that can be used to process and extract value from a chat signal. I believe Meta's primary revenue source is still advertising (98%), so that is probably 98% of the why.
      - sangnoir 2y ago
        > Thanks for the article but I don't think I have the sequence reversed I suppose I read your first sentence as being in future tense when it might not be. The thrust of my argument is that Meta already successfully built those ad targeting models (Advantage+), and they preceded the Llama releases, so they don't need to use Llama-derived models for ad targeting, as I understood your comment to be suggesting. The sequence was not/will not be "Llama -> ad targeting", but was "ad targeting -> Llama" Meta didn't have to release the weights of the models. Ad revenue doesn't explain why they did so.
        ecocentrik 2y ago
        Lots of applications for the technology are likely and already being used. Llama to improve Customer to Product Matching through content analysis. Llama for Ad Generation based on customer and product profiles. Llama to generate additional chat signal for humans not chatting with other humans. Llama as a site content moderator. Llama as a code generation assistant. Llama to clean up and improve internal wikis. Llama as an operational analysis tool to detect inefficiencies in internal communication... They will use it every in every situation where they find a successful use case. Open sourcing the weights buys goodwill but it won't be long before everyone open sources their weights since the only real long term moats are the successful products built around the technology and not the technology itself. Facebook is its own moat. Altman suggested this outcome a few days ago in his NYT DealBook interview when he compared the transformer model to the transistor.
- swalsh 2y ago
  I call them OpenAI instead of Meta.
  - grahamj 2y ago
    I'm sticking with fuckerbook
    - benatkin 2y ago
      I'm sticking with: > They "trust me" > Dumb fucks Quotation marks his, not mine. It adds a certain vibe to it.
      - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
        I'm glad nobody saved all the stupid stuff I said at 19 for posterity. Sin, without, first stone etc.
        sillyfluke 2y ago
        I'm also glad that those who chose to give my 19 year-old self a break ignore all the other scandalous shit my company did in line with those comments in the decades after the fact.
        disgruntledphd2 2y ago
        OK, so your position is that Meta (nee Facebook) are bad, and that they've been doing scandalous stuff for years. Can you give me a list of the things that they did that you felt were particularly egregious? Note: I worked there for five years, but left 8 years ago (but up till the recent layoffs, had 170+ LI contacts still there).
        almoni 2y ago
        See their partnership with Cambridge Analytics. Also, is manipulating elections and contributing to third world genocidal riots enough for you? I'm surprised you know so little about this stuff.
- LordDragonfang 2y ago
  It's funny how quickly Zuck managed to turn his image around from "data-stealing actual lizard person" to "kind of normal guy" with a few years and a haircut. It's also not lost on me that he's the only "hacker" major tech CEO remaining: - Sundar is a glorified bean counter and his company is rotting from the inside, only kept afloat by the money printer that is ads. - Satya and Microsoft are in a similar boat, with the only major achievement being essentially buying OpenAI while every other product gets worse - Tim Cook is doing good things with Apple, but he still runs the company more like a fashion company than a tech company - Amazon was always more about logistics than cool hack value, and that hasn't changed since Bezos left - Elon is Elon Meanwhile Zuck is spending shareholder money pushing forward consumer VR because he thinks it's cool, demoing true AR glasses, releasing open-source models, and building giant Roman-style statues of his wife.
  - oblio 2y ago
    Microsoft has Azure, which is growing like crazy from a high base point.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    I feel like owning Oculus must be the equivalent of the curse of the monkey's paw. It drove Palmer Luckey veritably[0] insane[1] when he was the head of it, and between the statue nonsense, the weaponizing of Llama and his angling for a position as a Trump advisor, it sure looks like Zuckerburg wants to head down the same path. [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/palmer-luckey-made-a-vr-headset-that-kills-the-user-if-they-die-in-the-game/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/palmer-luckey-made-a-vr-head... [1] https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/us-border-surveillance/ https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/us-border-surve...
  - nimish 2y ago
    Pichai, Cook and whoever runs Amazon are excellent operators. Perhaps the best in the game. But you can't simply sit on past success.
  - a2128 2y ago
    In my mind, Zuckerberg will always be a data-stealing lizard person and no amount of MMA training will change that
- talldayo 2y ago
  It's funny. The only time I've ever seen Hacker News unanimously applaud a Facebook product was when Pytorch announced they merged Apple Silicon support. Seems like Mr. Zuckerburg knows how to play a winning hand.
- yodsanklai 2y ago
  > Also don't underestimate the value they're getting from making more overtures to the developer community. I wonder if it's significant. As developers, we're biased to think it matters, but in the grand scheme of things, 99.99% of people don't have a clue about open source or things that matter to hackers. As far as recruitment go, developers look primarily at how much they make, possibly the tech and how it looks on resume. There's always been a stigma around social networks and generally big tech companies, but not to the point it's going to hurt them.
  - joelthelion 2y ago
    It might make it a bit easier to hire engineers. Working for Facebook? Meh. Working for the "new Meta", on the other hand?
  - a_wild_dandan 2y ago
    AI researchers get huge checks working anywhere. So how does your company distinguish its appeal? Play to a researcher's desire for recognition in their field. Lean on open source. (I'm just paraphrasing Zuckerberg.)
    - wongarsu 2y ago
      Similar how places like SpaceX or game development are known for low pay and bad working conditions, yet have no shortage of applicants. No matter whether you want to hire the best of the best or just average people at a lower than average price, being a place where people want to work helps immensely
  - ben_w 2y ago
    I agree there's a lot of decisions that have to be made on the basis of "the tech and how it looks on resume" (as I'm finding out by not having React Native on mine). > There's always been a stigma around social networks and generally big tech companies, but not to the point it's going to hurt them. I'm not sure it was "always": The one Facebook developer event I've been to made me feel dirty just to associate with them, but before that I had no negative feelings. It started off as "the new LiveJournal". Deleted my account for a few years, only came back to it when I started planning to move country and wanted to keep in contact with those who stayed put.
- signal11 2y ago
  Facebook Engineering has always been well regarded — starting with React on the front end, but also projects like Open Compute. Their product management on the other hand— well, I mean, Facebook and Instagram are arguably as popular as McDonald’s. So they’ve got that going for them.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    Spot-on. Hacker News has a hate-boner for Facebook and the Facebook-branded products, but from an engineering standpoint they're up there with Netflix solving problems at scale. FAIR had a better reputation than OpenAI since the start, and they've developed the Oculus acquisition to it's logical extremes. You can do a lot worse, looking at the way their peers handle similar situations. All the big tech companies have a Facebook-esque product they wish they could get rid of forever. Meta has Facebook, and instead of imploding like everyone said they would (for decades) they demonstrated competency in engineering and culture. The next 4 years will be a gauntlet with a literal "Mr. X" advising social media policy, but I frankly don't think Facebook has ever been down for the count in a pragmatic sense.
    - dgfitz 2y ago
      I think the only concept I’ve heard as to the decline of Facebook is, Facebook is for “older people” (read: millennials+) but I have no idea how true this is.
      - zxvkhkxvdvbdxz 2y ago
        It totally depends! I used to live in the city and now I live out in nowhere land. Everything around here is done thru facebook groups and facebook events. If you want to keep in touch with the community, it is really only on facebook. Some of my older facebook friends seem to have left the platform and I seen more than once of my old city friends posting final goodbyes declaring they are leaving the "dead" platform for discord or some stuff where their family will never find them.
    - nmfisher 2y ago
huijzer 2y ago
I already was thinking for a while what the business model of open source was exactly. Why does Google spend money on Chrome also? After Zuckerberg’s comments it hit me: Open source is useful for a business if it can either increase revenue or decrease costs. Examples: Increase revenue: Chrome and Visual Studio code. For example, the more people code, the more likely it is that they pay MSFT. So VS code aims to make programming as attractive as possible. Similar for Chrome. Decrease costs: Linux and Llama. As Zuckerburg said himself IIRC, they don’t want one party snowball into an LLM monopoly so they rather help to get the open source ball rolling.
- barbazoo 2y ago
  > For example, the more people code, the more likely it is that they pay MSFT. So VS code aims to make programming as attractive as possible How does that increase revenue in a remotely measurable way? Chrome, for sure, high market share, default search engine, more money, at least that's how I imagine it.
  - jyap 2y ago
    One example is that Microsoft owns GitHub.
- rafaelmn 2y ago
  I think Balmers "developers, developers, developers" meme has been around longer than some people here are alive - it served them well in the Windows era and it serves them well in the cloud space.
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    And if you want to think about comparators to Facebook, Microsoft is the right company to look at.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Exactly. Microsoft wants lots of cash for Copilot, meanwhile, we had Code Llama running with 150 developers before the Microsoft idiots could schedule a meeting.
barbazoo 2y ago
Do the improvements the community proposes/makes to their models amount to anything significant? For a company like Meta with basically infinite money, do they really benefit from external help?
- lolinder 2y ago
  I don't have eyes inside of Meta, but keep in mind that we're not just talking about fine-tunes and LoRAs, we're also talking about the entire llama ecosystem, including llama.cpp, ollama, and llamafile. These would not exist (or wouldn't have anything like as much momentum) without Meta's investment, but they're now huge community projects. I don't know if they use them internally, of course, but they could, and they represent a lot of work.
muixoozie 2y ago
>storage being 'a feature, not a product. Somewhat unrelated mini-rant. Upgraded a phone recently after about 3 years. Surprised to see storage still capped around 128GB (in-general). That's got to be artificially held back capacity to push cloud storage services?
- viraptor 2y ago
  There's lots of phones with more and/or with SD slots. It's not really "capped" as much as default size that seems to work just fine for the majority.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  I’ve got a 512GB phone with 112GB used. I’ve put absolutely no effort whatsoever into keeping that number done, and I’m not shy about downloading stuff to it. I’m certain plenty of people need way more than 128GB. I figured I’d be one of them when I bought this. Nope. I bought a much bigger device than I actually needed. If I’ve used less than 128GB, I’ve gotta think most other people do too. Not all, clearly! But most? I’d bet on it.
rafaelmn 2y ago
Ironically gen AI made their products worse more than the rest. I can't believe the amount of AI slop I see every time I open Facebook - I'd check it occasionally when replying to messenger and scroll through for a while, after seeing the AI spam I don't even bother.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  truly I wonder if they're fooled by their own click fraud, or, if the incentives really do work out that they get paid whether the engagement is from bots or people, but anyway I came here to say the same thing, it's shocking to me how enthusiastic Zuckerburg is about generative AI, what other possible outcome is there except actual human content creation being replaced by slop
- paxys 2y ago
  That was going to happen regardless. From Meta's perspective it's better for their platforms to contain their own AI slop than OpenAI's.
andy_ppp 2y ago
Baggy Tees, gold chains and now this!? Make this man president immediately!
petercooper 2y ago
Commoditize your complement: https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement
Spooky23 2y ago
They’ve dramatically improved their ad quality. I routinely check out on convert on Facebook and Instagram ads, and I can honestly say I never intentionally clicked on one for 20 years or more, once.

by ben30 2y ago

lolinder 2y ago

Also don't underestimate the value they're getting from making more overtures to the developer community. It could be a coincidence, but it's only since they started releasing these models that I started noticing people on HN calling them "Meta", and attitudes towards them have been far more positive of late than usual. Good will isn't worth as much as cheap moderation automation and fancy features, but it's worth something.

ecocentrik 2y ago
It would be strange if they didn't also use these models to generate much more sophisticated models of their user's interests and hyper-targeted advertising that always looks and feels like trusted friend recommendations for the exact product that's been missing from your life.
- lolinder 2y ago
  There's the old HN! I knew it was around here somewhere!
- sangnoir 2y ago
  > It would be strange if they didn't also use these models to generate much more sophisticated models of their user's interests and generate the hyper targeted advertising You have the sequence reversed as Meta already created ad targeting models. Meta was forced to scale its AI competence for ad targeting when Apple sent out a privacy update that destroyed tracking-based ad-serving and tanked Meta's share price by deleting billions in revenue for Meta over many quarters. Now that Meta has this skill as a core-competence, they are creating new models for public release. Why they are doing so is debatable[2], but I imagine the cost is marginal since they already had the GPU clusters, talent and know-how for survival purposes. 1. https://www.businessinsider.com/metas-bet-on-ai-has-saved-its-ad-business-from-apples-privacy-update-2023-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/metas-bet-on-ai-has-saved-it... 2. I suspect Zuckerberg is not enthused by the idea of a future AI Apple-analog unilaterally shutting him out of the market. Having your net worth cut in half by a press-release has got to hurt.
  - ecocentrik 2y ago
    Thanks for the article but I don't think I have the sequence reversed. Without access to the tracking signal, it's been more important to build out a system that can recreate the value from that lost signal by analyzing what users are actually sharing and saying on their platform. Hence the importance of chat (VR, text, video...) and AI that can be used to process and extract value from a chat signal. I believe Meta's primary revenue source is still advertising (98%), so that is probably 98% of the why.
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      > Thanks for the article but I don't think I have the sequence reversed I suppose I read your first sentence as being in future tense when it might not be. The thrust of my argument is that Meta already successfully built those ad targeting models (Advantage+), and they preceded the Llama releases, so they don't need to use Llama-derived models for ad targeting, as I understood your comment to be suggesting. The sequence was not/will not be "Llama -> ad targeting", but was "ad targeting -> Llama" Meta didn't have to release the weights of the models. Ad revenue doesn't explain why they did so.
      - ecocentrik 2y ago
        Lots of applications for the technology are likely and already being used. Llama to improve Customer to Product Matching through content analysis. Llama for Ad Generation based on customer and product profiles. Llama to generate additional chat signal for humans not chatting with other humans. Llama as a site content moderator. Llama as a code generation assistant. Llama to clean up and improve internal wikis. Llama as an operational analysis tool to detect inefficiencies in internal communication... They will use it every in every situation where they find a successful use case. Open sourcing the weights buys goodwill but it won't be long before everyone open sources their weights since the only real long term moats are the successful products built around the technology and not the technology itself. Facebook is its own moat. Altman suggested this outcome a few days ago in his NYT DealBook interview when he compared the transformer model to the transistor.
swalsh 2y ago
I call them OpenAI instead of Meta.
- grahamj 2y ago
  I'm sticking with fuckerbook
  - benatkin 2y ago
    I'm sticking with: > They "trust me" > Dumb fucks Quotation marks his, not mine. It adds a certain vibe to it.
    - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
      I'm glad nobody saved all the stupid stuff I said at 19 for posterity. Sin, without, first stone etc.
      - sillyfluke 2y ago
        I'm also glad that those who chose to give my 19 year-old self a break ignore all the other scandalous shit my company did in line with those comments in the decades after the fact.
        disgruntledphd2 2y ago
        OK, so your position is that Meta (nee Facebook) are bad, and that they've been doing scandalous stuff for years. Can you give me a list of the things that they did that you felt were particularly egregious? Note: I worked there for five years, but left 8 years ago (but up till the recent layoffs, had 170+ LI contacts still there).
        almoni 2y ago
        See their partnership with Cambridge Analytics. Also, is manipulating elections and contributing to third world genocidal riots enough for you? I'm surprised you know so little about this stuff.
LordDragonfang 2y ago
It's funny how quickly Zuck managed to turn his image around from "data-stealing actual lizard person" to "kind of normal guy" with a few years and a haircut. It's also not lost on me that he's the only "hacker" major tech CEO remaining: - Sundar is a glorified bean counter and his company is rotting from the inside, only kept afloat by the money printer that is ads. - Satya and Microsoft are in a similar boat, with the only major achievement being essentially buying OpenAI while every other product gets worse - Tim Cook is doing good things with Apple, but he still runs the company more like a fashion company than a tech company - Amazon was always more about logistics than cool hack value, and that hasn't changed since Bezos left - Elon is Elon Meanwhile Zuck is spending shareholder money pushing forward consumer VR because he thinks it's cool, demoing true AR glasses, releasing open-source models, and building giant Roman-style statues of his wife.
- oblio 2y ago
  Microsoft has Azure, which is growing like crazy from a high base point.
- talldayo 2y ago
  I feel like owning Oculus must be the equivalent of the curse of the monkey's paw. It drove Palmer Luckey veritably[0] insane[1] when he was the head of it, and between the statue nonsense, the weaponizing of Llama and his angling for a position as a Trump advisor, it sure looks like Zuckerburg wants to head down the same path. [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/palmer-luckey-made-a-vr-headset-that-kills-the-user-if-they-die-in-the-game/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/palmer-luckey-made-a-vr-head... [1] https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/us-border-surveillance/ https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/us-border-surve...
- nimish 2y ago
  Pichai, Cook and whoever runs Amazon are excellent operators. Perhaps the best in the game. But you can't simply sit on past success.
- a2128 2y ago
  In my mind, Zuckerberg will always be a data-stealing lizard person and no amount of MMA training will change that
talldayo 2y ago
It's funny. The only time I've ever seen Hacker News unanimously applaud a Facebook product was when Pytorch announced they merged Apple Silicon support. Seems like Mr. Zuckerburg knows how to play a winning hand.
yodsanklai 2y ago
> Also don't underestimate the value they're getting from making more overtures to the developer community. I wonder if it's significant. As developers, we're biased to think it matters, but in the grand scheme of things, 99.99% of people don't have a clue about open source or things that matter to hackers. As far as recruitment go, developers look primarily at how much they make, possibly the tech and how it looks on resume. There's always been a stigma around social networks and generally big tech companies, but not to the point it's going to hurt them.
- joelthelion 2y ago
  It might make it a bit easier to hire engineers. Working for Facebook? Meh. Working for the "new Meta", on the other hand?
- a_wild_dandan 2y ago
  AI researchers get huge checks working anywhere. So how does your company distinguish its appeal? Play to a researcher's desire for recognition in their field. Lean on open source. (I'm just paraphrasing Zuckerberg.)
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    Similar how places like SpaceX or game development are known for low pay and bad working conditions, yet have no shortage of applicants. No matter whether you want to hire the best of the best or just average people at a lower than average price, being a place where people want to work helps immensely
- ben_w 2y ago
  I agree there's a lot of decisions that have to be made on the basis of "the tech and how it looks on resume" (as I'm finding out by not having React Native on mine). > There's always been a stigma around social networks and generally big tech companies, but not to the point it's going to hurt them. I'm not sure it was "always": The one Facebook developer event I've been to made me feel dirty just to associate with them, but before that I had no negative feelings. It started off as "the new LiveJournal". Deleted my account for a few years, only came back to it when I started planning to move country and wanted to keep in contact with those who stayed put.
signal11 2y ago
Facebook Engineering has always been well regarded — starting with React on the front end, but also projects like Open Compute. Their product management on the other hand— well, I mean, Facebook and Instagram are arguably as popular as McDonald’s. So they’ve got that going for them.
- talldayo 2y ago
  Spot-on. Hacker News has a hate-boner for Facebook and the Facebook-branded products, but from an engineering standpoint they're up there with Netflix solving problems at scale. FAIR had a better reputation than OpenAI since the start, and they've developed the Oculus acquisition to it's logical extremes. You can do a lot worse, looking at the way their peers handle similar situations. All the big tech companies have a Facebook-esque product they wish they could get rid of forever. Meta has Facebook, and instead of imploding like everyone said they would (for decades) they demonstrated competency in engineering and culture. The next 4 years will be a gauntlet with a literal "Mr. X" advising social media policy, but I frankly don't think Facebook has ever been down for the count in a pragmatic sense.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    I think the only concept I’ve heard as to the decline of Facebook is, Facebook is for “older people” (read: millennials+) but I have no idea how true this is.
    - zxvkhkxvdvbdxz 2y ago
      It totally depends! I used to live in the city and now I live out in nowhere land. Everything around here is done thru facebook groups and facebook events. If you want to keep in touch with the community, it is really only on facebook. Some of my older facebook friends seem to have left the platform and I seen more than once of my old city friends posting final goodbyes declaring they are leaving the "dead" platform for discord or some stuff where their family will never find them.
  - nmfisher 2y ago

huijzer 2y ago

I already was thinking for a while what the business model of open source was exactly. Why does Google spend money on Chrome also? After Zuckerberg’s comments it hit me: Open source is useful for a business if it can either increase revenue or decrease costs. Examples: Increase revenue: Chrome and Visual Studio code. For example, the more people code, the more likely it is that they pay MSFT. So VS code aims to make programming as attractive as possible. Similar for Chrome. Decrease costs: Linux and Llama. As Zuckerburg said himself IIRC, they don’t want one party snowball into an LLM monopoly so they rather help to get the open source ball rolling.

barbazoo 2y ago
> For example, the more people code, the more likely it is that they pay MSFT. So VS code aims to make programming as attractive as possible How does that increase revenue in a remotely measurable way? Chrome, for sure, high market share, default search engine, more money, at least that's how I imagine it.
- jyap 2y ago
  One example is that Microsoft owns GitHub.
rafaelmn 2y ago
I think Balmers "developers, developers, developers" meme has been around longer than some people here are alive - it served them well in the Windows era and it serves them well in the cloud space.
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  And if you want to think about comparators to Facebook, Microsoft is the right company to look at.
Spooky23 2y ago
Exactly. Microsoft wants lots of cash for Copilot, meanwhile, we had Code Llama running with 150 developers before the Microsoft idiots could schedule a meeting.

barbazoo 2y ago

Do the improvements the community proposes/makes to their models amount to anything significant? For a company like Meta with basically infinite money, do they really benefit from external help?

lolinder 2y ago
I don't have eyes inside of Meta, but keep in mind that we're not just talking about fine-tunes and LoRAs, we're also talking about the entire llama ecosystem, including llama.cpp, ollama, and llamafile. These would not exist (or wouldn't have anything like as much momentum) without Meta's investment, but they're now huge community projects. I don't know if they use them internally, of course, but they could, and they represent a lot of work.

muixoozie 2y ago

>storage being 'a feature, not a product. Somewhat unrelated mini-rant. Upgraded a phone recently after about 3 years. Surprised to see storage still capped around 128GB (in-general). That's got to be artificially held back capacity to push cloud storage services?

viraptor 2y ago
There's lots of phones with more and/or with SD slots. It's not really "capped" as much as default size that seems to work just fine for the majority.
kstrauser 2y ago
I’ve got a 512GB phone with 112GB used. I’ve put absolutely no effort whatsoever into keeping that number done, and I’m not shy about downloading stuff to it. I’m certain plenty of people need way more than 128GB. I figured I’d be one of them when I bought this. Nope. I bought a much bigger device than I actually needed. If I’ve used less than 128GB, I’ve gotta think most other people do too. Not all, clearly! But most? I’d bet on it.

rafaelmn 2y ago

Ironically gen AI made their products worse more than the rest. I can't believe the amount of AI slop I see every time I open Facebook - I'd check it occasionally when replying to messenger and scroll through for a while, after seeing the AI spam I don't even bother.

jazzyjackson 2y ago
truly I wonder if they're fooled by their own click fraud, or, if the incentives really do work out that they get paid whether the engagement is from bots or people, but anyway I came here to say the same thing, it's shocking to me how enthusiastic Zuckerburg is about generative AI, what other possible outcome is there except actual human content creation being replaced by slop
paxys 2y ago
That was going to happen regardless. From Meta's perspective it's better for their platforms to contain their own AI slop than OpenAI's.

andy_ppp 2y ago

Baggy Tees, gold chains and now this!? Make this man president immediately!

petercooper 2y ago

Commoditize your complement: https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement

Spooky23 2y ago

They’ve dramatically improved their ad quality. I routinely check out on convert on Facebook and Instagram ads, and I can honestly say I never intentionally clicked on one for 20 years or more, once.