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What is Meta’s angle with AI? They seem to be doing a lot of research but what is the end goal? Google and MSFT I understand, Meta not so much.
by brap 2y ago
What is Meta’s angle with AI? They seem to be doing a lot of research but what is the end goal? Google and MSFT I understand, Meta not so much.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y agoMoney and manipulation? Was that a real question?
- isoprophlex 2y agoYou forgot "fucking over the competition". Not that I'm complaining about their open-weights model releases destroying openai's moat... but still.
- twelve40 2y agoYes, that's a real question, even for the money and manipulation use case, how does this help, especially the money part?
- mistrial9 2y agoall math leads to cryptography; all media leads to ads (?)
- barbazoo 2y agoGenerated content is my assumption. Both, by users but also fully automated.
- brap 2y agoI don’t think anyone wants generated content in their IG/FB feed, so not sure how this will play out in the long run
- twelve40 2y agoSadly, i don't think they care much about what "everyone wants" because with userbase this size they will figure out a way to forcefully shove whatever they come up with into people's faces.
- ketzo 2y agoCorrection: Nobody wants content that they can tell is AI generated.
- int_19h 2y agoPeople say that, yet how many likes and reshares does said generated content get?
- brap 2y agoMy assumption is that 90%+ of those come from 1. bots 2. old people 3. third world. I don’t think this is the target audience most valuable advertisers are going for, and this type of slop probably makes other audiences want to leave the platform. So in the short term maybe it’s great for engagement metrics and stuff like that, but I don’t think it’s financially sustainable.
- yalogin 2y agoWhat is MSFT and Google's reason?
- brap 2y agoBoth do search, devices, OS and browsers - very natural verticals to integrate with AI, and both have cloud platforms where they can sell it to developers. With Meta I can’t think of a single existing vertical where AI would be desirable. Maybe Quest
- navigate8310 2y agoMeta is aggressively pushing open source AI so as to not get annihilated by closed sourced AI that is being researched by MSFT and Google
- rm_-rf_slash 2y agoAdvertising?
- CPLX 2y agohttps://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified a major pattern in technology business & economics: the pattern of “commoditizing your complement”, an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a chokepoint or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist. No matter how valuable the original may be and how much one could charge for it, it can be more valuable to make it free if it increases profits elsewhere. A classic example is the commodification of PC hardware by the Microsoft OS monopoly, to the detriment of IBM & benefit of MS. This pattern explains many otherwise odd or apparently self-sabotaging ventures by large tech companies into apparently irrelevant fields, such as the high rate of releasing open-source contributions by many Internet companies or the intrusion of advertising companies into smartphone manufacturing & web browser development & statistical software & fiber-optic networks & municipal WiFi & radio spectrum auctions & DNS (Google): they are pre-emptive attempts to commodify another company elsewhere in the stack, or defenses against it being done to them.
- twelve40 2y agogreat question, i was wondering about that. I think it's mostly in discovery phase right now, similar to how they dabbled in crypto before, and the largely finished by now "metaverse" experiment. (yes, this dabbling involves a ton of money sometimes). These demos actually show what they might end up using AI for, but whether it's truly game-changing for their business and whether it will be good for the regular users, considering their shitty UI's both in FB and even Instagram by now are grossly obsolete, haven't changed in over a decade despite 70,000 people working there, and are nowadays mostly focused on violently shoving more ads over actual usefulness, is still an open question. If their business remains a shitty declining buggy 20-year-old Facebook and a 10+year-old Instagram app, but they contribute to advancing open source models similar to how they did with React, I'll consider that a net win though.
- lanthissa 2y agoMeta believes the dollars at the end of the AI race will be in walled gardens and prop data, not data centers and models. They are going to do everything they can to make sure no one uses the time that models and data centers are limiting factors to disrupt them. In the same way google demonetized the application layer of the web to prevent walled gardens from blocking search. If models and hardware become commoditized at the end of the race meta will have a complete psychographic profile of people on an individual and group level to study, and serve incredibly targeted content to. Their only real competition in that would be someone developing a 'her' like app that takes people out of social media and into their own individual silo'ed worlds. In a lot of ways discord is the alternative world to meta's ecosystem. hyper focused invite only small communities.
- twelve40 2y agoso in other words, "better targeting"? that's it?
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoHas Meta done anything else?
- jiggawatts 2y agoIn the same way that an atomic bomb is “just” a better bomb. I keep telling parents that Meta et al are spending the inflation-adjusted equivalent of the Manhattan project — not to defeat Japan — but to addict their child.
- pfisherman 2y agoIf you know how these algorithms work, and you can be intentional about what you want, seeding with a few well thought out examples, and curating recommendations; they can be quite useful. I think atomic power or even better drugs / medicines is actually a good analogy considering the dual use nature of the stuff that they are building. Can improve quality of life if used prudently and responsibly, or cause devastation if not.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoEnabling experiences with AI that will drive people sharing content with each other, communicating online, and which can be utilized in AR/VR, where they have a lead position. In-house AI improvements have also helped ad placement and ad generation for clients People who think Meta's main business focus is Facebook and Instagram don't pay attention.
- hypothesis 2y agoWhat makes you think that more artificial stuff is going to reinvigorate the business? Metaverse was supposed to be such savior, but this time they didn’t even rename the company…
- xvector 2y agoLet's not pretend that AR wearables aren't the future of personal computing.
- hypothesis 2y agoIt’s possible of course, but will it be Meta? Who knows.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoJust as an example, there's some pretty funny AI-assisted memes people pass around. The Harry Potter Balenciaga fashion one was a while ago and an example I remember. Also, the business doesn't need to be reinvigorated. It is booming and they are investing in places to stack more gains down the road & cement current status, which investors like to see. Many big techs right now are flailing and trying to artificially keep profits up by slashing costs only and not increasing revenue, which dents innovation. Meta is managing to sink money into AR/VR AND AI while seeing big revenue growth.
- 999900000999 2y agoAI make stock go up. I think this is it. I'm kicking myself for not going harder, but I was very much into LLMs/ML back in 2019, had I not given up I might have a startup right now. I'd need like 70k and a minimum of 6 months, but I still have a few ideas for AI driven startups.
- rsynnott 2y agoAfter the 'metaverse' stuff flopped, desperate to spend their money on some other thing that might be The Future(TM)? Arguably this would be kind of rational behaviour for them even if they thought that LLM stuff had a low chance of being the next thing; they have lots and lots of money, and lots of revenue, so one strategy would be just to latch on to every new fad, and then if one is a real thing they don't get left behind (and if it's not, well, they can afford it). My suspicion is that this is where most Big Tech interest in LLMs comes from; it's essentially risk management.
- postexitus 2y agoParaphrasing from someone who is involved in this - their angle in AI is better targeting of Ads - better classification, clustering, better "recommendations" for the advertiser, including visuals, wording, video etc. These and others are just side benefits or some form of "greenwashing". Meta's main (and only) business is advertisement. They failed to capitalize on everything else.