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OpenAI is building a social network?
- dtj1123 2y agoSounds like OpenAI want to further leverage their platform into a tool for directing public opinion. Or maybe this is just a middle finger directed at Elon Musk by Sam Altman, who knows.
- jsnider3 2y agoWith all the other social networks trying to keep their data private because they all want to try their own AIs, it makes sense that OpenAI would want to have its own social network that wouldn't charge them for the data. I still doubt they actually launch it.
- bhouston 2y agoI've always thought that the social networks like X and BlueSky are sort of like the distributed consciousness of society. It is what society, as a whole / in aggregate, is currently thinking about and knowing its ebbs and flows and what it responds to are important if you want to have up to date AI. So yeah, AI integrated with a popular social network is valuable.
- ahartmetz 2y agoSocial networks tend to reflect the character of their founders. Do you really want to see what Sam Altman can do?
- bhouston 2y ago> Social networks tend to reflect the character of their founders. I would say "owners" rather than "founders", but I agree with you. I think Sam Altman's couldn't be worse than Elon Musk's X, no?
- daqhris 2y agoBoth are founders of a so-called non-profit and are suing each other. Their legal arguments are public at this point. By reading them, one may understand that it's hard to choose between 'yes' and 'no' as an answer. Maybe, we could request and take into account the opinion of what they 'created' that might outlast them and their conflict, namely AI.
- ahartmetz 2y agoI don't use X neither. Looks like it won't be around for much longer anyway, except as American Pravda (even though "Truth" Social already exists).
- newaccountlol 2y agoMake sure to hide your little sisters from it.
- beloch 2y ago>One idea behind the OpenAI social prototype, we’ve heard, is to have AI help people share better content. “The Grok integration with X has made everyone jealous,” says someone working at another big AI lab. “Especially how people create viral tweets by getting it to say something stupid.” This would be a decent PR stunt, but would such a platform offer anything of value? It might be more valuable to set AI to the task of making the most human social platform out there. Right now, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, etc. are all rife with bots, spam, and generative AI junk. Finding good content in this sea of noise is becoming increasingly difficult. A social media platform that uses AI to filter out spam, bots, and other AI with the goal of making human content easy to access might really catch on. Set a thief to catch thieves. Who are we kidding. It's going to be Will Smith eating spaghetti all the way down.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoNo, nothing of value. If you ever want to lose faith in the future of humanity search "@grok" on Twitter and look at all the interactions people have with it. Just total infantilism, people needing tl;drs spoon-fed to them, needing summarization and one-word answers because they don't want to read, arguing with it or whining to Musk if they don't get the answer they want to confirm what they already believe.
- Centigonal 2y agothe worst is like a dozen people in the replies to a post asking Grok the exact same obvious follow-up question. Somehow, having access to an LLM has completely annihilated these commenters' ability to scroll down 50 pixels.
- rudedogg 2y agoI bookmarked this example where it is confidently incorrect about a movie frame/screenshot: https://x.com/Pee159604/status/1909445730697462080 https://x.com/Pee159604/status/1909445730697462080
- exodust 2y ago
- numpad0 2y agoA 4chan but images can be prompt generated? Makes sense. Everything's going back to early 2000s, it seems.
- kittikitti 2y agoI would try to make a platform like Deviantart or Tumblr except OpenAI pays you to make good content that the AI is trained on.
- malux85 2y agoNice in theory but don’t know how practical it is to actually do. How do you define “good”? Theres obvious examples at the extremes but a chasm of ambiguity between them. How do you compute value? If an AI takes 200 million images to train, wait let me write that out to get a better sense of the number: 200,000,000 Then what is the value of 1 image to it? Is it worth the 3 hours of human labour time put into creating it? Is it worth 1 hour of human labour time? Even at minimum wage? No, right?
- paxys 2y agoYou really think an OpenAI-sponsored social network is going to attract people who create and share original content?
- pjc50 2y agoHow do you stop people gaming this by feeding it the output of other AIs? (not to mention defining "good")
- blitzar 2y agoThis is just part of the ongoing feud between Sama and Musk.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- andrewstuart 2y agoThey should use their resources to make OpenAI good at coding.
- siva7 2y agoSam got a jawline lift, anyone noticed?
- dlivingston 2y agoDid he? Flipping back and forth between old vs. new photos of him, his facial structure seems roughly the same.
- beeflet 2y agoYes, I've been cataloging the mewing and lookmaxxing progress of hundreds of public figures
- labrador 2y agoIt'd be cool to see Google+ resurrected with OpenAI branding. Google+ was actually a pretty well designed social network
- WJW 2y agoNot well designed enough to live, though.
- AlienRobot 2y agoNot well designed to live under Google* Tumblr is still alive. LiveJournal is still alive. Newgrounds is still alive and Flash doesn't even exist anymore.
- int_19h 2y agoIt doesn't matter how well-designed it is if people aren't there. Social graph lock-in is the single biggest issue with any contender.
- bluetux01 2y agothat would be cool, google+ was very unique and i was kinda sad google killed it off
- swyx 2y agowhat did you like about it?
- labrador 2y agoI liked the UX. I liked Circles. There were other nice options that I can't remember but I thought Google+ was a big improvement over Facebook.
- piva00 2y agoI don't believe it was well designed, it felt clunky to use, concepts weren't intuitive enough to understand after a few uses. I tried to use it for a few months after release, always got frustrated to the point I didn't feel like reaching out to friends to be part of it. The absurd annoyance of its marketing, pushing it into every nook and cranny of Google's products was the nail in the coffin. I'm starting to feel as annoyed by the push with Gemini, it just keeps popping up at annoying times when I want to do my work.
- chazeon 2y agoI think a social network is not necessarily a timeline-based product, but an LLM-native/enabled group chat can probably be a very interesting product. Remember, ChatGPT itself is already a chat.
- sho_hn 2y agoWhat's a "LLM-native/enabled group chat"?
- simple10 2y agoTelegram and slack bots are probably the best example so far. Bot gets added to a chat and can respond when mentioned in the group chat.
- sho_hn 2y agoGotcha, the NLP-enabled version of the good old IRC weatherbot. For a moment I had a funnier mental image of a chat app with an input field that treats every input as a prompt, and everyone's chatting through the veil of an LLM verbosity filter. There might be something chat RPG-like there worth trying though ...
- simple10 2y agoYes, this. That's my bet if OpenAI follows through with social features. Extend ChatGPT to allow multiple people / friends to interact with the bot and each other. Would be interesting UX challenge if they're able to pull it off. I frequently share chats from other platforms, but typically those platforms don't allow actual collaboration and instead clone the chat for the people I shared.
- thomasfromcdnjs 2y agoI am building this with a team currently and we are launching in a couple days. Would love an alpha tester or two if anyone wants to test it. My email/twitter is in my profile, shoot me a message and I will be in touch.
- candiddevmike 2y agoWhat else are they going to spend billions on to turn a profit?
- grg0 2y agoI don't know, but a weight bench goes under $200 and Sam needs some chest gains fast.
- swyx 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20250415160251/https://www.theverge.com/openai/648130/openai-social-network-x-competitor https://web.archive.org/web/20250415160251/https://www.theve...
- outside1234 2y agoAren't they unprofitable enough already?
- pedalpete 2y agohttps://archive.is/qU4am https://archive.is/qU4am
- pontus 2y agoIs this just a data play? Need more data. Start a social network. Own said data.
- mr90210 2y ago[flagged]
- sva_ 2y agoI think its more likely that they're desperate to find a profitable business model.
- 000ooo000 2y agoSeems telling that an org had arguably the leading AI, as the planet knows it at least, and still can't exist without putting ads in front of eyes. So much for the hype.
- guywithahat 2y agoHonestly I wonder if it’s because Altman loves X and is threatened by Grok
- prvc 2y agoIs making yet another twitter clone really the way to build a path towards super-intelligence? A worthy use of the organization's talent?
- arcatech 2y agoCollecting millions of people’s thoughts and interactions with each other IS probably on the path to better LLMs at least.
- sho_hn 2y agoI'd love for my agents to be created in the image of humanity's best side, its interactions on social media. Perhaps then we can all let LLMs take care of tweeting outrage for us, and go outside to find each other rolling around on the grass.
- blitzar 2y agoAnother twitter clone will help the decline of human intelligence, the dumber humans are the smarter the Ai appears.
- philipov 2y agoImagine that, a social network where all of the participants are bots.
- tiffanyh 2y agoMy guess ... it's probably less of a "social network" and more of a "they are trying to build a destination (portal) where users go to daily". E.g. old days of Yahoo (portal)
- sho_hn 2y agoThey just want the next wave of Ghibli meme clicks to go to them, really. This will be built on the existing thread+share infra ChatGPT already has, and just allow profiles to cross-post into conversations, with UI and features more geared toward remixing each other's images.
- herpdyderp 2y agoThat was my thought: a meme-sharing platform.
- beepbopboopp 2y agoThe answer seems more obvious to me. They dont even care if its competitive or scales too much. xAI has a crazy data advantage firehousing Twitter, llama FB/IG and CGPT just has, well, the internet. Id hope they have some clever scheme to acquire users, but ultimately they want the data/
- latency-guy2 2y agoI actually would love this. I hate having to go to another website to share some thoughts I had using tools in a platform. I miss the days when experiences would actually choose to integrate other platforms into their experiences, yes I was sort of a fan of the FB/Google share button and Twitter side feed (not the tracking bits though). I wasn't a fan of LLM and the whole chat experience a few years ago, I'm a very mild convert now with the latest models and I'm getting some nominal benefit, so I would love to have some kind of shared chat session to brain storm, e.g. on a platform better than Figma. The one integration of AI that I think is actually neat is Teams + AI Note taking. It's still a hit or miss a lot of the time, but it at least saves and notes something important 30% of the time. Collaboration enhancements would be a wonderful outcome in place of AGI.
- mushufasa 2y agoSounds like they are thinking about instagram, which originated as a phone app to apply filters to a camera and share with friends (like texting or emailing them or sending them a link to a hosted page), and evolved into a social network. Their new image generation feature has enough people organically sharing content that they probably are thinking about hosting that content on pages, then adding permissions + follow features to all of their existing users' accounts. honestly it's not a terrible idea. it may be a distraction from their core purpose, but it's probably something they can test and learn from within a ~90 day cycle.
- CharlieDigital 2y agoSounds like some crossover with Civit.ai
- clonedhuman 2y agoAI bots already make up a significant percentage of users on most social networks. Might as well just take the mask off completely--soon, we'll all be having conversations (arguments, most likely) with 'users' with no real human anywhere near them.
- api 2y agoI've been saying for a while that the next innovation beyond TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube is to get rid of human creators entirely. Just have a 100% AI-generated slop-feed tailor made for the user. There's already a ton of AI slop on those platforms, so we're like half way there, but what I mean is eliminating the entire idea of humans submitting content. Just never-ending hypnotic slop guided by engagement maximizing algorithms.
- janalsncm 2y agoAn idea which sounds horrifying but would probably be pretty popular: a Facebook like feed where all of your “friends” are bots and give you instant gratification, praise, and support no matter what you post. Solves the network effect because it scales from zero.
- samcgraw 2y agoI'm sorry to say this exists: https://socialai.co https://socialai.co
- einrealist 2y agoThis is Altman increasing the mass of the investment black hole that OpenAI is.
- paulvnickerson 2y agoSam Altman is retaliating against Musk for Grok and Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, trying to ride the wave of anti-Musk political heat, and figure out a way to pull in more training data due to copyright troubles. If they launch, expect a big splash with many claiming it is the X-killer (i.e. the same people that claimed the same of Mastadon, Threads, and Bluesky), especially around here at HN, and then nobody will talk about it anymore after a few months.
- AlienRobot 2y agoHere's how to kill Twitter and Bluesky AND Mastodon: 1: use an LLM to extract the text from memes and relatable comics. 2: use an LLM to extract the transcriptions of videos. 3: use an LLM to censor all political speech. OpenAI, I believe in you. You can do it. Save the Internet. If you can clean my FYP of current events I'll join your social media before you can ask a GPT how to get more users.
- paulvnickerson 2y ago^-- This comment proves my point.
- terminatornet 2y agocomputer: show me jingling keys
- zombiwoof 2y agoJust use an LLM to verify only humans are on the social network and no bots and you win
- mcmcmc 2y ago> 3: use an LLM to censor all political speech. And who gets to decide what is political? Are human rights political? Is a trans person merely existing political? Is calling for genocide political?
- AlienRobot 2y ago
- frabona 2y agoFeels like a natural next step, honestly. If they already have users generating tons of content via ChatGPT, hosting it natively and adding light social features might just be a way to keep people engaged and coming back. Not sure if it's meant to compete with Twitter/Instagram, or just quietly become another daily habit for users
- pclmulqdq 2y agoThis would be a natural step if it were 2010. In 2025, it sounds like a lack of imagination to me.
- 9rx 2y agoPerhaps, but currently OpenAI is stuck sharecropping with existing social networks – producing the content but not deriving the value. It is hard to move grander visions forward when you don't own the land.
- rnotaro 2y agoFYI there's already an (early) social feed in OpenAI Sora. https://sora.com/explore?type=videos https://sora.com/explore?type=videos
- Nijikokun 2y agongl building a social network isn't hard, getting people to use a social network is the hard part
- abc-1 2y agoHahaha they’re cooked. GPT 4.5 was a massive flop. GPT 4.1 is barely an improvement after over a year. Now they’re grasping at straws. Anyone actually in this field who wasn’t a grifter knew improvements are sigmoidal. All the original talent has already left too.
- Apocryphon 2y agoWe've got gen AI now and no ZIRP yet this is all they can think of, Web 2.0 will never die.
- basisword 2y agoI can’t think of anything less appealing or interesting. AI content as a destination has zero appeal.
- randomor 2y agoControversial opinion: it's not about the generator of the content, human or not, but about the originality of the content itself. Human with the help of AI will generate more good quality as a result. Humans are just as good as bots in generating rubbish content, if not more so. Twitter reduced content production cost significantly, AI can take it another step down. At minimum, a social network where people share good prompt engineering techniques will be valuable to people who are on the hunt for prompts. Just like the Midjourney website, except creating a high quality image is no longer a trip to the beach, but a thought experiment. This will also significantly cut down the cold start friction and in combination with some free credits, people may have more reasons to stay, as the current chat based business model may reach it's limit for revenue generation and retention, as it's just single player mode.
- godelski 2y ago> but about the originality of the content itself Your metric is too ill-defined. Here, have some highly unique content gZbDrttzP6mQC5PoKXY2JNd9VIIxBUsV ClRF73KITgz5DVnSO0YUxMB6o7P9gh8I 1ttcQiNdQuIs4axdAJvjaFXXkxq0EvGq Pd0qwVWgSvaPw8volLA0SWltnqcCNJiy If we need unique valid human language outputs I'll still disagree. Most human output is garbage. Good luck on your two tasks: 1) searching for high quality content 2) de-duplicating. Both are still open problems and we're pretty bad at both. De-duping images is still a tough task, before we even begin to address the problem of semantic de-duplication.
- visarga 2y agoThe idea is to let humans be humans, make a mess, debate, have their opinions, and AI comes after that and removes the herp derp from the useful parts. As a test of concept copy paste this whole page, put it in a LLM and ask for an article. It will come out without junk, but will reflect a greater diversity of opinion, more arguments, will do debunking, and generally have better grounding in our positions than the original content. So it's careful synthesis over human chats that is the end value. Humans provide that novelty and lived experience LLMs lack, LLMs provide consistent formatting and synthesis. The companies that understand that users are the source of entropy and novelty will stop trying to own the model and start trying to host the question. Wondering why reddit doesn't generate thousands of articles per day from comment pages. It would crush traditional media in both diversity and quality. It would follow the interesting topics naturally.
- gorgoiler 2y agoThe analogy is with Iain Banks’ The Culture. Anyone can be anything and do anything they want in an abundant, machine assisted world. The connections, cliques, friends and network you cultivate are more important than ever before if you want to be heard above the noise. Sheer talent has long fallen by the wayside as a differentiator. …or alternatively it’s not The Culture at all. Is live performance the new, ahem, rock star career? In fifty years time all the lawyers and engineers and bankers will be working two jobs for minimum wage. The real high earners will be the ones who can deliver live, unassisted art that showcases their skills with instruments and their voice. Those who are truly passionate about the law will only be able to pursue it as a barely-living-wage hobby while being advised to “not give up the night job” — their main, stable source of income — as a cabaret singer. They might be a journalist or a programmer in their twenties for fun before economics forces them to settle down and get a real, stable job: starting a rock band.
- retransmitfrom 2y agoThe Culture is about a post-capitalist utopia. You’re describing yet another cyberpunk-esque world where people have still have to do wage-labor to not starve.
- gorgoiler 2y agoYou’re right so I made a slight edit to separate my two ideas. Thanks for even reading them at all! I try to contribute positively to this site when I can, and riffing on the overlap between fiction and real-life — a la Doctorow — seems like a good way to be curious.
- comrade1234 2y agoNaah… in the culture you could change your sex at will, something soon to be illegal.
- idiotsecant 2y agoThe culture presents such a tempting world view for the type of people who populate HN. I've transitioned from strongly actually believing that such a thing was possible to strongly believing that we will destroy ourselves with AI long before we get there. I don't even think it'll be from terminators and nuclear wars and that sort of thing. I think it will come wrapped in a hyper-specific personalized emotional intelligence, tuned to find the chinks in our memetic firewalls just so. It'll sell us supplements and personalized media and politicians and we'll feel enormously emotionally satisfied the whole time.
- tomrod 2y agoMaybe, but Substack is building a much mote engaging social network. I'm frankly amazed at how good it is.
- shaftoe444 2y agoLogical conclusion of AI is to generate slop for slop feeds so why not own your own slop feed.
- rglover 2y agoI speculated a ways back [1] that this was why Elon Musk bought Twitter. Not to "control the discourse" but to get unfettered access to real, live human thought that you can train an AI against. My guess is OpenAI has hit limits with "produced" content (e.g., books, blog posts, etc) and think they can fill in the gaps in the LLMs ability to "think" by leveraging raw, unpolished social data (and the social graph). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31397703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31397703
- godelski 2y agoBut collecting more data is just a naive task. The reason scale works is because of the way we typically scale. By collecting more data, we also tend to collect a wider variety of data and are able to also collect more good quality data. But that has serious limits. You can only do this so much before you become equivalent to the naive scaling method. You can prove this yourself fairly easily. Try to train a model on image classification and take one of your images and permute one pixel at a time. You can get a huge amount of scale out of this but your network won't increase in performance. It is actually likely to decrease.
- chewbacha 2y agoIf that were the case he (Musk) wouldn’t have turned it into a Nazi-filled red pilled echo chamber.
- danity 2y agoJust what the world needs, another social network!
- Duanemclemore 2y agoI haven't been happier online in the last 10 years than after I stopped checking social media. And in that miserable time it wasn't even a naked beg for training data like this. But I really don't see why anyone would even use an open ai "social network" in the first place. It does allow one thing for open ai. Other than training data which admittedly will probably be pretty low quality. It is a natural venue for ad sales.
- Duanemclemore 2y agoOh I get one thing - other than ads. So the idea of an LLM filter to algorithmically tailor your own consumption has some utility. The logical application would be an existing social network -using- chat gpt to do this. But all the existing ones have their own models, so if they can't plug in to an existing one like goooooogle did to yahoo in the olden days, they have to start their own. That makes a certain amount of (backward) sense for them. I don't think it'll work. But there's some logic if you're looking from -their- worldview.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y agoIsn't the selling point behind Blue sky is that you can customize your feed your way? I don't know the tech behind that but the feed is "open" isn't it? Can they plug into that?
- rcpt 2y agoThe selling point of Bluesky is that you don't get bombarded with a mob of blue checks every time you post something political
- SecretDreams 2y agoSocial media is a plague, including LinkedIn. Anything that lets you follow others and/or erodes your anonymity is just different degrees of cancer waiting to happen. The best I ever enjoyed the internet was the sweet spot between dial up and DSL where I was gaming in text based/turn based games, talking on forums, and chatting using IRC.
- throw_m239339 2y agoWhat would be the point? Why would it even need real members?
- paxys 2y agoAds
- Magma7404 2y agoThe point would be getting real content from real people because most of the internet will soon be written by bots and that's bad for LLMs. They need new content all the time. And IMHO that's why programming is fucked if no one writes new code anymore, and every code monkey vibes code all day long. But it seems not to bother programmers for some reason...
- uptownfunk 2y agoIt’s all whatever will maximize valuation. They can do it until antitrust comes for them.
- lukev 2y agoThis kind of news should be a death-knell for OpenAI. If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and you wouldn't even be considering it... unless you knew you weren't about to shortly offer AGI.
- pyfon 2y agoIt is a Threads. How is that doing?
- celdon25 2y ago> If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and you wouldn't even be considering it... unless you knew you weren't about to shortly offer AGI. I’m not a big fan of OpenAI but this seems a little unfair. They have (or at least had) a pretty kick ass product. Great brand value too. Death-knell? Maybe… but I wouldn’t read into it. I’d be looking more at their key employees leaving. That’s what kills companies.
- smt88 2y ago- Product is not kickass. Hallucinations and cost limit its usefulness, and it's incinerating money. Prices are too high and need to go much higher to turn a profit. - Their brand value is terrible. Many people loathe AI for what it's going to do for jobs, and the people who like it are just as happy to use CoPilot or Cursor or Gemini. Frontier models are mostly fungible to consumers. No one is brand-loyal to OpenAI. - Many key employees have already left or been forced out.
- stef25 2y ago> Product is not kickass It might not be the best but people of whom you'd have never thought that they would use it, are using it. Many non technical people in my circle are all over it and they have never even heard of Claude. They also wouldn't understand why people would loathe AI because they simply don't understand those reasons.
- beambot 2y agoMakes me (further) believe that Reddit is heavily undervalued...
- alphazard 2y agoAlright, I'll bite. What's a reasonable price for Reddit? Aren't most of their users bots?
- pyfon 2y agoDoesn't matter. Subreddits create vast islands of value. A single sub overrun with bots is quarantined effectively. That is why Reddit is one of my favourite social sites. It is algorithmic but if you go to r/assholedesign you get asshole design. (and an anal mod who keeps it like that) Etc. Value $44bn ;)
- blitzar 2y agoDiscord is the real play.
- robbomacrae 2y agoI'm came to the comments here wondering why OpenAI can seemingly fund massive new AI chip data centers but can't acquire Discord.
- blitzar 2y agoBuy discord (for 44bn) - skin a version to be a slack/teams/zoom/google thingy clone for corporates - integrate ChatGPT into all of it. Discord will probably IPO when conditions allow - might be an easy buy for a stock / cash offer.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Nevermark 2y agoA social network that faithfully and intelligently curated posts according to my own continuously updated (explicit) direction would be most excellent. But it would also juice echo chamber depth and further amplify extremist "engagement". And the monetary incentives for OpenAI to generate most of the content, the "people", and the ads, including creative hallucinations and novel extremisms, so they directly match each of our curation directions, would enshittify the whole thing within a short minute. -- The time has come to outlaw conflict of interest businesses that scale (the conflict). If a startup plan includes "sales" and "customers": Green light go. If it talks about ways to "monetize": Red trash can. If only.
- misonic 2y agothis sounds not appealing to me, what extra value would it provide? why do I need a new X with AI support, making friends with Agents/Bots?
- xpl 2y agoOne interesting benefit is that OpenAI would be able to detect bots using their APIs to generate content.
- aussieguy1234 2y agoLLM -> Social Media Platform -> Tiktok clone. That would be an interesting evolution.
- arizen 2y agoSocial media is becoming TikTok’s clone army, with algorithms hooked on short-form videos for max engagement. Text, images, and long-form content are getting crushed, forcing creators into bite-sized video to be favored by almighty algorithm. It’s like letting a kid pick their meals - nothing but sugar and candy all day.
- tayo42 2y agoyour probably not wrong But personally i don't get it. i hate almost all videos. the exception is some thing is best shown as a video, like a how to. but I search those out Maybe im so broken at this point, who has the patience for videos? Clearly a lot but how lol
- aussieguy1234 2y agoSo far, I've refused to watch Tiktok. Something about mindless garbage doesn't appeal to me.
- mrandish 2y agoOkay, thinking charitably here... maybe a play at getting training data they don't have to steal? (although it does seem like rotating the ladder instead of the lightbulb...)
- gerash 2y agoI believe the play here is: 1. Look "Studio Ghibli" went viral, let's capitalize 2. Switching cost for LLMs are low. If we can't be the best let's find other ways to lock our users in and make our product super sticky
- BrenBarn 2y agoSo Facebook is trying to get into AI (e.g. its chatbot-"user" debacle) and OpenAI wants to form its own social network. Our world is becoming the recycled shit-food of this technological ouroboros.
- tossandthrow 2y agoThe American play book: make some innovation but do a bait and switch and focus all energy on value extraction.
- karel-3d 2y agoAI generated posts and images and nonstop posting about AI? That sounds like LinkedIn in 2025.
- Iolaum 2y agoMaybe before building a social network, you should be able to share the result of an answer with another user, even if they have not paid/subscribed. Tried to share an answer to a colleague (who didn't have the paid version) and he couldn't see it ...
- pluto_modadic 2y agoThey know AI can be addictive (people will prompt it far too often), so mixing it with social media can captivate users even more effectively.
- hybrid_study 2y agoand they can own all the data
- beaugunderson 2y ago> While the project is still in early stages, we’re told there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that has a social feed. isn't it public already? they basically made tumblr but everything is AI: https://sora.com/explore https://sora.com/explore
- interludead 2y agoCurious to see if this leans more "creative community" or "algorithmic content zoo."
- camkego 2y agoI suspect they are searching for network effects, otherwise they know the switching costs are too low for their users
- paride5745 2y agoIt makes no sense to build a social network nowadays. With Mastodon and Bluesky around, users have free options. Plus X and Threads, and you can see how the market is more than saturated. IMHO they should look into close collaboration/minority stake with Bluesky or Reddit instead. You have a huge pool of users already, without the need to build it up from the ground up from scratch. Heck, OpenAI probably has enough money to just buy Reddit if they want.
- b1n 2y agoAlso, what is their USP? "Join our social network so we can train our models on your data!"
- Traubenfuchs 2y ago...free AI slop right from the tap? Like the latest ghibli fad.
- seafoamteal 2y agoI don't know about Reddit, but Bluesky would never in a million years partner themselves publicly with OpenAI. I can't comment on the opinions of the team themselves because I just don't know, but the users would revolt. Loudly.
- sksxihve 2y agoIs there anything stopping openai from scraping all the bluesky content without partnering?
- paride5745 2y agoYes, they can. All Bluesky data (and ATProto in general) is publicly available. It is already happening and nothing can be done against it at a protocol level: https://mashable.com/article/bluesky-ai-dataset-using-one-million-user-posts https://mashable.com/article/bluesky-ai-dataset-using-one-mi...
- GeorgeCurtis 2y agoThe whole value proposition of a social media is that everyone you know (almost) is on it. That's why young people don't use Facebook. They'd be better off buying one
- svara 2y agoI guess where this is all going in the long run is something with an interface similar to TikTok, where the user gives rapid feedback to train an algorithm to generate content that they "love", er, that maximally tickles their reward circuitry.
- buyucu 2y agoopenai is getting crushed by competitors who are offeering more cost-effective alternatives. so sam altman is pressing all buttons to keep the hype train going.
- nottorp 2y ago... for bots. The "AI" bots are lonely and this will let them talk to each other.
- robert-whiteley 2y agoCounter opinion - What tech people don't seem to realise about AI is that putting it into a user-friendly format for the average person is what has led to this current revolution, i.e. ChatGPT This is just the next step of that. This also doesn't stop them working on 'AGI', you need the data as well as the models, as most people familiar with the field will known. I will be happy to be proven wrong on this prediction.
- WASDAai 2y ago[dead]
- INTPenis 2y agoThe aversion to robots in Fediverse suddenly makes a lot of sense. I don't want to live on the internet that is crammed with AI content.
- gtirloni 2y agoSocial networks are the TODO list app of rich people, apparently.
- trilbyglens 2y agoWhat a dumbfuck article. It's essentially a gossip-rag level story based on a few random and meaningless tweets from a couple of billionaire douchebags.
- umagamdrup 2y ago[dead]
- thatgerhard 2y agothis is starting to feel a lot like the ~15 years ago where everyone wanted a social network
- sharathnarayan 2y agoMay be they need the social media data to improve their models? X and Meta have an edge here
- rvnx 2y agoData quality on social networks like Twitter/Meta, is very low compared to what you see in Wikipedia or Reddit
- antirez 2y agoIsn't Gemini 2.5 the proof you don't need social network alike data for training?
- dktp 2y agoGoogle has a deal with Reddit to scrape its content for training AI. It also has Youtube
- seafoamteal 2y agoSo... one stop shop to generate slop and send it out into the ether to be recycled into more slop.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nbzso 2y agoScam Altman is running out of "options". Serial failing is SV current business model.
- arjunaaqa 2y agoIf they simply take Chatgpt profiles, a button to share with others, and add a follow button for every qa pair. - They have a quick social network with feed of qna with AI (like stackoverflow) immediately.
- anentropic 2y ago> “The Grok integration with X has made everyone jealous,” says someone working at another big AI lab. “Especially how people create viral tweets by getting it to say something stupid.” It's awesome to see the amazing value for society being created by big tech these days.
- jrflowers 2y agoWhen your definition of “everyone” is like two, three guys tops
- sph 2y agoTo think that even a year ago the idea of Instagram-style social media where all posts are openly AI-generated sounded very dystopian, now I can clearly so it is something people would pay for and HN people would gladly build. I wasn’t always a Luddite, but damn they made me one.
- yapyap 2y agoAlthough that is true for Instagram style media it was always a risk for text based media. As PoC I’d say look at the subreddit SubSimulatorGPT2 www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago[dead]
- fullshark 2y ago"Social" media isn't really social anymore, it just means any idiot with a computer can generate the media you're consuming.
- flir 2y agoWrite-only media.
- 2y ago
- fhd2 2y agoI wonder to what degree this move would be genuine company strategy, and to what degree it'd just be what the sub headline says: "Is Sam Altman ready to up his rivalry with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg?"
- paradox242 2y agoThey have to feed the beast with a never ending supply of input.
- chocolateteeth 2y agoThis sounds more like a project intended to be a component of his—incredibly—still larger project World. Good times to come, everyone.
- kilianinbox 2y agoIf a front figure of a big tech happens to go plant based, that simply means a good role model for Ai in this time (and humans..). I’m for a big YES. At first I wasn’t positive due to a sense of bloating the service and risking forms of leaking, but considering that most social plattforms needs more ethical thinking integrated and that social media can be done in new smart way; it’s much easier than making a AI-driven Search Engine (takes extreme compute to be as good as people likely expect without bringing a negative opinion for chatgpt as such; since high quality tailored answers will take some compute..) to make a meaningful social ’plattform’; interaction with Ai can be done much cooler than today in co-exploration :) ..
- andrewstuart 2y agoIf it’s true then it flags giant problems at OpenAI and makes it clear they don’t know what they’re doing or where they are going.
- rnotaro 2y agoFYI there's already an (early) social feed [1] in OpenAI Sora. [1] https://sora.com/explore?type=videos https://sora.com/explore?type=videos
- eagerpace 2y agoI thought they were building a new search engine. Now it’s a social network. Tomorrow it will be robots. It’s all a distraction from ClosedAI.
- bsima 2y agoAlso rumored to be building a phone at one point? They are playing the media
- empath75 2y agoIt already is a search engine and has been for a while. I think you don't recognize it as such because it's incorporated into the chat box, but I use chatgpt as my search engine 90% of the time and almost never use google any more. I think the social stuff will also just be incorporated into the chat interface in the form of 'share this image', etc, and isn't going to be like twitter with a bunch of bots posting.
- owebmaster 2y agoA browser would make a lot of sense, for both a search engine and social nework.
- vagab0nd 2y agoCan we just have a public ledger that everyone posts to, and then we each have an AI to selectively serve us contents we are interested in?
- MagicMoonlight 2y agoI think people would actually use an all-bot social network. Imagine tweeting and thousands of “people” reply to you and appreciate you. It would be addictive.
- squigz 2y agoSome of the comments here are so detached from my reality that I have to wonder whether I'm the crazy one. Nobody I know would be interested in a social media platform that is just AI. Contrary to what some commenters here seem to think, most people are interested in things like upvotes and likes and whatnot... because they understand it's (mostly) humans on the other end. Without that, it would all be rather hollow, and nobody would want to participate in it. I think most people would find the insinuation that they're so shallow as to want that a bit insulting. But again, maybe I'm the crazy one.
- NiloCK 2y agoLeveraging OpenAI for a Worldcoin proof-of-humanity toehold? Blue checks for WorldID holders, and a presumption of dead internet everywhere else.
- colonial 2y agoA few months ago they were AGI vagueposting. Now they're working on SlopBook? This plus Ed Zitron's excellent investigative writing on their finances [0] makes me think that OpenAI is going to fold within a year, maybe two. [0]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the-tech-industry-2/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the... (TL;DR - we have apparently learned nothing from 2008.)
- nilkn 2y agoWhat this tells me is that xAI / X / Grok have together become a much bigger threat to OpenAI than they anticipated. And I believe it's true -- Grok's progress has been much faster than ChatGPT's over the past year, even if we can nitpick evals over which is technically "better" at any moment. The fact that it's hard to tell is itself a huge statement considering the massive advantage OpenAI and ChatGPT had not too long ago. I mean, Grok was basically a joke when it first launched!
- mring33621 2y agoi said this 3 months ago: I think OpenAI should split into 2: 1) B2B: Reliable, enterprise level AI-AAS 2) B2C: New social network where people and AIs can have fun together OpenAI has a good brand name RN. Maybe pursuing further breakthroughs isn't in the cards, but they could still be huge with the start that they have.
- datadrivenangel 2y agoIf they nail the memory part, this could basically kill WorkOS and Jira and all those project management tools.
- sys32768 2y agoI hope they don't apply the same censorship filters to their social media as their image generation.
- giancarlostoro 2y agoI'm genuinely curious how they will achieve this, will they go the open source pre-built solution route, or build their own from scratch?
- soylentEnjoyer 2y ago[flagged]
- ulech 2y agorecent memory update and this all points to the same direction; openai is first trying to lock-in their users via personalization. this specifically targets general users with low privacy sensitivity, who don't mind chatgpt knowing their personal details, then network-effect. not sure how the new joint social network for ai and humans will be, though i doubt it will be dystopic like we can easily imagine; rather i see a network where humans talk to each other (like we do in any other sns) and can call an ai to "chime in" to the conversation. ai will moderate / reference other posts, users / and so on. like X with grok but where users ask more than "explain this meme". one thing is, privacy sensitive individuals will find it difficult to convince themselve to participate in the network as long as openai remains close (ironically). though we shall wait as they planned on revealing an open source model soon.
- resonanormal 2y agoIt’s basically a way to have actual people create content that will be used further training AI as a reinforcement circle. Also reduces the need for scraping
- afinlayson 2y agoWhat if it was an un-social media. Like undo what happened over the last 5(or more) years in social media… may be interesting or just concentrate power in another company.