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I'm somewhere in the middle on this, with regards to the ROI... this isn't the kind of thing where you see immediate reflection on quarterly returns... it's the

I'm somewhere in the middle on this, with regards to the ROI... this isn't the kind of thing where you see immediate reflection on quarterly returns... it's the kind of thing where if you don't hedge some bets, you're likely to completely die out from a generational shift. Facebook's product is eyeballs... they're being usurped on all sides between TikTok, X and BlueSky in terms of daily/regular users... They're competing with Google, X, MS, OpenAI and others in terms of AI interactions. While there's a lot of value in being the option for communication between friends and family, and the groups on FB don't have a great alternative, the entire market can shift greatly depending on AI research. I look at some of the (I think it was OpenAI) in generated terrain/interaction and can't help but think that's a natural coupling to FB/Meta's investments in their VR headsets. They could potentially completely lose on a platform they largely pioneered. They could wind up like Blackberry if they aren't ready to adapt. By contrast, Apple's lack of appropriate AI spending should be very concerning to any investors... Google's assistant is already quite a bit better than Siri and the gap is only getting wider. Apple is woefully under-invested, and the accountants running the ship don't even seem to realize it.

malfist 1y ago
How many years of not seeing returns this quarter does it take before its all hype?
- tracker1 1y ago
  How long did it take Space-X to catch a rocket with giant chopsticks? It's more than okay for a company with other sources of revenue to do research towards future advancement... it's not risking the downfall of the company.
- throw310822 1y ago
  "technology too expensive to be offered at a profit (yet)" != hype
  - malfist 1y ago
    Is it too expensive? Or not a valid solution to real problems?
  - ehnto 1y ago
    The MIT report that has everyone talking was about 95% of companies not seeing return on investment in using AI, and that is with the VC subsidised pricing. If it gets more expensive that math only gets worse. I can't predict the future, but one possibility is that AI will not be a general purpose replacement for human effort like some hope, but rather a more expensive than expected tool for a subset of use cases. I think it will be an enduring technology, but how it actually plays out in the economy is not yet clear.
    - ringeryless 1y ago
      writing spam emails, that's what LLMs enduring market niche will end up being. without structural comprehension, babbling flows of verbiage are of little use in automation. CAD is basically the opposite of such approaches, as structural specifications extend through manufacturing phases out to QA.
daheza 1y ago
I think apple is fine. When AI works without 1 in 5 hallucinations then it can be added to their product. Showing up late with features that exists elsewhere but are polished in apple presentation is the way.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  In general I don't think Google or Apple need AI. In practice though their platform is closed to any other assistant than theirs, so they have to come up with a competent service (basically Ben Thomson's "strategy tax" playing in full) That question will be moot the day Apple allows other companies to ingest everything's happening on device and operate the whole device in reaction to user's requests, and some company actually does a decent job at it. Today Google is doing a decent job and Apple isn't.
  - platevoltage 1y ago
    You’re right, they don’t need AI. I finally stopped using Google search after they added the AI summary and didn’t add a way to turn it off. I’m just as bothered by Apple’s lack of AI as a am their lack of a touch screen on MacBooks. I use AI when I need AI.
    - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
      Hm, so what'd you want from apple and google. One went too far in one direction and the other went too fair in the opposite direction. And it seems that you want to be somewhere in the middle?
      - makeitdouble 1y ago
        I think in general we want granularity and choice. So not just in how much AI there is, but what AI, where it's applied and where we can turn it off, and what context it has access to and where it's off bound.
- rafaelmn 1y ago
mvdtnz 1y ago
> they're being usurped on all sides between TikTok, X and BlueSky Good grief. Please leave your bubble once or twice in a month. Tiktok yes. X and Bluesky, absolutely not.
- tracker1 1y ago
  Monthly active users: From DemandSage: Facebook - 12 billion!? TikTok - 1.59 billion X - 611 million Bsky - 38 million That's according to DemandSage ... I'm not sure I can trust the numbers, FB jumped up from around 3b last year, which again I don't trust. 12b is more than the global population, so it's got to be all bots. And even the 3b number is hard to believe (at close to half the global population), no idea how much of the population of earth has any internet access. From Grok: Facebook - 3.1 billion TikTok - 1.5-2 billion X - 650 million Bsky - 4.1 million Looks like I'm definitely in a bubble... I tend to interact 1:1 as much on X as Facebook, which is mostly friends/family and limited discussions in groups. A lot of what I see on feeds is copy/pasta from tiktok though. That said, I have a couple friends who are die hard on Telegram.
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    pardon me but I am just a little surprised as to how telegram came in the last paragraph? we were talking about social medias and telegram is a messaging app...
    - 4ggr0 1y ago
      Telegram Groups sometimes blur the line between message-only interactions and social media dynamics, depending on how many bots and features they got running.
      - tracker1 1y ago
        Yeah... the friends in question run groups/chats including group live streams, which is like a half a step up from X's Spaces as opposed to twitch or youtube streams that seem to have text only chat. Telegram groups seems to be pretty popular among security minded, survivalists and actual far-right, there's moderate right users in there as well though. Nothing like death threats from ignorant nutjobs though, usually get that from the antifa types, having worked in election services in 2019/2020.
deepsun 1y ago
Deja vu, Zuck has already scaled down their AI research team a few years as I remember, because they didn't deliver any tangible results. Meta culture likes improving metrics like retention/engagement, and promotes managers if they show some improvement in their metrics. No one cares about long shots generally, and a research team is always the long shot.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
> they're being usurped on all sides They did it to themselves. Facebook is not the same site I originally joined. People were allowed to people. Now I have to worry about the AI banning me.
- platevoltage 1y ago
  I deleted my Facebook account 10 years ago, and I’ve been off Instagram for half a year. I recently tried to create a new Facebook account so that could create a Meta Business account to use the WhatsApp API for my business. Insta-ban with no explanation. No recourse.
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    Their loss, your gain. ;)
    - platevoltage 1y ago
      Yeah well, our Plivo bill disagrees unfortunately.
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    You don't have to use whatsapp api for business if all you want is simple automation. Like, there is beeper which can theoretically allow you the same but you might have to trust their cloud but they are giving options locally too in the meanwhile, you can use what beeper uses underneath its hood which is https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow and use this for automation. I used this for some time and I didn't seem to get banned but do be careful. Maybe use it on a side sim. I am not sure but just trying to help
    - platevoltage 1y ago
      I'll have to look into this. Thank you.
stephen_g 1y ago
> They're competing with Google, X, MS, OpenAI and others in terms of AI interactions Am I the only one that find the attempt to jam AI interactions into Meta's products useless and that it only detracts from the product? Like there'll be posts with comedy things and then there are suggested 'Ask Meta AI' about things the comedy mentions with earnest questions - it's not only irrelevant but I guess it's kind of funny how random and stupid the questions are. The 'Comment summaries' are counter-productive because I want to have a chuckle reading what people posted, I literally don't care to have it summarised because I can just skim over a few in seconds - literally useless. It's the same thing with Gemini summaries in YouTube - I feel it actually detracts from the experience of watching the videos so I actively avoid them. On what Apple is doing - I mean, literally nothing Apple Intelligence offers excites me, but at the same time nothing anybody else is doing with LLMs really does either... And I'm highly technical, general people are not actually that interested apart from students getting LLMs to write their homework for them... It's all well and good to be excited about LLMs but plenty of these companies' customers just... aren't... If anything, Apple is playing the smart move here - let other spend (and lose) billions training the models and not making any real ROI, and they can license the best ones for whatever turns out to actually have commercial appeal when the dust settles and the models are totally commodified...
- olyjohn 1y ago
  God the AI answers that it gives in the Facebook Groups are so wrong that it's hilarious.
- tracker1 1y ago
  I was thinking about this.. if you look at (I think OpenAI) the scene generation and interaction demos, it's a pretty natural fit for their VR efforts. Not that I'm sold on VR social networks, but definitely room for VR/AR enhancements... and even then AI has a lot of opportunities, beyond just LLM integration into FB/Groups. Aside, groups is about the only halfway decent feature in FB, and they seem to be trying to make it worse. The old chat integration was great, then they remove it, and now you get these invasive messenger rooms instead.

malfist 1y ago

How many years of not seeing returns this quarter does it take before its all hype?

tracker1 1y ago
How long did it take Space-X to catch a rocket with giant chopsticks? It's more than okay for a company with other sources of revenue to do research towards future advancement... it's not risking the downfall of the company.
throw310822 1y ago
"technology too expensive to be offered at a profit (yet)" != hype
- malfist 1y ago
  Is it too expensive? Or not a valid solution to real problems?
- ehnto 1y ago
  The MIT report that has everyone talking was about 95% of companies not seeing return on investment in using AI, and that is with the VC subsidised pricing. If it gets more expensive that math only gets worse. I can't predict the future, but one possibility is that AI will not be a general purpose replacement for human effort like some hope, but rather a more expensive than expected tool for a subset of use cases. I think it will be an enduring technology, but how it actually plays out in the economy is not yet clear.
  - ringeryless 1y ago
    writing spam emails, that's what LLMs enduring market niche will end up being. without structural comprehension, babbling flows of verbiage are of little use in automation. CAD is basically the opposite of such approaches, as structural specifications extend through manufacturing phases out to QA.

daheza 1y ago

I think apple is fine. When AI works without 1 in 5 hallucinations then it can be added to their product. Showing up late with features that exists elsewhere but are polished in apple presentation is the way.

makeitdouble 1y ago
In general I don't think Google or Apple need AI. In practice though their platform is closed to any other assistant than theirs, so they have to come up with a competent service (basically Ben Thomson's "strategy tax" playing in full) That question will be moot the day Apple allows other companies to ingest everything's happening on device and operate the whole device in reaction to user's requests, and some company actually does a decent job at it. Today Google is doing a decent job and Apple isn't.
- platevoltage 1y ago
  You’re right, they don’t need AI. I finally stopped using Google search after they added the AI summary and didn’t add a way to turn it off. I’m just as bothered by Apple’s lack of AI as a am their lack of a touch screen on MacBooks. I use AI when I need AI.
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    Hm, so what'd you want from apple and google. One went too far in one direction and the other went too fair in the opposite direction. And it seems that you want to be somewhere in the middle?
    - makeitdouble 1y ago
      I think in general we want granularity and choice. So not just in how much AI there is, but what AI, where it's applied and where we can turn it off, and what context it has access to and where it's off bound.
rafaelmn 1y ago

mvdtnz 1y ago

> they're being usurped on all sides between TikTok, X and BlueSky Good grief. Please leave your bubble once or twice in a month. Tiktok yes. X and Bluesky, absolutely not.

tracker1 1y ago
Monthly active users: From DemandSage: Facebook - 12 billion!? TikTok - 1.59 billion X - 611 million Bsky - 38 million That's according to DemandSage ... I'm not sure I can trust the numbers, FB jumped up from around 3b last year, which again I don't trust. 12b is more than the global population, so it's got to be all bots. And even the 3b number is hard to believe (at close to half the global population), no idea how much of the population of earth has any internet access. From Grok: Facebook - 3.1 billion TikTok - 1.5-2 billion X - 650 million Bsky - 4.1 million Looks like I'm definitely in a bubble... I tend to interact 1:1 as much on X as Facebook, which is mostly friends/family and limited discussions in groups. A lot of what I see on feeds is copy/pasta from tiktok though. That said, I have a couple friends who are die hard on Telegram.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  pardon me but I am just a little surprised as to how telegram came in the last paragraph? we were talking about social medias and telegram is a messaging app...
  - 4ggr0 1y ago
    Telegram Groups sometimes blur the line between message-only interactions and social media dynamics, depending on how many bots and features they got running.
    - tracker1 1y ago
      Yeah... the friends in question run groups/chats including group live streams, which is like a half a step up from X's Spaces as opposed to twitch or youtube streams that seem to have text only chat. Telegram groups seems to be pretty popular among security minded, survivalists and actual far-right, there's moderate right users in there as well though. Nothing like death threats from ignorant nutjobs though, usually get that from the antifa types, having worked in election services in 2019/2020.

deepsun 1y ago

Deja vu, Zuck has already scaled down their AI research team a few years as I remember, because they didn't deliver any tangible results. Meta culture likes improving metrics like retention/engagement, and promotes managers if they show some improvement in their metrics. No one cares about long shots generally, and a research team is always the long shot.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

> they're being usurped on all sides They did it to themselves. Facebook is not the same site I originally joined. People were allowed to people. Now I have to worry about the AI banning me.

platevoltage 1y ago
I deleted my Facebook account 10 years ago, and I’ve been off Instagram for half a year. I recently tried to create a new Facebook account so that could create a Meta Business account to use the WhatsApp API for my business. Insta-ban with no explanation. No recourse.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  Their loss, your gain. ;)
  - platevoltage 1y ago
    Yeah well, our Plivo bill disagrees unfortunately.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  You don't have to use whatsapp api for business if all you want is simple automation. Like, there is beeper which can theoretically allow you the same but you might have to trust their cloud but they are giving options locally too in the meanwhile, you can use what beeper uses underneath its hood which is https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow and use this for automation. I used this for some time and I didn't seem to get banned but do be careful. Maybe use it on a side sim. I am not sure but just trying to help
  - platevoltage 1y ago
    I'll have to look into this. Thank you.

stephen_g 1y ago

> They're competing with Google, X, MS, OpenAI and others in terms of AI interactions Am I the only one that find the attempt to jam AI interactions into Meta's products useless and that it only detracts from the product? Like there'll be posts with comedy things and then there are suggested 'Ask Meta AI' about things the comedy mentions with earnest questions - it's not only irrelevant but I guess it's kind of funny how random and stupid the questions are. The 'Comment summaries' are counter-productive because I want to have a chuckle reading what people posted, I literally don't care to have it summarised because I can just skim over a few in seconds - literally useless. It's the same thing with Gemini summaries in YouTube - I feel it actually detracts from the experience of watching the videos so I actively avoid them. On what Apple is doing - I mean, literally nothing Apple Intelligence offers excites me, but at the same time nothing anybody else is doing with LLMs really does either... And I'm highly technical, general people are not actually that interested apart from students getting LLMs to write their homework for them... It's all well and good to be excited about LLMs but plenty of these companies' customers just... aren't... If anything, Apple is playing the smart move here - let other spend (and lose) billions training the models and not making any real ROI, and they can license the best ones for whatever turns out to actually have commercial appeal when the dust settles and the models are totally commodified...

olyjohn 1y ago
God the AI answers that it gives in the Facebook Groups are so wrong that it's hilarious.
tracker1 1y ago
I was thinking about this.. if you look at (I think OpenAI) the scene generation and interaction demos, it's a pretty natural fit for their VR efforts. Not that I'm sold on VR social networks, but definitely room for VR/AR enhancements... and even then AI has a lot of opportunities, beyond just LLM integration into FB/Groups. Aside, groups is about the only halfway decent feature in FB, and they seem to be trying to make it worse. The old chat integration was great, then they remove it, and now you get these invasive messenger rooms instead.