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What does Meta even want with AI? I suppose they could solve superintelligence and cure cancer and build fusion reactors with it, but that's 100% outside their

What does Meta even want with AI? I suppose they could solve superintelligence and cure cancer and build fusion reactors with it, but that's 100% outside their comfort zone - if they manage to build synthethic conversation partners and synthethic content generators as good or better than the real thing the value of having every other human on the planet registered to one of their social network goes to zero. Which is impossible anyway - I facebook to maintain real human connections and keep up with people who I care about, not to consume infinite content.

zamadatix 1y ago
At 1.6T market cap it's very hard to 10x or greater the company anymore doing what's in their comfort zone and they've got a lot of money to play with to find easier to grow opportunities. If Zuckerberg was convinced he could do that by selling toothpicks they'd have a go at the toothpick business. They went after the "metaverse" first, then AI. Both are just very fast growth options which happen to be tech focused because that's the only way you generate new comparable value as a company (unless you're sitting on a lot of state owned oil) in the current markets.
- b112 1y ago
  You missed an opportunity to use paperclips instead of toothpicks, as your example. Would be very inline with the AI angle.
breppp 1y ago
they are out for your clicks and attention minutes if OpenAI can build a "social" network of completely generated content, that can kill Meta. Even today I venture to guess that most of the engagements in their platforms is not driven by real friends, so an AI driven platform won't be too different, or it might make content generation be so easy as to make your friends engage again. Apart from it the ludicrous vision of the metaverse seems much more plausible with highly realistic world models
- pandemic_region 1y ago
  Sad to hear it has come to attention minutes, used to be seconds.
- drexlspivey 1y ago
  How do LLMs help with clicks and attention minutes? Why do they spend $100+B a year in AI capex, more than Google and Microsoft that actually rent AI compute to clients? What are they going to do with all that compute? It’s all so confusing
  - breppp 1y ago
    It might be just me, but in my opinion facebook platforms are way past the "content from your friends phase", but is full of cheap peddled viral content. If that content becomes even cheaper, of higher quality and highly tailored to you, that is probably worth a lot of money, or at least worth not losing your entire company by a new competitor
    - drexlspivey 1y ago
      But practically speaking, is Meta going to be generating text or video content itself? Are they going to offer some kind of creator tools so you can use it to create video as a user and they need the compute for that? Do they even have a video generation model? The future is here folks, join us as we build this giant slop machine in order to sell new socks to boomers.
      - breppp 1y ago
        For all of your questions Meta would need a huge research/GPU investment, so that still holds. In any case if I have to guess, we will see shallow things like the Sora app, a video generation tiktok social network and deeper integration like fake influencers, content generation that fits your preferences and ad publishers preferences a more evil incarnation of this might be a social network where you aren't sure who is real and who isn't. This will probably be a natural evolution of the need to bootstrap a social network with people and replacing these with LLMs

zamadatix 1y ago

At 1.6T market cap it's very hard to 10x or greater the company anymore doing what's in their comfort zone and they've got a lot of money to play with to find easier to grow opportunities. If Zuckerberg was convinced he could do that by selling toothpicks they'd have a go at the toothpick business. They went after the "metaverse" first, then AI. Both are just very fast growth options which happen to be tech focused because that's the only way you generate new comparable value as a company (unless you're sitting on a lot of state owned oil) in the current markets.

b112 1y ago
You missed an opportunity to use paperclips instead of toothpicks, as your example. Would be very inline with the AI angle.

breppp 1y ago

they are out for your clicks and attention minutes if OpenAI can build a "social" network of completely generated content, that can kill Meta. Even today I venture to guess that most of the engagements in their platforms is not driven by real friends, so an AI driven platform won't be too different, or it might make content generation be so easy as to make your friends engage again. Apart from it the ludicrous vision of the metaverse seems much more plausible with highly realistic world models

pandemic_region 1y ago
Sad to hear it has come to attention minutes, used to be seconds.
drexlspivey 1y ago
How do LLMs help with clicks and attention minutes? Why do they spend $100+B a year in AI capex, more than Google and Microsoft that actually rent AI compute to clients? What are they going to do with all that compute? It’s all so confusing
- breppp 1y ago
  It might be just me, but in my opinion facebook platforms are way past the "content from your friends phase", but is full of cheap peddled viral content. If that content becomes even cheaper, of higher quality and highly tailored to you, that is probably worth a lot of money, or at least worth not losing your entire company by a new competitor
  - drexlspivey 1y ago
    But practically speaking, is Meta going to be generating text or video content itself? Are they going to offer some kind of creator tools so you can use it to create video as a user and they need the compute for that? Do they even have a video generation model? The future is here folks, join us as we build this giant slop machine in order to sell new socks to boomers.
    - breppp 1y ago
      For all of your questions Meta would need a huge research/GPU investment, so that still holds. In any case if I have to guess, we will see shallow things like the Sora app, a video generation tiktok social network and deeper integration like fake influencers, content generation that fits your preferences and ad publishers preferences a more evil incarnation of this might be a social network where you aren't sure who is real and who isn't. This will probably be a natural evolution of the need to bootstrap a social network with people and replacing these with LLMs