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It’s still hard to create something successful. Remember that Mark Zuckerberg has had “AGI” for over a decade in the form of tens of thousands of human softwar
by qgin 9mo ago
It’s still hard to create something successful.
Remember that Mark Zuckerberg has had “AGI” for over a decade in the form of tens of thousands of human software engineers and Facebook still has barely been able to create a new successful product on their own without acquiring it from a smaller company.
- KaiserPro 9mo agoFacebook cannot make products, its that simple.
- epolanski 9mo agoOculus?
- raw_anon_1111 9mo agoThat division is losing billions a year. I wouldn’t call it a success
- toast0 9mo agoAcquired
- KaiserPro 9mo agoI worked for oculus, well reality labs. Lots of talented people, and decent hardware, once the stupid politics was overcome. But. In all the time I worked there, we never managed to get "join my friends" feature get made. Trying to join your friends in a game was so fucking hard. You'd think being a social company, who's whole point is connecting people, this would be the first feature. But no. Threads is the only product they have launched in the last 5 years that anything close to successful. Even then it only launched because management ignored it, let them get an MVP out the door before swelling the size of the team from ~8(?) to >>2k The time to fun was also waaay too high. it got better towards the end, but in 2020-2023 it would take ages to log in, update, load, get kicked out, reboot and then join.
- utopiah 9mo agoDid they make though or did they buy? What did they actually buy that wasn't already done at Valve?
- swiftcoder 9mo agoOculus was shipping hardware/software before the Facebook acquisition, and proceeded to slowly bleed out post-acquisition. We shipped a few decent VR headsets in the middle there (Quest 1, 2 and 2s/3), but most of the other initiatives within Meta's reality labs withered on the corporate vine...
- jokethrowaway 9mo agoOr Google Large companies struggle to launch anything due to their staff size. They're as inefficient as a government
- GeorgeOldfield 9mo agohow is apple, overall, so good at this?
- scotty79 9mo agoIs it though?
- ranger_danger 9mo agoTheir revenue last year was 400 billion dollars... you tell us.
- scotty79 9mo agoThey are still milking the product they launched 20 years ago, doing slight periodic updates to match innovations of others with few years delay. They are about as good at making new products as Google and Facebook.
- ranger_danger 9mo agoI'd say it depends on your definition of "good", since the revenue seems to suggest they're doing something most people agree with.
- bloppe 9mo agoBy that logic, the online scam industry is shipping the best products of all time. By some estimates they make over a trillion a year.
- robofanatic 9mo ago> Mark Zuckerberg has had “AGI” for over a decade in the form of tens of thousands of human software engineers This makes me think that companies like Open AI, Anthropic etc are simply new types of body shoppers. body shoppers don’t have their own products they just supply talent to help other companies make products and services.
- utopiah 9mo agoMechanical Turk at scale.
- robofanatic 9mo agoBody shoppers on steroids
- port11 9mo agoMeTAS, ironic since quite some AI companies ended up in the news for using humans when they claimed it was AI.
- robofanatic 9mo agoAnd a lot of companies call themselves “AI companies” because their developers use copilot to generate code.
- port11 9mo agoIt’s hilarious how many apps for parents now have AI. Like, couldn’t you figure out how to calculate a mean and weight quantiles, need an LLM for that?
- bee_rider 9mo agoAs much as Facebook was a silly and poorly coded site at the time, Zuck seemed to do better in like 2007 when it was pretty small. I wonder if increasing the capabilities of somebody who still has ideas left and isn’t burdened by a bloated organization is the real benefit here.
- swiftcoder 9mo agoSuccessful people also tend to overestimate what portion of that success was down to timing/luck. Zuck had a lot of early-mover advantage in the social media space (especially in the university demographic Facebook started out in). A lot of his later ventures have been trying to break into markets that are already crowded by more established players, and that's just a lot harder to execute on.
- scotty79 9mo agoDid you mean "underestimate"?
- swiftcoder 9mo agoYes, yes I did
- ares623 9mo agoThat’s an interesting thought. Thanks.
- pendenthistory 9mo agoDamn, that is an interesting point