Thats tells you a lot about whats going on and what kind of people work inside there.
They seem to be a dead man walking.
I hate seeing these comments in HN. No substance. Just saying whatever to jump into the FB hate bus.
It’s also a fair criticism of most of big tech wrt AI, and a lot of AI/ML: there’s a lot of cool-sounding R&D, but so far there are few (arguably no) resulting products.
Maybe we’re starting to see that change, maybe not. Bing/ChatGPT is promising, but ... nascent. A lot of this has echoes of the self-driving revolution.
Whenever I read techno-optimists on this site, I cannot help but think back to 2014-ish when they all predicted that there would be no truckers in 5 years and dramatic changes to infrastructure to support a wave of self-driving vehicles.
The inevitable nature of large corporations is to become bureaucratic and slow, yet many of them exist for decades without being innovative. It's sufficient to just buy out whoever is innovative in the market - Microsoft just bought into OpenAI big time. Other than incrementally developing its 40yo operating system Microsoft copies AWS, Netflix for games, Sublime Text and Macbooks while throwing some random cash at garage projects that amount to effectively nothing that can exist without subsidies (Hololens).
There's a difference between running a research lab and a product organization. I used to work in a research lab (Nokia Research). Lots of cool research. But product divisions routinely ignored what we were doing. Not invented here, not a priority, we're busy moving deck chairs around on our Titanic, etc. Very little industrial research translates into customer/product/share holder value.
Facebook, like several other big companies, pays a lot to keep some very smart people on staff. They constantly come up with new stuff that they publish about and that also result in patents. That's not the issue.
However, from there to product features is where it goes wrong. Most of Facebook's product portfolio hasn't changed substantially for quite some time. And they haven't really launched any noteworthy new stuff either. Publishing a paper doesn't really count. It's nice and it will no doubt help other companies to succeed where Facebook is clearly struggling to succeed.
Most large companies struggle with this. A lot of former industrial research labs have either disappeared entirely or became a shadow of their former selves. IBM, HP, etc. used to do lots of blue sky research. Xerox Parc was a big deal and they obviously failed to productize. But of course inspired Apple and quite a few others. It's a tough topic. I don't think many companies have figured this out.
There are positive examples of course but mostly the return on investment for open ended research in a corporate setting is not as high as it should be considering the valid research that gets published and then fails to get monetized by the companies doing the research.
OpenAI, is the smart counter move. Spin off a company, fund it, and then license back the technology. MS seems to have learned from it's past efforts in MS Research.
They are talking about actions in the last year or so.
Meta's open source projects that they own are maintained now by eager volunteers, not staff.
Anybody could see how Facebook is floundering, Instagram can see the iceberg approaching, and changing anything major in Whatsapp will piss off literally billions of people.
They've cornered themselves, so now they're reaching for literally anything that could save them. That seems reasonable as a failing company, except when every action they make affects entire markets and legitimizes trends on a very shaky basis.
And now, this meta thing... :-)
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2056928835691
https://www.gominplanet.com/blog/air-canada-the-worst-airlin...
My advice to anyone using Air Canada: upon arrival to the destination, don't waste time trying to find your suitcase on the carousel (it's not there anyway) - instead, go directly to the kiosk to complain about the lost luggage , otherwise you will have to stand in line for 2 hours. :-)
It's facial recognition.
That said, Air Canada (also mentioned in the article) is also investing in AI while their default online booking process is still quite bad. Last time I wanted to book a flight with a pet, the website told me to book the flight without pet, then make a phone call to tell them I would be taking a pet with me (and cost would then depend on destination) just like two decades ago.
So I decided to use KLM and booked my flight, with pet, all through the website without needing a phone call.
Security took me almost three hours to get through, and they had a byzantine system where once you got to the end of what you thought was the entire line, you’d turn a corner to find another long one, and that happened six times.
It basically devolved into a system where it was just a huge crowd standing around, and as peoples’ flights were about to board they’d get moved to the front.
It reminded me of the freakonomics episode where they talk about the LIFO queue: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-are-you-waiting-for/
Uh, ok, I thought all airports have already been doing this for decades? One time I got pulled aside because the scanner thought my chocolate bar was a bomb.
Cryptocurrency. Voice assistants. VR.
What else?
See the open-source code repo of Meta Research. https://github.com/facebookresearch
Companies dream of creating just one of these.
Nowhere did you say that Facebook’s innovations have to be the reason the end user uses the product, or even used by the end user at all. All you said is that they have never innovated. That is the bar. And it is clearly extremely low as Facebook has done lots of innovating with products used by developers all the time.
I guess you could say that fb created some innovations, mostly in their labs, but they are not in the business of innovation
> but they are not in the business of innovation
Who in this thread claimed they are in the business of innovation or that something is innovative only if it affects their direct customers? This entire response is a strawman, plain and simple.
Once again, your clearly defined bar is, and I quote:
> When did facebook innovate?
Stick to the bar you set and be humble when it’s clearly proven to be a dismally low bar.
As much as we try to sugarcoat it, facebook is not known as a mobileUI or languageML company
The fact that you’re continuing to double down is astounding.
Or people calling Oculus and FBAI etc as facebook innovations. They are acquisitions of existing technologies, paying the way to innovator status
But, referring back to all my previous posts, you set them at “when did Facebook innovate”.
Maybe next time you comment, you actually read what is being criticized and stick to that, rather than this strawman you keep putting up.
Even outside of AI with PyTorch, Facebook invented React and has been pervasively used by hundreds of millions of developers and billions on the web.
If neither of those are examples of Facebook's innovations on both the web and AI, then I don't know what is.
any company with tons of money is going to build some stuff thats innovative by virtue of hiring people completely irrelevant to its core product. FB is a social networking and ads company and it was not particularly innovative at that. It was not a web development house or an AI powerhouse, and it's still not (that's not where it makes its billions).
So by your own goalposts, they DID release innovations then?
> FB is a social networking and ads company and it was not particularly innovative at that.
I wonder what those psychologists and engineers who worked on the Like button with the team who built the AI that is used from that, to Ads and the social graph would say about the billions of dollars and stock value that it has made for Facebook.
Again, you set those exceeding low goalposts for your point. If not even that is an example of an innovation relevant to Facebook's business and made it billions of dollars, then perhaps nothing is.
IBM famously did this with the IBM PC. They didn’t end up holding the lead in computing, but they certainly stayed relevant for another decade while their mainframe and minicomputer competitors struggled to get into personal computing but were late to the party.
In the pop-business book “Bottom-Up Marketing,” this is given as one of the key strategies to being the leader: Play Defence.
I wouldn’t say that a company playing defence by throwing cash at every fad that comes along necessarily means they are dying or dead. It just means they know they have to have a finger in every pie, “just in case.” It’s insurance.