Mark Zuckerberg abandons metaverse as shiny new toy appears
futurism.com
futurism.com
My own understanding has always been that Facebook cares not one jot about the content of the messages; it's the metadata (i.e. the social network and its patterns of interaction) that's valuable. (Of course that may change, now.)
Sure, if you want to use a terrible user interface. An app or website can provide the same thing much faster.
If I could type a few vague sentences into a box describing what I want, and then have it reliably converted into an unambiguous summary for me to adjust or approve, that would be amazing:
"I would like a gallon of lactose free milk, a pound of fresh chicken breast, a dozen eggs that are on sale, and a bag of frozen hash browns. I need it by 4:30."
5 seconds later up pops a website with a shopping list with product photos, an estimated delivery time with appropriate fee, and an order button linked to Google Pay.
I order groceries online a lot. My personal opinion about why this UX wouldn’t work well is that people want to feel like they made an optimal choice. Like when you go to the store to buy an apple, do you just pick the first one? Or do you pick the organic variety that looks freshest? Or maybe you go in for an apple buy decide to get grapes because they look better. There are a few staples I always buy, but generally my grocery purchases are more deliberate. From what I see at the store, many people exhibit such behavior.
When I'm outsourcing a chore, I'm doing it to exchange money for time and effort. I would prefer to be able to abstract away the details, and trust that my request will be satisfied. In the current UX, I have to specifically request a tub of "Ben and Jerry's Extra Choco Choo Choo Churn", then be disappointed when the desperate minimum-wage worker somehow buys a version with almond milk because it was the closest one in stock. All I wanted was "a $5 pint of chocolate ice cream" to cheer up my depressed wife, and she's allergic to almonds...
Perhaps an LLM could provide that level of abstraction to customers, while reliably compiling it down to a sufficiently concrete list of options for a worker to retrieve. The abstraction would likely improve the UX, as the workers would have more freedom to choose compatible products rather than arbitrarily specific ones. It would be closer to a personal shopper experience virtually built on top of commodity labor, which seems like the whole goal of these grocery services.
This strikes at the heart of the issue. The criteria you’ve placed on the ramen is actually pretty complicated, and yet it is simpler than the criteria many use to select produce, dairy, and meat. Needing to meticulously articulate criteria for the 100+ items purchased every month would be a pain. Items also have interdependencies, e.g. I can only afford the fancy yogurt if I got a deal on something else, and context dependent, e.g. I want to spend more on chicken for the fancy dinner, and less for a weeknight meal.
Of course, these criteria are theoretically learnable by an LLM, but extracting the prerequisite information is hard. So much context exists in your mind. For instance, just looking at your ramen purchase history, do buy chicken ramen over beef ramen because you like chicken better, or is it because you actively dislike beef? It’s hard to say without your explicit input. If every purchasing decision requires explicit input, it seems better to cut out the LLM.
Not to be rude but to highlight my point, why are you trying to infer my ramen flavor preferences from my purchase history? I already explicitly said that I am allergic to beef. That's the whole point. It takes practically no effort for a literate human to speak or write down the criteria that are important to them. It is significantly harder for a computer to correctly interpret it, but that's why it seems like an LLM could help.
On the other hand, the physical store has often been out of certain items over the last couple of years, so I don't think the app is entirely to blame here..
When I do see a worker, they always genuinely seem to be trying their best to find the right thing. I was at a Walgreens at 10pm a couple nights ago, and a poor guy who barely spoke english desperately asked me whether the bag of charcoal briquettes he was holding matched the listing on his phone.
That is why I do not have Whatsapp, Messengar or Insta in the first place. Using them through web browser is not good experience as well.
Alexa bugs me everyday to do voice shopping with it, i would be suprised if any significant number of people are voice shopping on alexa.
I also think most ppl don't want to type in a whole bunch of sentences on their phone either.
I’m feeling like one of those guys in Japan who attacks the customer service robot in the department store—I loath the voice recognition systems behind phone systems for major business (banks, energy suppliers, telcos). I routinely mash #1 until I get to touch tone. I either want to pay a bill or I have a problem the automated system can’t solve—chat bots waste my time & I don’t like talking to friendly robots.
I guess some people are only using their phone and not a website first, in which case a chatbot lets you navigate a much wider set of options by phone. I get it.
Still hasn’t changed my feeling that my mobile phone bot is keeping me chatting just to further train their itself and waste my time. I’m Nexus 1, help me grow as a chatbot.
I think though that the tech won’t exist properly till display tech catches up and can give you 10 times more than the Quest 2 gives in a pair of standard eyeglasses. I think we are two decades off still, so all of Meta’s pioneering efforts are way early.
A pivot into AI and spinning off the VR division would make investors very happy and probably be the best move for the company.
I just watched Dan Harmon's new doc on Decentraland[0] and he raises some really good points about the functional impedance that exists in virtual worlds alongside of all of the grifting that currently exists. Grifting aside, so many applications of VR just don't make sense as a direct virtual representation of the world, at that starts with our inner ear our ability to process visual motion without actually moving.
He shows how these virtual storefronts that your character can walk through are much less efficient at actually allowing you to transact as opposed to a search page on an e-commerce site.
I think it's easy to have romantic visions of how a VR world will look in the future. But if it's driven primarily by profit, as all of the most mainstream attempts have so far, it's going to be an empty crypto hell.
yeah but that would require a vision of something new and AI-based that is actually relevant to the users, and they seem to have trouble in that department.
Apple knows how to work within hardware limitations to give users a smooth experience. Like the first gen iPhone, which had perfect lag-free scrolling even if the actual content took many seconds to load.
An earth-spanning Metaverse controlled by countless human engineers (and countless managers) or LLM/AI (where tons and tons of the dirty work within the metaverse is off-loaded to sophisticated bots)?
I'd rather be interacting in the real world - assisted by smart tech - to make my real life easier/better. This means LLM/AI. There's real value here (if done right...).
The metaverse, for a long time, is still going to feel like gaming 2.0. Just another form of entertainment.
If the article is valid, it's a good move by Zuckerberg.
These limitations have been known for decades as every VR attempt has run into them. Oculus and The Virtual Boy ran into the exact same problems.
I’m sure someone warned the Meta teams of this and they assumed they’d crack this intractable problem with one weird trick, but they didn’t, and probably nobody will. Certainly not while they’re trying to anyway.
Sometimes it's bought as a gift or because they want another one, but I've also seen people break cheap products and then order the same one as if they're supposed to be disposable. (There's the "boots" theory of economic inequality again)
I've been making a living with many of the tools and techniques from prior to the original "AI Winter" -- but the companies that produced them and that were promising expert systems and other forms of knowledge engineering have very few survivors.
When Meta, which is basically dying advertising company, is promising AI as it's core innovation center, we know that it's a shibboleth for signaling some participation in a notional future economy.