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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

My money has been on Meta for AGI since they started training people to label data for them (tag your friends!)

Between all their properties they have more instrumentation on humans, collecting human behavior trajectories and state action pairs transfer learning and inverse RL than anyone - and it’s not even a close second

Specifically and critically I think they likely have the largest egocentric multimodal labeled dataset collection platform from their meta quest and ray ban glasses products

Apple is the only group that will likely beat them to egocentric data collection at scale but I expect Meta to catch up quickly once people are used to it socially

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In 2007 or 2008 or so, when I saw that they had implemented a feature that let people tag you in photos without permission, I assumed it was to gather data for identifying people with AI at some future date (albeit based on my rather different understanding of AI at the time). So, I deleted my account: FB didn't provide me any value, and had introduced an unknown future risk by taking away control of my identity.

Ever since then, I've asked friends and family not to upload pictures of me to Facebook, with the natural amount of awkwardness and eye-rolling that request evoked.

I assume my friends continued to add me to Facebook without telling me about it, just as I assume that deleting my Facebook account did not actually remove me as a uniquely identified individual in their system. But, what am I supposed to do, just silently assent? Turns out, we're not the product, we're further back on the chain. We're more like ingredients that can be used and reused to create an infinite variety of different products.

> Ever since then, I've asked friends and family not to upload pictures of me to Facebook, with the natural amount of awkwardness and eye-rolling that request evoked.

In the future, systems will probably infer what you look like based on connections. DNA relatives, etc.

How accurate do you expect that to me? If I tell you two people have children how well do you think you can predict what that child looks like?

1. With the child's complete DNA or key markers, I bet we'll eventually have algorithms for DNA -> adult phenotype

2. With only parental or relative DNA, if we are able to gather an enormous amount of extra information -- social group, gym use, hobbies, dating circles (mate selection probably yields a huge amount of info!), profession, fashion purchase activity, etc. -- then I bet we can get pretty reasonable confidence intervals on a lot of physical characteristics. Height, eye color, eye distance, face shape, lip thickness, etc. etc. Perhaps even elements such as voice timbre, etc.

If we had their familial phenotypes, photos and phenotypes of all a person's dating history, then I bet that lets us cut the search space down tremendously. If we add music listening habits and hobbies, I bet we'd also be able to cut it down.

I'm hypothesizing that physical appearance might correlate from behaviors, social graph information, and limited DNA information. I have nothing to show for that, however. (I would love to read literature on this topic.)

I'd imagine that constructing such a predictive model would require an enormous amount of data. Facebook + 23andme could probably pull it off.

I have always felt Ebay dropped the ball on this with untold amounts of custom, varying quality photos with tons of metadata added by users. Presumably they are working on using this, but I haven't seen anything from them for it.

I would assume that stuff can be scraped though. How much would it cost to set up a bot farm that scrapes ebay live?

Same with Amazon and Aliexpress and Facebook marketplace.

They (we) were working on that more than 15 years ago with mallet library. Unfortunately some of the drawbacks of public companies are they too focused on the current quarter and all effort is towards increasing EPS

You are completely overlooking a few Chinese companies that have been collecting data online and IRL from a population as large (or larger) than the active users on FB.

There are >3 billion active meta users. What Chinese companies have more users than this? From a quick search tik tok has 1/3 of that

oh you're right, I had overestimated WeChat.. and QQ by a lot. TIL

how many of those FB and Insta accounts are bots? not zero, but probably not a billion, either

The quality of the data matters a lot. Textbooks, scientific papers, etc… are substantially better for training smart and capable LLMs than random social chit-chat.

Google and Microsoft both have a lot of corporate info, including source repositories they can legally use.

Google has Google Books, Maps, and YouTube.

Microsoft has Azure, GitHub, LinkedIn, etc…

Facebook has… what? Instagram? Your crazy aunt screaming about her conspiracy of the week?

Not to mention bot spam. Google and Microsoft have a better idea of their data's provenance than Meta or Reddit.

> largest egocentric multimodal labeled dataset collection platform

I'm not in the field, can you explain what you mean by this?

Example egocentric data set: https://ego4d-data.org/

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