AI and the Next Computing Platforms with Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg | Hacker News Reader

AI and the Next Computing Platforms with Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg

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23 pointsdoener7 comments

Zuckerberg has always been mad he doesn’t have a platform.

FB was king, then the App Store and phones came along and FB was no longer so central.

Then they bought Occulus to try to get a platform, but VR hasn’t taken over the world.

Then they poured vast amounts of money into The Metaverse® to try to make that their platform everyone used, but that went nowhere.

Now AI is the hot thing. So Zuckerberg is out there talking about how, essentially, others shouldn’t be able to control it (it should be open!) so he doesn’t get boxed out again.

Same old story.

Don't entirely disagree but I think "mad" is an unfair characterization and simplifies how the fascinating competitive dynamics have played out that resulted in the Llama models.

Meta as well as Amazon and MS have been strategically constrained by not owning the mobile platform and they've been pretty consistently clear about that. https://x.com/ianand/status/1753425306181116394

Like it or not, Apple's ATT move (i.e. "Ask App Not to Track") hit their revenue in real dollars and stock price significantly. Not only that, the ensuing chaos helped pave an opening for the rise of competitor TikTok:

> Meta, formerly known as Facebook, said that one setting alone cost the company an estimated $10 billion. Its stock value has plunged 70% this year. But ATT had another side effect, one that got far less attention than Meta’s troubles. Apple’s iPhone privacy setting gave TikTok a significant leg up in its fight for social media dominance. (from https://gizmodo.com/how-apple-s-ask-app-not-to-track-prompt-...)

Their savior to improve monetization in the face of ATT turned out to be AI:

> Further integration of AI helped drive Meta’s first revenue increase in three quarters, the company said on Wednesday. Reels monetization is up over 30% on Instagram and over 40% on Facebook on a quarterly basis as AI plays a larger role in the platforms. (from https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-says-ai-boost...)

So improving Reels monetization and competing with TikTok is what led Zuck to seemingly clairvoyantly purchase all those GPUs at the right time to be able to build and release Llama:

> We got into this position with Reels where we needed more GPUs to train the models...we were constrained on the infrastructure in catching up to what TikTok was doing as quickly as we wanted to. I basically looked at that and I was like “hey, we have to make sure that we're never in this situation again. So let's order enough GPUs to do what we need to do on Reels and ranking content and feed. But let's also double that.” (from https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/mark-zuckerberg)

I am curious if the AI glasses thing takes off.

I tried Google Glasses both during a demo when I worked at Google and then a few months later a friend who was an elderly woman got a pair from Google, they were anxious to try the ‘old folks demographic’ I suppose. That product creeped out people not wanting their privacy invaded in bars, restaurants, etc.

I have not been following the Facebook AI glasses project, but a question I would ask is how the privacy issues will be handled. I would suggest not having the ability to take pictures and videos, rather, feed video into an LLM and then discard the video. Make it impossible to photograph other people using AI glasses.

I think Facebook has done an OK job with the Oculus product line, and I am a happy customer, so I am trying to keep an olen mind about FB AI glasses.

I don’t get the sense that they’re in touch with reality. They seem driven by attracting investors rather than doing engineering. Show me their git repos, their board layouts, their arxiv papers.

I don't think they're supposed to be "hands-on" with the engineering. They literally hire thousands (if not more) to deal with those problems.

https://github.com/facebookresearch -- there's like 1,000ish repo's here.

When you're in the business of selling shovels it benefits you and your investors when you convince folks that there's a gold rush they're missing out on... and need your shovels to get in on it.

There are quite a few engineers who aren't convinced. They seem to recognize the benefits and the limits of the technology. And they can see how it's failing in practice due to the technical limitations: energy demand and supply, heating and cooling, economic limitations, etc.

What's interesting about these two CEOs is one is definitely interested in selling shovels, the other is interested in selling contracting services that must lease the shovels.

I think you're right though, Meta has real challenges ahead of them in terms of capacity and creating an actual product that can be monetized for the general public. It's worth mentioning that FB was doing AI long before the hype train started really rolling, and monetized it -- all behind the scenes.

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