Meta introduces Segment Anything Model 2
ai.meta.com
ai.meta.com
I'm sure this, LLAMA and the other projects that they have will help drive up new creations, companies and progress.
I'm also sure that this kind of openly sharing code and research will drive up business value for them. It may be hard to say right now what it is, but I'm sure it will.
That's the difference of a founder-led company vs. market led. Google is mostly concerned on short-term goals so they don't report a single bad quarter or has too high CAPEX on a project without profit on its sight (like VR).
Once Meta finds the killer app for VR, all the other companies will be so many years behind that they will need to buy software from Meta or not take any market share in this new space. Similar to what happened about AI chips and Nvidia. Nobody was investing enough on it.
They are behind in productization of the research. So far they seem to do the minimal effort from the trained model to product.
1. how many miles does waymo drive compared to competition?
2. how many people use waymo versus competition?
3. how many miles of road does waymo work on?
the answer to all three is thousands of times less than Tesla's FSD, which granted is not free of disengagements and still supervised. But then you have to ask what consumers want:
1. self driving that needs intervention once every few hundred miles and works anywhere
2. self driving that works only in low volume and predictable traffic, in a small section of a single city, sometimes still gets stuck and blocks intersections, breaks as soon as the road conditions change, but is entirely hands off
i think most people want #1, and the usage stats agree with that
I am not even saying this as some Tesla FSD hater, I used it a ton over the years and am generally happy with it. But claiming that, in its current state, it has a lead over Waymo is a bit questionable.
FSD is really, really close. The recent 12.5 software is a big step forward for them, and their rate of improvement is really, really fast these days.
i appreciate the level headed discussion
However, I can still see someone claiming that Waymo might have an edge in some form as a fair take, given they indeed have something that FSD, at the moment, doesn’t (which is full operation with no driver). Whether that is a viable long-term approach compared to FSD (or whether it is hitting the ceiling that FSD doesn’t have) is a solid point though.
Situation is the same on YouTube where Google have insane market monopoly, but still depreoritize actual creators who made their platform successful to appeal to brands and push more and more ads. Demonetization of everything ever slightly controversial. Somehow Google index whole internet 100 times a day, their OS run on majority of smartphones, their browser is monopoly, they know everything about everyone, but can't even filter spam efficiently.
I never liked or used Facebook / Instagram much, but at least Meta core products are not deteriorating at same insane pace Google products are. I can still use WhatsApp daily without ads being fed down my throat.
If you have a website, all the spam and AI garbage filling up Google's search results can make it very hard for people to find your website using Google. Don't worry though, because you can pay Google to fix the problem Google has made for you, in fact, you might increasingly feel like you need to pay Google to fix the problem they're causing you or people won't be able to find your website at all. You can try to tell people your domain name, but Google has trained the pubic to search from the address bar and they've mostly forgotten what a URL even is.
That honestly sounds like revisionism to fit your narrative. Occam's razor would decree that the degradation simply came through SEO, and it's inverse correlation of quality (SEO means essentially pushing terrible content higher for advertising revenue)
It most likely wasn't Google's aim to reduce their search quality, it was just a side effect of them becoming too successful, that it became unreasonably profitable to game the system
Cherry on top for Google: Due to the sheer "volume" of content this loop ended up creating, it posed a larger moat for any new entrants into the search market thus strengthening their monopoly position.
There will be a subsequent tipping point: Where due to the sheer volume of generated/spammed/seo crap on the internet, the volume of "real" content will be so small that it'll become within reach of being indexable again by smaller players. We're already seeing this to some extent, and it'll only get better.
Will it be discoverable, though?
They had the power to not succumb to "SEO" content spam, but this wouldn't improve their ads revenue baseline. Pushing their own services and centralised internet on other hand...
> That's the difference of a founder-led company vs. market led.
Zuckerberg is the most unimaginative CEOs of the them all. Meta never had a single original product ( save for portal device). All their products are acquisitions. Meta is phenomenally bad at innovation.
Zuckerberg seems to have pulled some sort PR campaign to cleanup his image. But we all know FB is still a shady company run by a shady man, nothing has changed in its rotten core. It was fined billions of dollars just this week by Texas.
Meta is far from a "founder led company" . All the founders of the apps he buys leave immediately and are in turn run by managment consultant types like Adam Mosseri .
> Once Meta finds the killer app for VR
Sad to see that ppl are still buying into metaverse hailmary zuckerburg scammed to convince markets that meta is still an innovative company amid slowing user growth. I still don't understand how metaverse fraud pulled by zuckerberg wasn't some sort of SEC violation.
Same thing for AR/VR, they can afford to invest massively in different plans, use cases and form factors. Fitness, work, social, metaverse, gaming, hardware... It's a collection of bets and in this day an age, one great product-market fit can scale into billions of revenue.
In a recent interview Zuck stated that he was surprised by how well the RayBans worked. It's also a great synergy with this new wave of AIs. Because they invested so much they might well get ahead in this race
Sure, none of this research might be obviously contributing to their products in a share market sense, but it's still innovation which is contributing to the (entirely separate to their "product") AI research community.
only till market tolerates it . they will shut it down once patience runs out like they did with metaverse nonsense
Are they really so different?
Facebook throws things at the wall, even expensive things without a clear path to profitability, such as Llama.
Google throws things at the wall, even expensive things without a clear path to profitability, such as waymo, google glass, google fiber, stadia, and everything on https://killedbygoogle.com
Facebook made a big companywide re-orientation to deliver a vision that flopped - the metaverse.
Google made a big companywide re-orientation to deliver a vision that flopped - google plus.
Facebook renamed themselves to Meta. Google renamed themselves to Alphabet.
Facebook has an AI research division founded by a French-American computer science professor and Turing award winner. Google has an AI research division founded by a British-Canadian computer science professor and Turing award winner.
Facebook released a widely used open source Python ML library with a camelcase name, PyTorch. Google released a widely used open source Python ML library with a camelcase name, TensorFlow.
Perhaps they're following the same playbook, it's just luck that Facebook's gambles paid off recently.
Also you mixed up tensorflow and pytorch.
It really depends on the founder. Some are very unhappy to see the stock price drop even if they don’t really need the money this second.
Also, it’s a mixed bag. I personally think Zuck is wrong on VR but right on AI.
The killer app for VR is porn.
The stream isn't controlled by Zuck, it's controlled by AI, an AI trained to "give the people whatever they want" to maximise engagement. The more deep learning you put into a product, the harder it is to directly control the output.
Plus, it showed me what I want so much I completely left the platform.
The laziest possible excuse, one rung below "just following orders" even: the "it wasn't me, it was the machine I built" defence.
They don't care about the output
The same holds true for Google. It's not that Facebook could design and build social networking sites that aren't terrible for the health or their users and society, or that Google could build a better search engine/search engine UI. They absolutely can, but that's less profitable.
If facebook can't 'control' the output because of AI or whatever as an argument, thats facebook specific.
Can google control its output? Yes for censoring etc. but Google shows you external self indexed and self analyzed content, Facebook doesn't do that. It has logged in users using their tools to create content and Facebook uses their internal algo to show whatever they want to you.
I like that it's taken as a premise that billionaires do have some kind of superhuman vision, that it's not even a matter of "if" but "when" Zuck's VR gamble pays off.
But for consumers Meta seems to have a lead indeed...
I really dont want to have any dependencies in my workflow on Google products and features because they'll surely break them.
> Sorry, I can't access your Google Drive files. You'll need to upload the file or describe the content of the pages to me.
Any example of prompt you using that is working for you?
When they initially moved from Bard to Gemini nothing worked for sure, but with your trick it does work.
Also find out right now that it can actually work if you ask to look for a file on Google Drive and within the same command ask to do something to specific file.
Thank you.
While Meta excels at chatbot of the day
The metaverse was a huge waste of money.
Their AI Character thing is weird.
They cater to a lot of small businesses, thats definitly helping them.
But besides that? They have very little to do what Google, Microsoft, Apple and co are actually doing.
It's probably less algorithmic and more arbitrary.
That is nothing like the list I would have seen 15 years ago when I first joined in 2009. Then again I don't miss the "101 ways to not need sleep and work all night on your startup" posts.
Really seems to have shifted away from anything entrepreneurship or running your own business, the mantle it took over from Joel's "Business of Software" forum. Wonder where that discussion's all gone.
Plus I just got a reminder how rubbish Google is right now and how vulnerable they are to having their lunch eaten. I couldn't remember what Joel Spolsky's foum was called, and it kept returning absolute crap for various search terms that would have instantly worked 5 years ago.
God, I sound like a grumpy old man, but the internet has turned shite. Or at least how I consume it has.
Regardless of how actually successful their attempts at VR and AI end up they already going to have some place in history for that.
Especially so in database technology: rocksdb, zstd compression, presto, Cassandra, Hive, Velox (this one’s new) are all Meta’s doing.
And those are just the popular ones, there’s way more (database-related) projects they open sourced that didn’t get too popular!
So all in all, as much as I’m happy to complain about them as a company, they’ve always been huge contributors to the open-source ecosystem.
AI research is different though. Everyone else decided against open source and started to dig their own moats justifying it with different kind of BS.
Yet Facebook / Meta has decided to be on side of open innovations.
I got a quest 3 about months ago and it's a world of difference from where the form factor was at in the past. It's to the point now where it's actually better for certain use cases than other alternatives and hence sees some daily use from me.
If the trend continues to get better and hardware that's smaller, lighter, more comfortable, and generally more useful, then I do see it hitting mass adoption at some point.
I think the demo Zuck did with Lex on his podcast where they did the podcast in VR using their avatars was pretty neat and the point where that is commercially available and as easy to use as a smartphone, it's a no brainer that it'll sell well.
What Google trying to do other than maintain their ad revenue? IDK.
The Roto Brush in After Effects is similar, but its quality has always been lacking and it takes forever to process.
What are possible scenarios?
1) Advertisers build tracking systems in supermarkets and malls and Facebook sells them the profiles of the victims.
2) Facebook is getting people hooked on the "free" models but will later release a better and fully closed model with tracking software so advertisers have to purchase both profiles and the software.
3) Facebook releases the model in order to create goodwill among (a subset of) the developer population and normalize tracking. The subset of developers will also act as useful idiots in the EU and promote tracking and corporate power.
Segmentation is helpful in creative applications, think of video editors that can segment the objects in the video and replace the background etc. Green screen type of thing.
If you want to look for something behind what Facebook doing now then it's pretty clear they damaging a moat of their competitors like Google and Microsoft (AI.com).
Meta competitors dump shitloads of money on GPUs and running their cloud AIs. When Meta releasing open models in wild where everyone and their cat can run them it's only make this arm race more expensive for proprietary AI offerings.
Tracking of everything via live camera vision