What is Meta’s angle with AI? They seem to be doing a lot of research but what is the end goal? Google and MSFT I understand, Meta not so much.
They are going to do everything they can to make sure no one uses the time that models and data centers are limiting factors to disrupt them.
In the same way google demonetized the application layer of the web to prevent walled gardens from blocking search.
If models and hardware become commoditized at the end of the race meta will have a complete psychographic profile of people on an individual and group level to study, and serve incredibly targeted content to.
Their only real competition in that would be someone developing a 'her' like app that takes people out of social media and into their own individual silo'ed worlds. In a lot of ways discord is the alternative world to meta's ecosystem. hyper focused invite only small communities.
I keep telling parents that Meta et al are spending the inflation-adjusted equivalent of the Manhattan project — not to defeat Japan — but to addict their child.
I think atomic power or even better drugs / medicines is actually a good analogy considering the dual use nature of the stuff that they are building. Can improve quality of life if used prudently and responsibly, or cause devastation if not.
I personally think that the population scale surveillance and behavioral manipulation infrastructure built by meta is unethical and incredibly dangerous.
Better moderation (to the extent they still care)
Generation of AI slop for the sheep to feed on
Use of AI is really core to their business, so understandable they want to build it themselves, but not so clear why they want to "open source" (weights) it other than to harm companies like OpenAI
I take it you have not tried the new Gemini models on ai studio? It does real time streaming video input and conversation you can genuinely ask it questions about what you are looking at in a conversational audio in-out way. This is basically "her"-level technology in an unpolished form, right here today.
Apple tried that and it’s crumbling. Meta/Zuckerfuck is always behind the curve.
- AR (failed)
- “metaverse” (failed)
The only thing that has kept them above water is social media and selling off user data, and that’s crumbling as well. Smaller players have been eating their lunch and the user base is aging out.
The writing is on the wall, and his "falling in line" with theb political climate speaks volumes on his effort to keep Meta afloat.
Talk to any staff+ eng at Meta in Ads and they will tell you there's a lot of low hanging fruit left. Sure the music will stop eventually (it always does) but there's no evidence that's soon.
People need to separate their hatred of Meta/Zuck from an objective analysis of the company. Meta has been and continues to be an amazing stock to own.
They were instead talking about the implications of GPDR, how they are switching to secure multiparty computation to try and side step restrictions, the looming threat of other data restrictions coming onto the scene soon internationally, the aging userbase, the concern they can't trace who is buying what via ads anymore (i.e. did that sneaker ad result in a Nike purchase), etc. They either didn't have any low hanging fruit left, or were certainly tight lipped about it.
This is an incredibly generous way to admit that Meta failed their pivot to VR and they will probably never recoup the tens of billions of dollars that was spent on it.
Will those walls keep AI-generated content out, or will they keep the people outside from accessing the AI-generated content in the garden?
If it's the first, somebody should tell them the slop's already up to their navels and they probably shouldn't be helping people generate more of it.
If it's the second, then the models that supply the content to the garden must have some kind of uniqueness/value, because otherwise you could get identical content from anywhere.
This is a genuine question, because I don't understand the logic here.
(I had assumed it was more like hardware companies funding open source way back when - Commoditize Your Complement).
One would imagine Meta can readily quantify how much AI-generated content is consumed across its properties.
Meta's play is simple: more engagement means more money for Meta, and this can be done by "slop" as you called it, or alternatively expanding the audience of high quality human-generated content, say via translation. A funny video in Albanian is probably still very funny after being translated to English.
Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified a major pattern in technology business & economics: the pattern of “commoditizing your complement”, an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a chokepoint or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist. No matter how valuable the original may be and how much one could charge for it, it can be more valuable to make it free if it increases profits elsewhere. A classic example is the commodification of PC hardware by the Microsoft OS monopoly, to the detriment of IBM & benefit of MS.
This pattern explains many otherwise odd or apparently self-sabotaging ventures by large tech companies into apparently irrelevant fields, such as the high rate of releasing open-source contributions by many Internet companies or the intrusion of advertising companies into smartphone manufacturing & web browser development & statistical software & fiber-optic networks & municipal WiFi & radio spectrum auctions & DNS (Google): they are pre-emptive attempts to commodify another company elsewhere in the stack, or defenses against it being done to them.
If their business remains a shitty declining buggy 20-year-old Facebook and a 10+year-old Instagram app, but they contribute to advancing open source models similar to how they did with React, I'll consider that a net win though.
Arguably this would be kind of rational behaviour for them even if they thought that LLM stuff had a low chance of being the next thing; they have lots and lots of money, and lots of revenue, so one strategy would be just to latch on to every new fad, and then if one is a real thing they don't get left behind (and if it's not, well, they can afford it).
My suspicion is that this is where most Big Tech interest in LLMs comes from; it's essentially risk management.
These and others are just side benefits or some form of "greenwashing". Meta's main (and only) business is advertisement. They failed to capitalize on everything else.
People who think Meta's main business focus is Facebook and Instagram don't pay attention.
Also, the business doesn't need to be reinvigorated. It is booming and they are investing in places to stack more gains down the road & cement current status, which investors like to see. Many big techs right now are flailing and trying to artificially keep profits up by slashing costs only and not increasing revenue, which dents innovation. Meta is managing to sink money into AR/VR AND AI while seeing big revenue growth.
Not that I'm complaining about their open-weights model releases destroying openai's moat... but still.
I think this is it. I'm kicking myself for not going harder, but I was very much into LLMs/ML back in 2019, had I not given up I might have a startup right now.
I'd need like 70k and a minimum of 6 months, but I still have a few ideas for AI driven startups.
With Meta I can’t think of a single existing vertical where AI would be desirable. Maybe Quest