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Comment by lanthissa | Hacker News Reader

Meta believes the dollars at the end of the AI race will be in walled gardens and prop data, not data centers and models.

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.

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> 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

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.

Her is about a lot more than just asking questions in pure audio. ChatGPT has also had this since for a little while.

Not really. Toss a scheduler in and some RAG to remember conversational stuff and that's about it.

ChatGPT has been doing this for ages. Is the Gemini version drastically different or something?

Gemini is capable of video - you can point your phone camera and talk about something you show Gemini in real world. My ChatGPT app can do just audio conversation.

Chatgpt can do that as well.

OpenAI had demoed it some half a year ago, but access since then was limited. I got access to it just last week (via ChatGPT app). Since I'm in Poland, I kind of assumed US users had this for at least a month, but maybe they roll out their features by different criteria than just geography.

> Meta believes the dollars at the end of the AI race will be in walled gardens

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).

> 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.

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.

> walled gardens

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.

Yeah, their stock is WAY over inflated. I know their data wells are drying up fast. The long bets aren't working out. The AI stuff is neat, and certainly disruptive, but it isn't a paying bet.

The writing is on the wall, and his "falling in line" with theb political climate speaks volumes on his effort to keep Meta afloat.

What are you talking about? Insane YoY rev growth. Still on a hockey stick growth curve. Lower PE than Apple. Best FCF in the biz. Well positioned to take over VR if it becomes a thing. WhatsApp is ripe for monetization.

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.

I actually did.

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.

> Well positioned to take over VR if it becomes a thing.

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.

I was the biggest meta naysayer given they've never realeased an original product till date. But there is no denying that they have money tree in the ads business.

so in other words, "better targeting"? that's it?

Has Meta done anything else?

In the same way that an atomic bomb is “just” a better bomb.

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.

If you know how these algorithms work, and you can be intentional about what you want, seeding with a few well thought out examples, and curating recommendations; they can be quite useful.

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.

Is something like automated personalized content creation (for ads) better targeting? Or is it qualitatively different?

I personally think that the population scale surveillance and behavioral manipulation infrastructure built by meta is unethical and incredibly dangerous.

Better targetting

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

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