OpenAI is building a social network?
theverge.com
theverge.com
It's awesome to see the amazing value for society being created by big tech these days.
As PoC I’d say look at the subreddit SubSimulatorGPT2
www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2
If this industry didn't pay so well, I would've been gone years ago. I'm lucky to work in a job that I think is ethical and improving the world, but it's so goddamn embarrassing to even be in the same room as the AI and blockchain types and the ad hucksters.
To quote the young'uns, we are so cooked.
Hey we can't ALL have the same plan, man! The tech oligarchs that own all of society's wealth will only need so much bespoke furniture!
More seriously, my plan had been to build a decent savings and go work for the USPS or the local public transit company, supplemented with savings interest and maybe some woodworking income. But then the 2024 election happened so who fucking knows anymore.
The point is to not owe people money so that you are self sufficient and not need to make money.
> Or buy with friends or family.
yeah, but i don't like people. /s
Got to find that perfect plot of land that has water, some trees for wood, some land that can be farmed and hopefully a clear sky to the south for solar. Oh, and it's gonna need to be far enough from a city so my telescope can finally be used the way it was meant.
Trouble is, if you become self-sufficient the government will soon swoop in and try to take a piece of the pie, and now you're back to owing people money again.
The ideal is to owe so much money that you become "too big to fail". Then you get all the benefits of being self-sufficient, but with nothing on paper to share.
Those are very honest and useful jobs for society. More than being paid $250,000 a year to design the next startup frontend by copy-pasting some template
I'm currently a "woodworker" in suburban Houston, but usually only average $500-ish per month (heavily loaded toward a couple of times of year - Mid Spring, Back to School, Christmas).
1: https://www.icloud.com/photos/#/icloudlinks/08c7DUB5txbSRiCs...
1994-1998 – Don't give out any personal information online.
1998-2004 – Well, maybe just don't give out your real name.
2004-2010 – Never mind. Your full name is fine. Just stay away from sharing racy or compromising photos.
2010-2016 – Actually, the photos are okay as long as your "bathing suit area" remains modest.
2016-2020 – On second thought, bare all if you wish. But, please, don't spread misinformation.
2020-2025 – Ugh, fine. Whatever you do, do not share your exact GPS coordinates!
That's the root of the problem. Intelligent and want to live nicely? Then have your mind exploited for profit! Have morals? Compromise on them and get paid.
I know someone who works for a large gaming company who told me upon hearing a friend of mine was entertaining a position at a Musk company told me "your friend lacks a moral compass to work for that man." I reminded them they work for a company who was fined half a billion dollars for willfully exploiting children. They did not take that well.
There's a list of 20-ish large companies we univerally agree are evil and openly bash all the time, but the reality is 95% of the industry is at best doing absolutely meaningless work, and at worst work that's deeply negative for the world.
Good riddance. Humanity is hell.
Social media's always been about giving people whatever makes them come back to the site, no matter how unethical. If an army of fake fans makes me think I have an army of real fans and keep posting for attention from my fans, they will totally do that. Unless it's illegal.
[0] https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/07/the-water-challenge-...
Closed systems are much more water-efficient, and are more common in cooler climates.
https://engineeringprompts.substack.com/p/does-chatgpt-use-1...
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/12/generative-ai-the-powe...
Even better, soon none of us will have to use social media at all, our AI bots will do it for us. Then we will finally find peace.
If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and you wouldn't even be considering it... unless you knew you weren't about to shortly offer AGI.
I’m not a big fan of OpenAI but this seems a little unfair. They have (or at least had) a pretty kick ass product. Great brand value too.
Death-knell? Maybe… but I wouldn’t read into it. I’d be looking more at their key employees leaving. That’s what kills companies.
- Their brand value is terrible. Many people loathe AI for what it's going to do for jobs, and the people who like it are just as happy to use CoPilot or Cursor or Gemini. Frontier models are mostly fungible to consumers. No one is brand-loyal to OpenAI.
- Many key employees have already left or been forced out.
It might not be the best but people of whom you'd have never thought that they would use it, are using it. Many non technical people in my circle are all over it and they have never even heard of Claude. They also wouldn't understand why people would loathe AI because they simply don't understand those reasons.
But I'd be stupid not to use it. It has made boilerplate work so much easier. It's even added an interesting element where I use it to brain storm.
Even most haters will end up using it.
I think eventually people will realize it's not replacing anyone directly and is really just a productivity multiplier. People were worried that email would remove jobs from the economy too.
I'm not convinced our general AIs are going to get much better than they are now. It feels like we're we are at with mobile phones.
And it did. Together with other technology, but yes:
https://archive.is/20200118212150/https://www.wsj.com/articl...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-vanishing-executive-assista...
Sam Altman is incredibly popular with young people on TikTok. He cured homework - mostly for free - and has a nice haircut. Videos of him driving his McLaren have comment sections in near total agreement that he deserves it.
People argue about the damage COVID lockdowns did to education, but surely we're staring down the barrel of a bigger problem where people can go through school without ever having to think or work for themselves.
In the worst case he's poisoned an entire generation. If ChatGPT doctors, architects and engineers are anything like ChatGPT "vibe-coders" we're fucked.
If you're doing deep deals with MSFT you're going to be strongly discouraged from using Gemini.
Counter-Counterpoint, I still feel investors priced in a bit more than that. Yahoo! Had major buy in as well and AGI believers were selling investors not just on the next Unicorn, but rather the next industry, AGI not being merely a Google in the 90s, but rather all of the internet and what that would become over the decades to this day. Anything less than delivering that, is not exactly what a large part of investors bought. But then again, any bubble has to burst someday.
Even if you believe all that to be true, it in no way contradicts what you quoted or makes it unfair. Having a kick ass product and good brand awareness in no way correlates to being close to AGI.
There has never been an AGI, and there's no clear path to get there. And no, LLMs are not bringing us any closer to a real AGI, no matter how much Sam Altman wants to try to redefine what "AGI" means so that he can claim he has it.
The difference between AGI funding and fusion funding is the people hawking AGI are better liars and the people funding are far more gullible than the people trying to make fusion power a reality.
We already know that computation has grown exponentially in scale and cost, for decades. With breakthrough software tech showing up reliably as it harnesses greater computational power, even if unpredictably and sparsely.
If we view AI across decades, it has reliably improved. Even through its “winters”. It just took time to hit thresholds of usefulness making relatively smooth progress look very random from a consumers point of view.
As computational power grows, and current models become more efficient, the hardware overhang for the next major step is growing rapidly.
That just hasn’t been the case for fusion.
Wait for it
Also, I don't think Sama thinks like a typical large org managers. OpenAI has enough money to have all sorts of products/labs that are startup like. No reason to standby waiting for the research work.
OpenAI doesn't have enough money to even run ChatGPT in perpetuity, so building internal moonshots is an irresponsible waste of investor funds.
xAI isn't allowing people to use the Twitter feed to train AI
Google is keeping it's properties for Gemini
Microsoft, who presumably could let OpenAI use it's data fields appears (publicly at least) to be in a love/hate relationship with OpenAI these days.
So you plant a meadow of tasty human interaction morsels to get humans to sit around and munch on them while you hook up your milking machine to their data teats and start sucking data.
Rather than directly admit fault they'll regularly respond in subtle (moreso o3) to not so subtle roundabout ways that deflect blame rather than admit direct fault, even when it's an inarguable factual error about even conceptually non-heated things like API methods.
It's an annoying behavior of their models and in complete contrast to say Anthropic's Claude which ime will immediately and directly admit to things it had responded incorrectly about when the user mentions it (perhaps too eagerly).
I have wondered if this is something its learned based on training from places like Reddit, or if OpenAI deliberately taught it or instructed via system prompts to seem more infallible or if models like Claude were made to deliberately reduce that aspect.
I don't know whats better here. ChatGPT did have a tendency to reply with things like "Oh, I'm sorry, you are right that x is wrong because of y. Instead of x, you should do x"
Human-level AI is closer than I'd realised... at this rate it'll have a seat in the senate by 2030.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/2025/feb/14/gua...
Your sense of injustice or whatevs you want to call it is aimed in the opposite direction.
If you don't like the fair use of open information, I would expect you to be cheering this rather than losing respect for those involved.
Instead, I’m just going to hang out here in this hacker meadow and on FOSS social networks where something like that would never happen!
sama probably would like to take Satya's seat for what he no doubt sees as unblocking the path to utopia. The slight problem is he's becoming a bit lonely in that thinking.
My guess is that they’re trying other things to diversify themselves and/or to try to keep investors interested. Whether or not it works is irrelevant as long as they can convince others it will increase their usage.
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C suites are usually made of up really out of touch and weird workaholics, because that is what it takes to make it to the C suite of a large company. They buy DSS (decision support service / software) from vendors, usually marketing groups, that basically tell them what is in and what isn't. Many marketing companies are now getting that data from twitter and reddit, and portraying it as the broad social trend. This is a problem because twitter and reddit are both extremely curated and censored, and the tone of the conversation there is really artificial, and can lead to really bad conclusions.
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This is only somewhat related, but if OpenAI did actually succeed in building their own successful social media platform (doubtful) they would be basing a lot of their model on whatever subset of people wanted to be part of the OpenAI social media platform. The opportunity for both mundane and malicious bias in models there seems huge.
Somewhat related, apparently a lot of English spellings were standardized by the invention of the printing press. This isn't surprising; it was one of the first technologies to really democratize written materials, and so it had a very outsized power to set standards. LLMs feel like they could be a bit like this, particularly if everyone continues with their current trends of intentionally building reliance on them into their products / companies / workflows. As a real life example, someone at work realized you could ask co-pilot to rate the professionalism of your communication during a meeting. This seems quite chilling, since you're not really rating your professionalism, but measuring yourself against whatever weird bell curve exists in co-pilot.
I'm absolutely baffled that LLMs are seeing broad adoption, and absolutely baffled that people intentionally adopting and integrating them into their lives. I'm in my early 40s now. I'm not sure if I can get out of the tech field at this point, but I'm seriously thinking about options at this point.
The social harm inflicted by journalists thinking "Damn, I can just go on twitter to find out what is going on and how people feel about it!"
Right now OAI's synthetic data pipeline is very heavily weighted to 1-on-1 conversations.
But models are being deployed into multi-user spaces that OAI doesn't have access to.
If you look at where their products are headed right now, this is very much the right move.
Expect it to be TikTok style media formats.
As for whether it will work, I don't know how they're possibly going to get the "seed community" which will encourage others to join up. Maybe they're hoping that all the people making slop posts on other social networks want to cut out the middleman and have communities of people who actually enjoy that. As always, the sfw/nsfw censorship line will be an important definer, and I can't imagine them choosing NSFW.
Or even if you did come up with AGI, so would everyone else. Gemini is arguably better than ChatGPT now.
I remember at Google they said well if source code leaks nobody is actually worried about stealing tech, the vast majority of code is open to all employees, with some exceptions like spam-, ranking, etc. It’s still protected, but not considered moat.
The moat comes from other things, such as datacenter & global networking infrastructure, marketing new products by pushing them through existing products (put Gemini in search, add chrome to Android etc). Most importantly you can use data you already have to bootstrap new products, say Gmail and calendar integrated with personalized assistants.
If you play your cards right, yes there’s some first-mover advantages, but they are more superficial than your average Twitter hype thread makes you think. It can give you the ability to set unofficial standards and APIs, like Kubernetes, S3 – (maybe OpenAI APIs?). And you can set certain agendas and market your name for recognition and trust. But all that can slip through your fingers if a behemoth picks up where you left off. They have so many advantages, except for being the fastest.
If it’s not obvious already, I believe we are far away from that with LLMs and that the attention those working in model safety give to AGI over current day concerns like Meta just torrenting for model data, are not very serious people, but I have accepted that this isn’t a popular opinion amongst industry professionals.
Not least because letting laws prevent them from model training is bad according to them, either for the same weird logic Musk uses to justify testing FSD Betas on an unwilling public due to the potential to prevent future deaths, or because they genuinely took RB seriously. No idea what’s worse for serious adults…
You don't need some mythical AI to be a great company. You need great products, which OpenAI has, and they keep improving them.
Now they've hamstrung themselves into this AGI nonsense to try and entice investors further, I guess.
AFAIK, they've been on the AGI hype-train for a very long time, before they reached mainstream popularity for sure. From their own blog (2020 - https://openai.com/index/organizational-update/), here is a mention of their "mission":
> We’re proud of these and other research breakthroughs by our team, all made as part of our mission to achieve general-purpose AI that is safe and reliable, and which benefits all humanity.
I'm not sure OpenAI trying to reach AGI is a "strategic mistake" as much as "the basis for the business" (which, to be fair, was a non-profit organization initially).
Google Gemini 2.5 Pro was remarkably good and I’m not sure how they did it. It’s like an elite athlete doing a jump forward despite harsh competition. They probably have excellent training methodology and data quality.
DeepSeek made huge inroads in affordability…
But even with those, intelligence itself is seeing diminishing returns while training costs are not.
So OpenAI _needs_ to diversify - somehow. If they rely on intelligence alone, then they’re toast. So they can’t.
This would be a decent PR stunt, but would such a platform offer anything of value?
It might be more valuable to set AI to the task of making the most human social platform out there. Right now, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, etc. are all rife with bots, spam, and generative AI junk. Finding good content in this sea of noise is becoming increasingly difficult. A social media platform that uses AI to filter out spam, bots, and other AI with the goal of making human content easy to access might really catch on. Set a thief to catch thieves.
Who are we kidding. It's going to be Will Smith eating spaghetti all the way down.
It's bad that this need exists. However, introducing this feature did not create the need. And if this need exists, fulfilling it is still better, because otherwise these kind of people wouldn't get this information at all.
Before we get too excited with disparaging those seeking summaries, it's common for people of all levels to want summary information. It doesn't mean they want everything summarized or are bad people.
I'm not particularly interested in "tariffs, what are they good for, what's the history and examples good or bad"... so I asked for a summary from grok. It gave me a decent summary. Concise and structured. I asked a few follow-ups, then went on with my life knowing a little more than nothing about tariffs. A win for summarized information.
The only way to avoid spam is to actually make a social network for humans, and the only way to do so is to verify each account belongs to a single human. The only way I've found that this can be done is by using passports[0].
A fake ID is a lot harder to get your hands on than a new email, burner phone, etc.
Yes, this does mean that dual nationals can have two separate human accounts. But it’s still better than an infinite number of accounts, which is the case for social networks right now.
Not strictly but Debian, where member inclusion is done through an in person chain of trust process so you have clusters of people who know each other offline as a basis.
Also, most WhatsApp contacts have been exchanged IRL, I presume.
The idea that I would give a copy of my passport to a social media company just to sign up, and that the social media company has access to verify the validity of the passport with the issuing government, just feels very wrong to me.
I’m perfectly happy talking to someone without knowing their real name. I just want to be more confident that they’re a unique human, and not just another sock puppet account run by some Russian agent (or evil corporation) trying to change people’s beliefs at scale.
There's almost no time investment in building onlyhumanhub. It's only a few months old (based on the copyright), have effectively a text-only homepage, and account creation which I assume allows you to upload photos of your passport and link your existing social media profiles.
There are so many ways that could go wrong, from this being a phishing attack to this being a well intended project that happens to create a database linking passport IDs to all of a person's social media accounts.
The idea that they may eventually offer a social media platform that doesn't require public use of your real identity is all well and good, but they're still a honeypot for doxing.
Using it as a filter instead of a generator would provide information about which content has real social value, which content doesn't, and what the many dimensions of "value" are.
The current maximalist "Use AI to generate as much as possible" trend is the opposite of social intelligence.
Like all those start-ups that are on the 'mission' to save the world with an app. Not sure if it is PR for users or VCs.
But I really don't see why anyone would even use an open ai "social network" in the first place.
It does allow one thing for open ai. Other than training data which admittedly will probably be pretty low quality. It is a natural venue for ad sales.
The logical application would be an existing social network -using- chat gpt to do this.
But all the existing ones have their own models, so if they can't plug in to an existing one like goooooogle did to yahoo in the olden days, they have to start their own.
That makes a certain amount of (backward) sense for them. I don't think it'll work. But there's some logic if you're looking from -their- worldview.
The best I ever enjoyed the internet was the sweet spot between dial up and DSL where I was gaming in text based/turn based games, talking on forums, and chatting using IRC.
Early fb reconnecting with people I hadn't seen since high school was okay. The blog / Google Reader era happening at the same time was the real golden age for me. And it's been all downhill since.
There is no concept of "friends" on a forum like HN, since people purely gather to discuss topics of interest here.
This post was brought to you by the year 2012.
HN is more of a discussion forum and not for connecting with others.
You and I are the doing same thing, commenting on posts made by strangers.
- no infinite scroll (you have to click on "More") - no personal recommendation - no feedback loop between your upvotes and the feed - no messaging or following between users
HN looks a lot more like news groups from back in the days.
Longer comments are a good thing.
The more people change their profile photos into the campaign logo, the less attractive sm becomes. Maybe at some point even the very addicted users will quit.
90% is implausibly high. If that many people wanted to quit social media, social media would no longer exist.
> I'm just proposing a way to fight back.
I propose an alternative is to just quit yourself and get on with your life. As the people around you understand you are happy without social media, they too can become interested and quit. Social media only works while there are people on it. The fewer of us there are, the less interesting it is.
How many times have there been campaigns to delete social media accounts? They never last, and often even the organisers come back. I don’t see a reason why this time it would work.
All that said, far from me to discourage you. If you feel it’s a worthy goal, I encourage you to do it. I genuinely hope I’m wrong and that you’ll succeed where others have failed.
This is how addiction works. Most smokers want to quit, but can't, etc., etc. Cigarettes still exist.
I hope one day we can strictly regulate social media & make pariahs of the people who built it, as we did with tobacco. Instead, we just did the equivalent of handing the entire federal government into Phillip Morris's control, so my hopes are not high.
Meta/Twitter/etc. are drug dealers.
> But I really don't see why anyone would even use an open ai "social network" in the first place.
I really don't see why anyone would even use Heroin yet they do.
“It feels good.”
“I can quit whenever I want.”
“I was on it the whole night instead of sleeping. I felt awful in the morning.”
“I can’t stop. All my friends are on it and I don’t want to be alone.”
Anyone can be anything and do anything they want in an abundant, machine assisted world. The connections, cliques, friends and network you cultivate are more important than ever before if you want to be heard above the noise. Sheer talent has long fallen by the wayside as a differentiator.
…or alternatively it’s not The Culture at all. Is live performance the new, ahem, rock star career? In fifty years time all the lawyers and engineers and bankers will be working two jobs for minimum wage. The real high earners will be the ones who can deliver live, unassisted art that showcases their skills with instruments and their voice.
Those who are truly passionate about the law will only be able to pursue it as a barely-living-wage hobby while being advised to “not give up the night job” — their main, stable source of income — as a cabaret singer. They might be a journalist or a programmer in their twenties for fun before economics forces them to settle down and get a real, stable job: starting a rock band.
I've transitioned from strongly actually believing that such a thing was possible to strongly believing that we will destroy ourselves with AI long before we get there.
I don't even think it'll be from terminators and nuclear wars and that sort of thing. I think it will come wrapped in a hyper-specific personalized emotional intelligence, tuned to find the chinks in our memetic firewalls just so. It'll sell us supplements and personalized media and politicians and we'll feel enormously emotionally satisfied the whole time.
"Amused to Death"
Great title and an even better album. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amused_to_Death
Which is why we'll need to acquire the drug gland technology before AGI - no mind can sell me anything if I can feel content on demand.
I think we'll just die out. Everyone will be too busy having fun to have kids. It's already started in the West.
As housing has moved further out of reach of young people, some don't seem to feel their lives are stable enough to make the leap. The trend was down anyway, but the housing crisis seems to be an aggravating factor.
Spending a life on the treadmill doesn't encourage more walks. It encourages burning it down. All I've known is work. Pass on more, thanks. I hear you/others now:
But past generations managed...
To get where I could afford to have kids, I became both unprepared and uninterested.
What's more: I'm one of the lucky ones. I was given a fancy title and great-but-not-domicile-ownership-great pay for my sacrifice. Plenty do more work for even less reward.
There's a sucker born every minute, right?
Oh, a subset will be at risk of being artificially satisfied but your hardcore grouch will always have a special "yeah, yeah, fuck off bot" attitude.
I do. And I don't even think the issue is a hostile AI. There are 8 billion people in the world. Millions of those people have severe mental issues and would destroy the world if they could. It seems highly likely to me that AI will eventually give at least one of those people the means.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulnerable_world_hypothesis
It is not.
Even if it were just a minority, there are plenty of people outside "this thing" that will profit from the ((putative) majority's) anesthesia. Or which at least will try to set the world on fire (anybody remember the elections in USA a few months ago? That was really dumb. But sometimes a dumb feat shows that one is alive, which is better than doing nothing and being taken for dead. Or it is at least good-enough peacocking to attract mates and pass on the genes, which is just an extravagant theory of mine that I'm almost certainly sure is false. And do not take this as an endorsement of DJT). I'm not being an optimist here; I've seen firsthand the result of revolutions, but it may be the least-bad outcome.
We already have so many of those that it’s very hard to make any sort of living at it. Very hard to see a world in which more people go into that market and can earn a living as anything other than a fantasy.
Cynically - I think we'd probably end up with more influencers, people who are young, good looking and/or charismatic enough to hold the attention of other people for long enough to sell them something.
Controversial stance probably, but this very much sounds like a world I'd love to live in.
E.g. old days of Yahoo (portal)
This will be built on the existing thread+share infra ChatGPT already has, and just allow profiles to cross-post into conversations, with UI and features more geared toward remixing each other's images.
Id hope they have some clever scheme to acquire users, but ultimately they want the data/
I miss the days when experiences would actually choose to integrate other platforms into their experiences, yes I was sort of a fan of the FB/Google share button and Twitter side feed (not the tracking bits though).
I wasn't a fan of LLM and the whole chat experience a few years ago, I'm a very mild convert now with the latest models and I'm getting some nominal benefit, so I would love to have some kind of shared chat session to brain storm, e.g. on a platform better than Figma.
The one integration of AI that I think is actually neat is Teams + AI Note taking. It's still a hit or miss a lot of the time, but it at least saves and notes something important 30% of the time.
Collaboration enhancements would be a wonderful outcome in place of AGI.
1. Look "Studio Ghibli" went viral, let's capitalize
2. Switching cost for LLMs are low. If we can't be the best let's find other ways to lock our users in and make our product super sticky
Humans are just as good as bots in generating rubbish content, if not more so.
Twitter reduced content production cost significantly, AI can take it another step down.
At minimum, a social network where people share good prompt engineering techniques will be valuable to people who are on the hunt for prompts. Just like the Midjourney website, except creating a high quality image is no longer a trip to the beach, but a thought experiment. This will also significantly cut down the cold start friction and in combination with some free credits, people may have more reasons to stay, as the current chat based business model may reach it's limit for revenue generation and retention, as it's just single player mode.
> but about the originality of the content itself
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As a test of concept copy paste this whole page, put it in a LLM and ask for an article. It will come out without junk, but will reflect a greater diversity of opinion, more arguments, will do debunking, and generally have better grounding in our positions than the original content.
So it's careful synthesis over human chats that is the end value. Humans provide that novelty and lived experience LLMs lack, LLMs provide consistent formatting and synthesis. The companies that understand that users are the source of entropy and novelty will stop trying to own the model and start trying to host the question.
Wondering why reddit doesn't generate thousands of articles per day from comment pages. It would crush traditional media in both diversity and quality. It would follow the interesting topics naturally.
And then, kind of like how LLMs are good for boilerplate code but get less helpful as you get to more specific problems, this approach works for the first few paragraphs but deteriorates the deeper in you get.
Here is a feed I collected over time: https://old.reddit.com/r/VisargaPersonal/ I'm just using this subreddit as a blog.
I think you don't recognize it as such because it's incorporated into the chat box, but I use chatgpt as my search engine 90% of the time and almost never use google any more.
I think the social stuff will also just be incorporated into the chat interface in the form of 'share this image', etc, and isn't going to be like twitter with a bunch of bots posting.
For a moment I had a funnier mental image of a chat app with an input field that treats every input as a prompt, and everyone's chatting through the veil of an LLM verbosity filter.
There might be something chat RPG-like there worth trying though ...
Extend ChatGPT to allow multiple people / friends to interact with the bot and each other. Would be interesting UX challenge if they're able to pull it off. I frequently share chats from other platforms, but typically those platforms don't allow actual collaboration and instead clone the chat for the people I shared.
Would love an alpha tester or two if anyone wants to test it.
My email/twitter is in my profile, shoot me a message and I will be in touch.
honestly it's not a terrible idea. it may be a distraction from their core purpose, but it's probably something they can test and learn from within a ~90 day cycle.
That is why Reddit is one of my favourite social sites. It is algorithmic but if you go to r/assholedesign you get asshole design. (and an anal mod who keeps it like that) Etc.
Value $44bn ;)
Discord will probably IPO when conditions allow - might be an easy buy for a stock / cash offer.
Imagine tweeting and thousands of “people” reply to you and appreciate you. It would be addictive.
Tried to share an answer to a colleague (who didn't have the paid version) and he couldn't see it ...
Nobody I know would be interested in a social media platform that is just AI. Contrary to what some commenters here seem to think, most people are interested in things like upvotes and likes and whatnot... because they understand it's (mostly) humans on the other end. Without that, it would all be rather hollow, and nobody would want to participate in it. I think most people would find the insinuation that they're so shallow as to want that a bit insulting.
But again, maybe I'm the crazy one.
This is just the next step of that. This also doesn't stop them working on 'AGI', you need the data as well as the models, as most people familiar with the field will known. I will be happy to be proven wrong on this prediction.
With Mastodon and Bluesky around, users have free options. Plus X and Threads, and you can see how the market is more than saturated.
IMHO they should look into close collaboration/minority stake with Bluesky or Reddit instead. You have a huge pool of users already, without the need to build it up from the ground up from scratch.
Heck, OpenAI probably has enough money to just buy Reddit if they want.
So yeah, AI integrated with a popular social network is valuable.
I would say "owners" rather than "founders", but I agree with you. I think Sam Altman's couldn't be worse than Elon Musk's X, no?
isn't it public already? they basically made tumblr but everything is AI:
That would be an interesting evolution.
Text, images, and long-form content are getting crushed, forcing creators into bite-sized video to be favored by almighty algorithm.
It’s like letting a kid pick their meals - nothing but sugar and candy all day.
But personally i don't get it. i hate almost all videos. the exception is some thing is best shown as a video, like a how to. but I search those out
Maybe im so broken at this point, who has the patience for videos? Clearly a lot but how lol
Something about mindless garbage doesn't appeal to me.
- They have a quick social network with feed of qna with AI (like stackoverflow) immediately.
I don't want to live on the internet that is crammed with AI content.
How do you define “good”? Theres obvious examples at the extremes but a chasm of ambiguity between them.
How do you compute value? If an AI takes 200 million images to train, wait let me write that out to get a better sense of the number:
200,000,000
Then what is the value of 1 image to it? Is it worth the 3 hours of human labour time put into creating it? Is it worth 1 hour of human labour time? Even at minimum wage? No, right?
(not to mention defining "good")
If they launch, expect a big splash with many claiming it is the X-killer (i.e. the same people that claimed the same of Mastadon, Threads, and Bluesky), especially around here at HN, and then nobody will talk about it anymore after a few months.
1: use an LLM to extract the text from memes and relatable comics.
2: use an LLM to extract the transcriptions of videos.
3: use an LLM to censor all political speech.
OpenAI, I believe in you. You can do it. Save the Internet.
If you can clean my FYP of current events I'll join your social media before you can ask a GPT how to get more users.
And who gets to decide what is political? Are human rights political? Is a trans person merely existing political? Is calling for genocide political?
There is a lot of stuff on the Internet, so I think the AI can just censor 80% of it and we're still going to have enough to have a social media.
Someone should do it anyway and make it dominant anyway ASAP.
All the original talent has already left too.
I think OpenAI should split into 2:
1) B2B: Reliable, enterprise level AI-AAS
2) B2C: New social network where people and AIs can have fun together
OpenAI has a good brand name RN. Maybe pursuing further breakthroughs isn't in the cards, but they could still be huge with the start that they have.
so sam altman is pressing all buttons to keep the hype train going.
Perhaps then we can all let LLMs take care of tweeting outrage for us, and go outside to find each other rolling around on the grass.
But it would also juice echo chamber depth and further amplify extremist "engagement".
And the monetary incentives for OpenAI to generate most of the content, the "people", and the ads, including creative hallucinations and novel extremisms, so they directly match each of our curation directions, would enshittify the whole thing within a short minute.
--
The time has come to outlaw conflict of interest businesses that scale (the conflict).
If a startup plan includes "sales" and "customers": Green light go.
If it talks about ways to "monetize": Red trash can.
If only.
This plus Ed Zitron's excellent investigative writing on their finances [0] makes me think that OpenAI is going to fold within a year, maybe two.
[0]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the... (TL;DR - we have apparently learned nothing from 2008.)
Tumblr is still alive. LiveJournal is still alive. Newgrounds is still alive and Flash doesn't even exist anymore.
I tried to use it for a few months after release, always got frustrated to the point I didn't feel like reaching out to friends to be part of it.
The absurd annoyance of its marketing, pushing it into every nook and cranny of Google's products was the nail in the coffin. I'm starting to feel as annoyed by the push with Gemini, it just keeps popping up at annoying times when I want to do my work.
There's already a ton of AI slop on those platforms, so we're like half way there, but what I mean is eliminating the entire idea of humans submitting content. Just never-ending hypnotic slop guided by engagement maximizing algorithms.
My guess is OpenAI has hit limits with "produced" content (e.g., books, blog posts, etc) and think they can fill in the gaps in the LLMs ability to "think" by leveraging raw, unpolished social data (and the social graph).