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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

From my perspective, Meta is doing pretty reasonable with their AI compared to eg Apple.

What is their end goal with AI? I understand Google, Anthropic and OpenAI try to cater to a certain audience with their AI products.

I understand the way Apple wants (but is failing) to integrate AI into their products.

What’s Meta’s strategy here? What’s their vision?

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I don't really think Meta ever had a vision beyond "Facebook is a social network to connect people". Since then, their strategy has primarily been driven by their fear of being left behind, or of losing the next platform war. Instagram, Whatsapp, Threads, VR, AR, and now AI, they all weren't driven by a vision as much as it was their fear of someone else opening a door to a new market that renders them obsolete. They are good at executing and capturing the first wins, but not at innovating, redefining a market, or pushing the frontier forward; which is why they eventually get stuck, lose direction, and fall behind (Tiktok, Apple Vision Pro, AI).

Yes, but they’ve definitely made a big contribution to AI / LLMs. I just don’t understand how they plan on monetizing upon things, apart from “better AI integration inside their own products”.

Are they planning to launch a ChatGPT competitor?

It seems like this acquisition is focused on technology, but what’s the product vision?

They already have a chatgpt competitor, you can talk to llama in all the facebook apps, they're just clearly inferior.

Where can I talk to llama in their apps? Serious question.

I use Messenger but not Facebook. There's a big "Ask Meta AI or Search" bar at the top of the app's main page.

Whatsapp you can tag @meta ai in any chat, have a separate chat with meta ai, forward messages to the meta ai chat for fact checks, etc.

Also standalone: https://www.meta.ai/ and https://about.fb.com/news/2025/04/introducing-meta-ai-app-ne...

Their already existing chat app is what “ai” means to my normie friends.

Their end goal isn’t with AI per se.

Mark wants to own platforms. He always has. That’s why they tried to make a phone, networks, VR headsets, horizon worlds and now glasses.

AI is just their vessel to draw people in. It’s the flash that gets people on board. It’s the commoditizing your complement, in that they want to undercut the competition and have the money to do so, as a means to pull people in rather than lose them to OpenAI or the like who are also trying to build platforms.

Put another way: these companies want to be the next iOS or Android, and they are doing what they can to be as sticky and appealing as possible to make that happen.

Meta is a huge nation-state of a company, like Apple or Google, but its actual sources of income are arguably precarious: in the past decades new social media platforms have crept up and become really popular pretty frequently. Ai and Vr are mostly ways to find new sources of income: Meta has the means to outinvest smaller companies like Anthropic, but not the obligation to fit it into an existing product, like Apple.

I don't know how much adoption they've seen in the real world, but they have some really cool models outside of gen-ai.

Stuff like:

- https://segment-anything.com/

- https://dinov2.metademolab.com/

They sell ads. Their strategy is to use AI to take over more of the marketing process. They want to move spend from in-house marketing (creative, strategy, analytics) to Meta.

> What’s Meta’s strategy here? What’s their vision?

I don't get it, either. Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp are ways to communicate with people you know, and they have a monopoly on that. (Well, Instagram is also softcore porn and product placement...)

TikTok beat them as mindless entertainment, showing people videos they're likely to watch until they end, and Zuck freaked out. Sometimes people would rather just watch TV than hang out with their friends! OMG! TikTok's bottleneck is that humans have to create the videos, so if Zuck can generate videos to maximize watch time, he wins.

Paying billions of dollars for a data-labeling company, though... Well, I guess it's not easy to put together a bunch of digital sweatshops in Kenya and the Philippines, but is it worth that much?

Meta monetizes content. AI makes it easier and cheaper to create content. If everyone has access to high quality AI, high quality content may be more plentiful and that content can be posted on Meta's platforms, which would make it more money.

Still confused, i show up to "consume content" from people i follow, not from Meta. Sure, occasional trash and spam and ads, and "recommended", and "promoted", but mostly things that people post. If content creators still come to post on say Instagram, which provides distribution and monetization, how does it matter which tools they used? Should Meta then try to acquire say Adobe Photoshop too, to produce better IG content?

Robotics and world-interaction, if LeCunn is to be taken as the primary proselyter.

When a company reaches a certain size they basically become a bank. Meta owns a bunch of social media properties and the long term prognosis for that industry is not great. It would make sense to get into other areas if they can do it.

> What’s Meta’s strategy here? What’s their vision?

The metaverse was their strategy. Then AI hype took over Silicon Valley and the unloved under-resourced AI team at Facebook became the stars of the show. Meta are now standing on the shoulders of those teams and the good will they generated from their foundational and open research efforts.

An AI first strategy from Facebook would not have involved a rebrand or open sourcing any research or models and would probably have looked a lot like OpenAi or Grok.

love slaves to quell the Bell Riots enough to prevent Star Trek?

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