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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

I wondered that.

But then huge revenue streams for Scale basically disappear immediately.

Is it worth Meta spending all that money just to stop competitors using Scale? There are competitors who I am sure would be very eager to get the money from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic etc that was previously going to Scale. So Meta spends all that money for basically nothing because the competitors will just fill the gap if Scale is turned-down.

I am guessing they are just buying stuff to try to be more "vertically integrated" or whatever (remember that Facebook recently got caught pirating books etc).

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Yeah, also the industry could come up with their own Scale if they were forced to.

But probs. it just makes sense on paper, Scale's revenue will pay this for itself and what they could do is to give/keep the best training sets for Meta, for "free" now.

Zuck's not an idiot. The Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions were phenomenal in hindsight.

> Yeah, also the industry could come up with their own Scale if they were forced to

I worked at Outlier and it was such a garbage treatment

is he not?

what about the whole metaverse thing and renaming the whole company to meta?

What about it? Imagine buying Twitter and renaming it to "X".

The metaverse will happen, IMO. The tech is just not there, yet.

Even if it turns out to be wasted money, which I doubt, he's still sitting on almost 2 trillion. Not an L on my book.

> The metaverse will happen, IMO. The tech is just not there, yet.

This seems possible, and it just sounds so awful to me. Think about the changes to the human condition that arose from the smartphone.

People at concerts and other events scrolling phones, parents missing their children growing up while scrolling their phones. Me, "watching" a movie, scrolling my phone.

VR/AR makes all that sound like a walk in the park.

“We went outside this weekend. Terrible. I wasn’t hot anymore, the smog was everywhere. House was tiny. No AI to help with conversations and people were unfriendly. I’m staying plugged in, where we can fly amongst the stars on unicorns. Some say it’s fake but I say life has been fake for a while.”

Meta has done great work on the underlying technology of the metaverse, but what they really need is a killer app. And I don't think Meta or really Silicon Valley types have the proper institutional ability or really cultural acumen to achieve it. We think back to Horizon Worlds that looked more like a amateur weekend asset flip than the product of a billion dollar conglomerate.

If it does come, it will likely come from the gaming industry, building upon the ideas of former mmorpgs and "social" games like Pokemon Go. But recent string of AAA disasters should obviously tell you that building a good game is often orthogonal to the amount of funding or technical engineering. It's creativity, and artistic passion, and that's something that someone who spends their entire life in the real world optimizing their TC for is going to find hard to understand.

Can you explain 2 trillion

What do you mean?

It's this number: 2,000,000,000,000.

Meta buys 900 AI employees here at less than $20M/head. Pretty cheap these days. Any IP the company has is a bonus.

850 people doing data labelling?

i don't think anybody is having data labelers as employees.

Nah - I think of Scale as "like Uber but for AI data". I.e. they match humans to AI companies wanting to do RLHF.

Could be they need a perpetual license to the data too… so they could potentially sue everyone.

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