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Comment by aj0strow | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. The strategy was unclear until now. Spending billions on acquisitions and targeted hires, clearing ranks, playing catch-up on coding and multimodal, open sourcing weak models, the AI girlfriends. It was all very confusing.

It is clear now. Alex and co have refocused Meta on Personal AGI or pAGI. The AI that runs your life. It feels appropriate for a social media company that hosts your photos and group chats. Most users will not pay for pAGI so the tokens need to be cheap. Muse is targeted at intelligence per dollar. Many sites do not offer API access. The marketing is focused on computer usage. Installing software adds friction. It runs securely in the cloud. If this isn't the right AI play for Meta then I don't know what would be.

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From the outside looking in, I don't think Meta has a clear vision. I think it's a stretch to say that this one announcement makes it clear. There are AI announcements from Meta every month, recent ones more focused on coding (Muse Spark/Muse Code)

Their ads team wants AI to improve their targeting and ad creation. Some want to have frontier AI including coding. Others might want personal AI agent. Then there's the flirting with renting their compute

And I'm not even taking shots at them. I think Google is exactly the same. I think OpenAI is largely the same (though lately more following Anthropic footsteps and focusing on productivity). And I think the whole field is so new and allows change in so many places - that it's sort of normal or fine to throw things at the wall and see what sticks.

But nothing as of now says to me that Meta has a clear strategy around llms

What’s Meta’s moat? Content and doom scrolling…

I would say they should put ALL their focus on Next Generation content generation… I honestly think in the ~10 years we’re going to see cinema completely flip from high budget blockbusters to way cheaper, personalised “Choose Your Own Adventure” content but where the story changes/rewrites itself in realtime based on constant user feedback (thumbs up from popups mid movie, facial expressions etc).

Meta could be the next generation’s Disney, Warner Brothers, Universal etc

I read this take on hacker news all the time, but what indication do you have that this would be popular ?

All the streaming giants had ample budget and engineering talent to make interactive fiction happen, but didn’t, presumably because they know a) not everybody is creative that way and b) a big part of culture is that you can discuss it with others, which doesn’t work for personalised works.

If you have your kids you’ll know that the shared culture we used to have is no more. Kids these days don’t turn on the tv when they get home from school but instead go on their highly personalised feeds… so for any shared culture, we’re now back to memes (in the original sense of the word, not internet memes).

You can’t look at the big giants with their budgets and think “If they can’t do it, nobody will”. The bigger you are, the slower you’ll move. This is exactly why FAANGS buy innovation rather than build it all themselves.

I’m 100% positive we’ll see exactly what I described in the coming years and it will be from an unknown startup with two founders, no budget, and just a coffee machine to keep them going

>The AI that runs your life

it was always "personal AI", thats why Zuck wants AR so much.

The problem is, before about 2025, there were a bunch of clear systems and procedures that stopped your personal data from being used for dodgy things. For example the browser inside oculus didn't emit any site specific usage metrics. This means that they couldn't use your VR porn habit to target you.

The same with the raybans. There was a perm block on processing user data offsite/outside of meta systems. (which is why we couldn't use FAIRs AWS cluster to do research on research data, because even though it was paid for data, it was still technically 'user' data because it had non-public domain PII [peoples faces, voices and locations in it]) So getting access to any kind of data that came in from raybans was a massive "nope never"

Then we find out that someone convinced Zuck to let people train on private rayban data? and they send it to fucking third party annotators, and new fucking annotators at that. That to me smells like MSL. To get how much of a big fucking deal that is, the original raybans had two cameras, so that FAIR could do some research or other. but because they didn't want to make a separate infra just for research, they couldn't get permission to use any of the data.

Meta had a working always on assistant that could locate, transcribe and recall any thing inside the offices (assuming you wanted to carry a fannypack with a jetson in it) it was always personal.

its now a case of how much shit they can get away with, its not like the FCC are going to audit them anymore.

It isn't the right play.

Part of the reason Meta is scrambling for purpose is how much privacy laws and changes have hurt them while their platforms fail to attract new generations. Ads are still selling, but they can no longer tie them to actual sales. Users are still logging in, but aging (i.e. failures to capture the younger generation).

Personal AGI has massive hurdles to overcome to be anywhere near the levels of profitability their ailing ads network is. This will bring in new data for them to mine for sure. But it will basically have to outrun new legislature that will likely limit just how "personal" these systems can get as they seek the profit they need to sustain growth via said data.

People dont even trust meta with their personal data anymore but somehow they'll use it to run every aspect of their lives? This feels like another big failure in the making. Give me an AI that doesn't use my data at all and maybe I'll use it. I already have Google AI Mode for that. Does that steal my data too, maybe, but at least it doesn't have Metas history of abusing repeatedly. They burned that bridge so many times even non techies know not to trust Meta.

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