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Comment by mattbrewsbytes | Hacker News Reader

Meta's active user base doesn't care about privacy.

Most personal tasks take trivial amounts of time these days. Does a 5th grade teacher or an auto mechanic need a personal assistant? Do we need to be able to book a trip faster? It feels very gimmicky to me, but I realize I'm not their target audience.

Given that, I do think Meta will probably get the lions share of B2C AI and they have a proven track record of using personal data to serve ads and make a lot of profit. If they capture more of their user base's time, it keeps them engaged and away from a list of competitors. If Meta starts crushing it in this fashion I could see IPO's of OpenAI and Anthropic land like fart in church.

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I mean I just used muse to plan out my entire weekend trip to Vegas recently. I booked everything myself but I asked it to shortlist dining options for me given dietary restrictions, events given restrictions (with elderly family), etc. it basically handled all the stuff I would have normally just Google searched for. Plus it made a nice web app dashboard to display it all. It seems pretty useful for common use.

It also handled payment splitting. I told it what person x spent for the group split 3 ways (it originally split by the total number of people, but I clarified that only me + x + y are paying) and it kept running totals. When I got an email from Venmo saying x sent me money, muse automatically updated the balance sheet.

We saw some signs written in an unfamiliar language. Muse told me what language it was.

Is that your first time using an LLM? I don't mean that in a snarky way, it just seems like things everything could do for years.

I've been "forced" to use AI in my work since this year, but I only started experimenting with it with my own ChatGPT subscription recently. I'm able to afford $20/mo and I'm fine paying it. The average user meta is targeting wants a free assistant to replace Siri, which is what muse is.

Continuing my thought, talking to Muse and ChatGPT feel fundamentally different. The single thread chat Muse offers encourages you to talk to it like a person imo. But that's probably just me.

I think some of those tasks are part of the fun of a trip - doing the research on locations, events, restaurants, etc. You stumble through a bunch of things and little nuggets of that sit in your brain and then when you're on the trip they might come up - one place is abruptly closed, something looks like a bummer in person, etc. Without doing that research yourself then on the trip you have a list of things and aren't really knowledgable about alternatives.

Like I said, I'm not the target audience for a personal assistant. That does sound like a more ideal UX than what chat gippity and the others offer though. I would expect that with Meta - they really get the UX mostly right for people.

Sure, I get that. For this particular case, I've been to Vegas (family lives there) "plenty" so I don't really care much about stumbling upon stuff like you pointed out. I just wanted to have some places on hand to suggest for dinner and things to do when the group when we'd inevitably get to the "so can someone decide what are we doing for dinner???" part of the day. For planning a long trip to say Tokyo (never been) for vacation I'd do the regular stuff searching Google and reading blogs, but I'd also add AI search to it, if anything to find the current new "viral/trendy" stuff that I absolutely do not keep up with.

Yes we do care and many of us have set the privacy settings to certain things over the years

But this is where friends are and don't give me 'you could just call them'

Not everyone has access to email/phone. Facebook should work in theory, if they weren't so enthusiastic about intentionally eroding privacy (physically changing the privacy options). Multicast. I post some status to multiple people at once. I can find people I don't already know/have lost touch with, and connect with them

What Meta does, does not mean its users don't care and I wish you people would stop saying that

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