Comment by hbosch
2 days ago
>It almost seems as though the record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI might have been a little shortsighted.
Everything zuck has done since the "dawn of AI" has been to intentionally subvert and sabotage existing AI players, because otherwise Meta would be too far behind. In the same way that AI threatens Search, we are seeing emergently that AI is also threatening social networks -- you can get companionship, advice, information, emotional validation, etc. directly from an AI. People are forming serious relationships with these things in as much a real way as you would with anyone else on Facebook or Instagram. Not to mention, how long before most of the "people" on those platforms are AI themselves?
I believe exactly 0 percent of the decision to make Llama open-source and free was done altruistically as much as it was simply to try and push the margins of Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. downward. Indeed, I feel like even the fearmongering of this article is also strategically intended to devalue AI incumbents. AI is very much an existential threat to Meta.
Is AI currently fulfilling the immense hype around it? In my opinion, maybe not, but the potential value is obvious. Much more obvious than, for example, NFTs and crypto just a few years ago.
> AI is very much an existential threat to Meta.
How so?
“you can get companionship, advice, information, emotional validation, etc. directly from an AI. People are forming serious relationships with these things in as much a real way as you would with anyone else on Facebook or Instagram. Not to mention, how long before most of the "people" on those platforms are AI themselves?”
Meta doesn’t really serve companionship. It used to make Yu connected to others in your social graph, which AI cannot replace. If IG still has the eyeballs, people can put AI generated content on it with or without meta’s permission.
Like with most things, people will want what’s expensive and not what’s cheap. AI is cheap, real humans are not. Why buy diamonds when you can’t tell the difference with cubic zirconia? And yet demand for diamonds only increases.