Comment by abixb
11 hours ago
I think Meta's strategy is to capture the 'normie-tier' of AI users. I know most of us here on HN track model releases quite frequently and discuss every parameter weight out of them, but most of the world is just... oblivious?
I was discussing latest in tech with an accounting friend out of curiosity, and I kept talking about tiers of GPT-5.6 (Sol vs Terra vs Luna) and asked which one she used on the desktop 'Work' app, and she responded with, "just ChatGPT, what is Sol?."
I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with, and it's a lot of them. So, us serial HN users and commenters are the extreme minority, and I'm sure millions of people will gobble up this Muse agent from Meta as if it's some sort of an innovative cutting-edge way to use the internet by Meta alone.
Curse of knowledge and all. [0]
Former meta prick, sorry employee:
> Meta's strategy
Meta has no strategy. The people that made llama work left two years ago. MSI are a bunch of charlatans who are trying to change the culutre and tooling of meta from the outside (I can see their point, trying to work outside of the defaults is incredibly hard.)
its basically a bun fight, with all of your productive workers being poached by frontier labs, and everyone else is either a new grad, burnt out, or a master bullshitter.
Meta certainly do give the impression that they are burning through ridiculous amounts of cash with not much to show for it, and thats just from the outside.
If you scroll Instagram for a few minutes you'll see what they have been working on and that are also making a ridiculous amount of cash by selling and serving ads while burning some on side projects like that.
How is it a bad thing if a company goes all in on burning cash but at the time have never reported a net loss quarter since its IPO? Its their money to burn at this point who cares
Yeah and if you look at there numbers, they can just afford it. When you realize how big zuckerberg still is.
I dunno what the correct level of abstraction is for LLMs to achieve the type of widespread adoption you’re referring to but I can guarantee it sits above the name of the model. If you have to possess that level of knowledge you ain’t gonna use it. Google achieved mainstream success for a reason. People don’t want to know how the sausage is made.
I think you're right, but I'd add that... if this wasn't obvious to you without being told, you should really question your worldview a bit.
A lot of people think that chat.com is an AI called "chat". Most people don't know acronym "LLM". Most people don't know about the existence of companies called "OpenAI" or "Anthropic", or that they are worth a lot of money. Etc.
TIL openai owns chat.com
I hung out with my parents this weekend and heard them talking about "chat", as a noun. I assumed they were talking about ChatGPT; there being a literal chat.com makes sense why they'd call it that.
I've seen people using "chat" to refer to ChatGPT because it's easier/simpler. I'm pretty sure an average person has no idea that chat.com will redirect you to chatgpt.com (or what a redirect is for that matter). It's similar to how people were calling the COVID-19 pandemic or the virus itself "covid".
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I’ve heard this recently too.
It’s confusing because of the streamer convention of referring to their actively chatting audience as “chat,” which had also entered broader slang use.
I saw one online use that seemed ambiguous, but I realized it referred to ChatGPT and that the poster was the exact type of guy who would be totally unaware of streamer culture despite being my age.
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Are you sure they were using "chat" to refer to ChatGPT? I have noticed many kids now use chat to refer to the collective audience/chat participants, and then gets used rhetorically even when no literal chatroom exists. A streamer says things like “Chat, what do you think?” or “Chat, are we cooked?” That usage has spread well beyond literal livestream chats, particularly among younger people.
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This has been a thing well before chat.com even among engineers at our company.
Chat Gee Pee Tee is a mouthful.
Dhamesh Shah (Hubspot founder) grabbed chat.com and then in late 2024 sold to openai
https://x.com/dharmesh/status/1854307883304792294
I've heard people affectionately call ChatGPT 'chatty'
Just redirects to chatgpt.com
Surely the way streamers talk to "chat"? I've never heard anyone call ChatGPT "chat".
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The joke of it is that I see those same people (ones who haven’t heard “LLM” before, don’t know what a model is or even the vaguest idea how these work, etc) have very strong opinions on the state of AI, where it’s headed, and are willing to make projections with timelines.
Bill Maher is one example.
This problem has permeated everywhere. Nobody can predict the future. Even VCs can’t and yet I’ll get a weekly email with a confident narrative about the future. Looking at a16z. CEOs do this as well. Listen to Satya talk about how AI will transform things. We’ve trained everyone else to casually state what the future will look like on timelines. As if it’s knowable at all.
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Its fine if he trusts the right experts.
And its not really hard to at least understand one point: We are putting the most amount of money ever into compute and the smartest people on the planet on one topic: AGI and we see progress every month.
If you don't take this serious, even if we hit a hard plateu very fast (not seeing one at all) you are ignorant as hell.
You don't go to bed without a worry in the world if you have a wildfire 20km away you can see. You would also not see it as a waste to be awake and aware and alert while seeing were it moves.
The timeline thing though, its ranges right? But if you hear about the same or similiar timelines across different independent people, they just might have seen things in frontierlabs you can't.
Btw. AI feels complelty different if you have a lot more tokens available to you than if you wait or constantly run into token limits or if you skip fable level because you can't /wont afford it.
Imagine sitting in Anthropic or OpenAI and having the best moodel doing all the work for you vs. sometimes playing with it a little bit.
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In general you can't take anyone whose job is to opine too seriously. When you're not familiar with what they're talking about, they make it sound reasonable and convincing. It's their skill after all. But now and then they talk about some topic you understand and care deeply about, and realize they're just repeating the talking points some staffer prepared for them shortly before. Most recently it happened to me with John Oliver talking about housing, reading from the standard left-NIMBY bingo card. I like him as a comedian, still.
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Is this unique to AI? I feel like something changed with social media becoming kinda ubiquitous. Like everyone suddenly felt the need to have an opinion on every thing. And on lots of divisive topics the fact you might not have an opinion could have you face criticism for not caring and/or being on the "other" side to whatever position your accuser/interrogator is.
I don't actually know what it is or when the phenomenon changed, but it definitely feels like people don't say "I don't know" or "I don't know enough to have an opinion on that" very much any more.
> you should really question your worldview a bit.
Yeah, I still struggle with it. I have a diverse friend circle and sometimes I forget that most of them don't have the same information diet that I do (or don't even care about tech the way I do). Maybe I should be more like them and just chill? I don't know.
You don't have to "be like" anyone but yourself. You should, however, be aware of what you know and more importantly what you do not know.
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Tech is a rather minor part of the world of knowledge. How many languages do you know? Do you know the styles of Renaissance painters? Slept with super-model? Ever seen an elephant stampede? Meditated by the Ganges? Read thousands of stories? Climbed a mountain so high you need Oxygen? Tech stuff is so boring.
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It is interesting that you conflate "information diet" with "tech". The biggest info junkies I have ever met are: (1) medical doctors, (2) STEM PhDs, and (3) journalists. There are probably some other categories that I am missing. And almost none of the info they are consuming is "tech".
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well probably even your friends know a lot more than "most people". But walk into a random town and ask a random person and I'd wager they'll be about at what I described, on average.
This is very accurate. I teach seniors about how to use AI responsibly and they are always mind blown, and I keep it very high level. The amount of Chat”GTP” users there are out there that have no idea who the main vendors are. Most of them also think that Google is just a “search” company.
Wait, isn't it ChatGBD?
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How would I be able to help do something like that?
People are generally bad with acronyms. For the longest time I used to refer to San Francisco as SFO. On my first visit to Bay Area, I was talking to a local friend and casually said - last weekend, I went to SFO for sightseeing. He was confused and asked why I was sightseeing at the airport. That’s when I realized it’s SF not SFO.
> Most people don't know about the existence of companies called "OpenAI" or "Anthropic", or that they are worth a lot of money.
I agree with your general premise but that one sounds like bullshit to me. Tons of people who otherwise don't know anything about LLMs know about these companies specifically because they are worth a lot of money, and of course tons of people know who OpenAI is because of ChatGPT.
You're grossly overestimating how many people care about big companies, at least on a daily basis. Most people don't invest in anything and will never get a job at a big American company. They do know about ChatGPT but that doesn't mean they know who makes it.
go ask 100 random people across the world and I bet less than 20 will know both those company names.
Even Shingy called chatgpt "chat" when he went on Ed Zitron's show. It was very weird to hear from a guy who has been around tech world for such a long time even if he's non technical.
I'm a pretty seasoned software dev, but I've also kept the frontier AI race at arms length from myself. I run Claude alongside my day to day workflow but don't really get overly concerned about the latest and greatest models, as I'm not leaning on it to do my job for me I suppose.
In my mind I'm after a stable tool, not wanting to dabble in the bleeding edge. I did that back in the early days of web coding and have settled into a much more subdued kind of industry/life in that regard.
Everyone calls it chat. I am technical and even I’ve come around to calling it that because that is what everyone, including very technical people, call the product.
I didn't know who Shingy was. He looks like Jensen Huang's subconscious.
Shingy, from “Everybody in the club getting Tipsy”?
Even Shingy. Ia he really the standard for explaining tech to normies? Ouch.
They call it "Chatty"
I think you are overestimating things. While there will be people who don't know - it's probably not as many as you think.
Over 90% of humanity and that's probably still underestimating it. Most people cannot point on a map where they live. Many people think 'chat' is conscious and being locked up by evil humans: many think 'chat' is a god or aliens communicating with us. And getting worse as people cannot make a sandwich without asking 'chat', let alone learn anything worthwhile.
> OpenAI
this is unnecessarily austere or whatever - people absolutely know what openai is because lots of "normies" now use chatgpt
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dRE41eYkui4
I think you are wrong, but of course it's just a guess.
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I think of my mom who doesn't care and doesn't understand the difference between google AI Overview vs actual google search results. "I looked it up" - she doesn't care what tool she is using she just wants answers to how long bake pork or the best throw pillows to buy or whatever else she is looking up.
She's mostly using google AI tools because it's easy and free and on her landing page.
tbh I also use google AI tools frequently. It’s convenient (search bar is top of my window), and extremely fast at generation. For quick Qs, opening a chat bot and changing the default reasoning from my coding settings, switching from Work to Chat, etc etc, is too much of a faff.
I ended up adding -ai to every search in the browser level to turn this crap off. I couldn't find a way to disable it otherwise. I did it after it hallucinated the world cup games schedule which made my friend send wrong events to everyone after he "looked it up". Can't stop this from him, but at least this honest mistake won't happen to me.
My mom texted me the following when Windows did some big update integrating AI and probably had one of those menu bar popups announce it:
“Sharkweek, my computer says it has AI on it now!?? Yikes! What does that mean?”
This happend to me too. What does it mean, indeed? Yikes!
“Is that just what AI says?”
‘No, it’s from $majorAmericanCorporation.’ look at screen, see $majorAmericanCorporation name in a pill as citation you can click on within the Google AI Overview
Thanks Google!
I use that google AI overview a lot but I’m still using ChatGPT for 80% of my queries now.
At $dayjob, a company with ~10k employees, there are like 3 people who cannot shut up discussing the latest models in the internal AI forum, 10 others that constantly compare models and talk about "strategy" of using the models.
The rest of the users just use whatever the default is and get their work done.
I'm a coder and a daily driver of ChatGPT and I don't really know what Sol is or how I can access it. I follow discussions here and know of its excistence, but I can't remember its relation to other models or tiers by heart. What ever the default thing the website is giving me has been good enough for my needs for years.
Do you... code by copy pasting chatgpt web???
Lots of companies have security policies that forbid installing a local agent/harness. So employees still only have access to the web chat interface, and copy paste content yes.
That's what I do. But I don't write enough code these days to spend time on anything more complicated. For the odd shell script or python program I have ChatGPT write it, then I copy/paste it, make it actually work, and deploy it.
Yes! Though I mainly use it for one-shotting full files, so I'm not copying over small diffs. I did try copilot at some point in vscode, but after a week or so I felt like it was slowing me down. Something I knew would be a simple and quick change was now slow since I didn't have enough ownership of the code to do it quickly myself, and prompting for the change took longer than changing it manually if I had had full ownership. So I went back to coding by hand things that aren't a one-shot file.
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This might depend what you mean by code. In the sysadmin space I ask a web interface for poweshell to generate specific information multiple times a day, and pasting it into a terminal is really the cleanest workflow on a corporate machine where you have to justify running an executable.
I code by hand (sigh) and copy paste some snippets once in a while from a web chat LLM. This also means every single line of such snippets gets reviewed and anaylzed. Usually, these are some arcane Win32 API usage where otherwise I'd have to dig into old forums. I don't want to become a prompt engineer so I stay away from "agentic" workflows.
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ah what a throwback.. I thought I was so efficient copy pasting all day long
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Its mostly used with Codex so you can give finer control over task delegation.
its definitely worth learning the different strengths and weaknesses for each one and which you should use for planning/building/testing/documentation updates etc.
No point in burning excessive tokens using a high tier/expensive reasoning model like Sol/Xhigh if just updating a readme file.
I confess that when I ride the subway, I like to peer at other people's phones to see what they are doing. The ones that interest me the most are other people talking with an LLM. I am always surprised by the wide variety of people who are using LLMs to ask an infinite variety of questions. From the surface-level PR annoucement here by Meta, this seems like a good business idea.
> "just ChatGPT, what is Sol?."
i'd really like to see some analytics on what proportion of users have ever switched the model in chatgpt because I anecdotally believe it is < 5%
Agree with the numbers but you can't "switch the model" in normie ChatGPT anyway, you can only select between instant/medium/high effort.
I didn't even know you could. Work pays for ChatGPT and I just assumed it is what it is.
On average, generally, do you dig into settings (or maybe if something works, good enough usually)?
(I’m always on the hunt for “please don’t just friggin sell my data to everyone, if you’re scared enough over getting sued that you’ll listen to the toggle” and “disable sponsored this-and-that”. Plus power user stuff.)
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Honestly I rarely change it in either of them unless I’m using the cli or cowork to do something. That’s where smarter work means less iterative un-fucking, later.
Any quick questions or rubber ducking in a regular “chat”… the model just doesn’t really matter anymore.
They’re all smarter than I need for that stuff (and whatever unfortunate thing that says about me).
95%(?) have never paid. Maybe that helps the stats: for those who’ve paid, perhaps it’s all the way to 10% who’ve switched models?
I think we are lacking in the easy to use side of things. Once you go beyond browser based chatbots things become hard to set up.
I see lots of posting about using AI to create patches to get new apps working in wine, or reverse engineering firmware. But every time I’ve tried it it’s been quite a lot of work to set everything up. Even more so if you want VMs and some level of isolation from your sensitive data.
Having something that’s just a one click product that just works is more important than the smartest model.
I remember Logan Kilpatrick from Google talking about how AGI will be more of an experience with a product than raw 'intelligence' of a model. [0] No one outside of the nerd community cares about benchmarks or any of the other crap. They just want their tech to work so they could go do other IRL things.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ldkkth/google...
They are not 'normies' - we're just 'nerds'.
You're driving a home kit car, they're driving something out of the factory.
Eventually - we'll probably drive factory variations as well.
Neurodivergent
Yeah you’re describing normies. They are the norm. It’s in the name. People as described make up the vast majority of the population.
Nerds have always been in the extreme minority. Ignoring the influx of cosplaying MBA financing bros and industry hangers-on as tech became the place where the money is of course. The tech industry started attracting the normies as soon as it became almost as lucrative as finance, so these days the definition gets a little blurry.
You're right!
I'm confident that Muse can do lots of agentic tasks succesfully for normies on outdated models. Like buying sneakers, booking appointments, dealing with government forms.
Given that cost of building is down, strategy of most companies is turning into "do everything" and see what sticks
> I think Meta's strategy is to capture the 'normie-tier' of AI users.
For what it's worth, maybe that would help people who struggle with technology in general? Because as far as UI/UX goes, a chat interface for an agent is about as easy as it gets (not every site having its own crappy assistant that can't really do anything useful for you, but is slapped on there for the sake of a checkbox).
I watched the marketing video and to me it seemed pretty nice and practical for the average person.
But who is going to trust Facebook/Meta with everything? Even my parents are wary of their products. I can't see a personal assistant coming from them and being successful.
If this is still not obvious to you, most people don't care about privacy. You and your parents are outliers.
> So, us serial HN users and commenters are the extreme minority
Words to live by.
It seems like on the “Chat” mode of ChatGPT it doesn’t allow switching the model. It’s just “5.6” with the effort level
I use claude all day every day, and sometimes codex, and I still don't change models. I guess I'm more interested in accomplishing the thing than in experimenting with a dozen ways of accomplishing the same thing.
most people are not on the unlimited plan and can't use it all day every day for complex work which is one reason they are forced to learn about the options available and optimize their workflows.
in a way it's not much different from a time where the E icon of internet explorer was considered "the internet".
Yesterday I helped a maaaaybe 40 year old woman connect to the wifi at my local library so she could get on a zoom call. Made me realize most of the world is exactly like that.
To be fair I stopped caring about specific versions as well. I don't seem to notice the big difference anymore on daily tasks and questions.
I agree, and stay away from meta generally in life wherever possible
That said, I've got more time for projects this week so flew through my Claude max plan. Now I'm trying muse spark 1.3 with opencode which is free with pretty generous usage allowance. First time I've been impressed by meta's AI products. It feels not far below opus 4.8ish
Even with all of this nuance why would the regular joe go to muse when they have chatgpt and gemini? Most of their actual productive data is likely with Google anyway.
> I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with, and it's a lot of them.
That's why Google already captured such a big part of the market with Gemini: they're now integrating it with just about everything. GMail? Gemini. Search? (asnwer by and "do you want to continue discussing this with") Gemini. Workspace? Gemini.
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/on...
They may not have yet the same number of MAU as OpenAI but the Gemini experience is much more streamlined than ChatGPT: when people are presented with it, they just use it.
And to be fair Google's flash model are just amazing.
I think all AI companies want to capture normie users too, it's a huge market.
All ChatGPT, Claude, Google, Microsoft have/want to have their own assistants.
> I think all AI companies want to capture normie users too, it's a huge market.
Huge revenue? Or just huge volume?
If I boost the productivity of a $100k employee by 50%, a business will happily pay $1k/month and consider it a great deal.
But from what I've heard, consumer-facing LLMs find most users won't hand over even $20/month (which is a heavily subsidised price anyway).
In a dystopian outcome, the goal of having more people use your AI will not be for them to pay for it...
This is not limited to non technical users. Plenty of people don't care to switch between models and just pick the latest model.
Literally what I was about to comment. This is meant to capture the normies, the busy parents managing school and work, the grandparents who want to make most of their retirement.
I am trying it now. It let me name my muse as Satan. I appreciate that it understands my humor, but I'm also not joking at the same time.
Is "normies" finally a mainstream word? Just wondering how out of the loop I am here.
I've never heard a normie use it. ;)
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I met a normie who was using ChatGPT to write production code… in instant mode. No thinking enabled.
Yeah this to me is why Apple wins
Many people deep into tech (like most commenters here) may fall into the trap of overestimating average user's knowledge or interest in the details of the tech: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...
It's not a bad market to aim for. No one else really is.
Cant wait for Snitch Bench results of this
> I then realized
Oh, your grandma doesn't know which android version her phone is running? Or the build number of the Windows on her laptop? You just realized this?
> I know most of us here on HN track model releases quite frequently and discuss every parameter weight out of them
You know it? I sincerely hope you don’t and that it’s not really “most” of us. That would be incredibly sad. Tracking model releases and discussing “every parameter weight” is very far from intellectually curious discussion (what HN is ostensibly about).
> I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with (…)
> Curse of knowledge and all.
If there’s one thing many of us on HN suffer from, however, is intense hubris. The juxtaposition of claiming “curse of knowledge” while admitting to not having known the most elementary principle of designing for people is a tad tone deaf. Yes, of course most people just stick with the defaults, that’s why dark patterns work and hiding settings is a thing. The industry has been using those strategies to manipulate people for years and years.
To me it sounds like they are simply taking social moon shots. They tried to do a phone, tried to make a kitchen videophone, tried to make their own cryptocurrency, and tried to dominate open source AI, and now this is trying to make something like a digital robotic assistant. It might have reached a peak with the metaverse, when Zuck thought his corporation was destined to be the ruler of a Snow Crash style metaverse, to the point of renaming it. Maybe that's still the plan and they are looking for something that will lead to another metaverse play.
They need the next big thing to secure the future of the company. Facebook and Instagram are still money printers which can sustain these repeated failures, but without something new, they could be completely ruined if the social media landscape changes.
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