Has Mark become distracted from his VR obsession by AI?<p>It's so crazy but Mark's personal boredom or interest in either of these could swing the whole direction of computing one way or the other.<p>I do think VR could be the ultimate application of generative AI - one of the biggest bottlenecks at the moment is how expensive and tedious it is to make the 3d content necessary to fill out expansive VR worlds. It could also be central to actually making viable things like codec avatars which currently are stupendously compute intensive but perhaps don't need to be if you can generate the output using AI instead of actually coding and decoding it at the other end.
So it seems innovation is now completely non-existent at FB, and their new modus operandi is to throw shitloads of cash at any new fad that surfaces in the media and see what sticks.<p>Thats tells you a lot about whats going on and what kind of people work inside there.<p>They seem to be a dead man walking.
Reminds me of Zuck announcing he planned to make a personal assistant back in 2016 to compete with Siri and Alexa:<p><a href="https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A775294156352065%7D&path=%2Fnotes%2Fnote%2F" rel="nofollow">https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A...</a>
<i>We're starting by pulling together a lot of the teams working on generative AI across the company into one group</i><p>"We will start by interrupting all of the initiatives currently in motion to introduce new layers of management and bureaucracy"<p>Maybe it will pay off.<p>Senior Management going to Senior Manage
I have a free idea for Facebook...<p>Let me fill my friends list with new AI friends who are like my actual friends, but cooler, kinder, and more helpful.
I for one welcome the inevitable creative application of these AI "personas" and whatnot to be tuned for arguments and set against each other. A non-friendly, no-holds-barred debate. Full vocabulary and historical references allowed.<p>Then we can put it textbooks for study on creating tools that can be way too easily weaponized in a sprawling environment like the Web in current form. My money is on Poe's Law before Godwin, but by narrow odds. What, y'all thought this would end well? Go re-watch T2 damn.
I will say this may be starting to cargo cult a little bit.<p>Do I think “generative AI” is huge - yes. But I also feel like people are starting to slap generative AI label on things somewhat motivated by silly reasons - marketing and pleasing investors who want to “keep up”. Or employees that want to work on something cool.
Endgame for all of this, mark my words will be "immersive VR"<p>Why play hogwarts legacy when you could go to meta hogwarts and actually talk to harry potter about your day? People think parasocial relationships are toxic to society now?!?<p>HAH.<p>Just wait till we start seeing headlines about people killing themselves over their favorite character (or worse ai wife/husband) getting digital dementia due to dataloss or being taken offline forever. It rings back to that movie HER the one where loads of people fell in love with the same AI model, except in that movie the model had agency and wasnt insidiously designed by a major social media/ads company to drive traffic and profits.<p>I know my comments might come off as inflammatory, but I want to make a very clear point that I hardly have seen mentioned elsewhere. The problems that we see with the terminally online and other forms of unhealthy attachment to online personas will only be amplified as VR and AI get better.
> In the short term, we'll focus on building creative and expressive tools. Over the longer term, we'll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways. We're exploring experiences with text (like chat in WhatsApp and Messenger), with images (like creative Instagram filters and ad formats), and with video and multi-modal experiences.<p>I guess that makes sense. It works great with their metaverse vision (and might give it the USP it desperately needs), while bringing short-term benefits as well. I wonder what they mean by text in WhatsApp though? A chatbot for companies to paritally automate all the business that now happens over WhatsApp, or a text-mode Alexa, kind of like XiaoBing (which far predates the current GPT craze, but is now much cheaper to create)?
It's interesting to see the comments on his post. A good percentage is just "very impressive". What's the point of that? Just hoping he'll see your name and say "good employee"?
One of the reasons I almost never visit Facebook anymore is I don't trust them with my personal data. And even after being fined $5 billion - the largest privacy fine by far in history - they never come clean and admit any wrongdoing.<p>I will stay far away from whatever Zuck accomplishes with generative AI.<p><a href="https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/07/ftc-imposes-5-billion-penalty-sweeping-new-privacy-restrictions-facebook" rel="nofollow">https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/07/...</a>
> Over the longer term, we'll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways.<p>It's easy to imagine a future in which Facebook have a paid monthly subscription to a friend, partner, therapist etc.<p>> with video and multi-modal experiences<p>And of course they'll try to slap some VR on top of it.
I am bemused that the approach here is to pull teams out of wherever they are closest to the products receiving these features and into their own top level. Zuckerberg enumerates what the objectives are (bots, assistants, image filters, etc.) but I would expect this change to open up gulfs in communication holding back shipping something of value.<p>It'd be one thing if there was a single umbrella Facebook product, but Meta is going the opposite direction.
Interesting to see the somewhat muted announcement from LeCun who has been (one might say, for good reasons) sceptical of “autoregressive LLMs” and the path to AGI requiring something quite different<p><a href="https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02zHwANqWrZLMimhq7U97i3xaHkMEHu8CLsa9TGRj1QeejwDxRFChxSK1zY6yPak5Kl&id=4" rel="nofollow">https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02zHwANqWrZ...</a>
As Steve Jobs said, you have to work backwards from the user experience and see how the technology fits.<p>Let’s see if they actually do that or just build a gimmick
Wondering if all this AR/VR stuff eventually becomes like the Voice semi failures seen by Google and Amazon.<p>Its more of an annoyance to have a voice assistant at odds with you trying to push advertisement and listening in on your conversations to sell to you better. Factor in that voice doesn't always get it right it becomes a nuisance.
At my FAAMG company, the new way to get funding for anything is to sprinkle some ChatGPT on it. Two years ago it was Kubernetes. Now it's ChatGPT. Just hilarious to watch execs fall for this stuff over and over again.
I imagine investing in Nvidia and possibly a company like Google who make their own AI accelerators (TPUs is it?) is a good idea? Is there going to be enough fab space for the coming AI revolution? With Apple taking all of TSMC 3nm output are they planning their own Mac Pro with external GPUs and a possible move to the datacenter too? It’s certainly an interesting time to be alive…
Did he even write this or did some marketing PR team do it for him?<p>> Over the longer term, we'll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways.<p>So Facebook are getting into the SockPuppet persona business, has the US military [1,2] and other 5eyes+X countries put out a tender for new sockpuppets, because the existing one's are getting too easily detected?<p>Arent they causing enough trouble [3] psychologically manipulating people, causing Hurt, Embarrassment and Harm (HEH)?<p>Anyway those bots are still making money for some![4]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/vkv8hu/aww_this_tik_tok_creator_with_a_million_followers/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/vkv8hu/aww_th...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/reddit-revives-ipo-plans-go-public-lower-valuation-meme-stocks-2023-2" rel="nofollow">https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/reddit-reviv...</a>