Proven technology, maybe, but proven product-market fit for the kinds of things Facebook is using it for? Their linked blog about AI features gives examples "AI stickers" and image editing... cool, but are these potential multi-billion dollar lifts to their existing business? I guess I'm skeptical it's worthwhile unless they're able to unseat ChatGPT with a market-leading general purpose assistant.
I have a few group chats just that devolve into hours of sending stickers or image generation back and forth, lately we've been "writing a book together" with @Meta AI as the ghost writer, and while it utterly sucks, its been a hilarious shared experience.
I don't think anyone else has gotten that group chat with AI thing so nailed.
On the podcast TrashFuture, November Kelly recently described AI systems as “garbage dispensers” which is both a funny image (why would anyone make a garbage dispenser??) and an apt description. Certainly these tools have some utility, but there are a load of startups claiming to “democratize creativity” by allowing anyone to publish AI generated slop to major platforms. On the podcast this phrase was used during discussion of a website which lets you create AI generated music and push it to Spotify, a move which Spotify originally pushed back on but has now embraced. Garbage dispenser indeed.
> unseat ChatGPT with a market-leading general purpose assistant.
It's not impossible. The prediction from many(not that I believe it) is that over long run modelling tricks would become common knowledge and only thing that matters is compute and data, both of which Meta has.
Also there could be a trend of LLMs for ads or feed recommendation in the future as they has large completely unstructured dataset per user across multiple sites.
Compute, data, and most importantly distribution/users.
IMO standalone AI companies like OpenAI might be successful by providing infrastructure to other companies, but I can’t imagine ChatGPT remaining #1 many years from now.
The web is still trending towards being a walled garden. Maybe not right now, but long term I think people will use whatever AI is most convenient which probably will be AI built into a giant company with established user base (FB, GOOG, MSFT, and Apple if they ever get around to launching - would love Siri 2.0 if it meant not needing to open the ChatGPT iOS app)
