[lhnz]

I wonder how many years it will be before a real AI can compete with Facebook's AI?

I guess by the time that's possible Facebook's pretend AI will already have cornered the market.

The public will only be able to see that you were the late entrant and that while your AI is faster it's occasionally incorrect in peculiar ways...

This seems like a fairly solid plan by Facebook to crown themselves the winners of a race that hasn't yet finished.

[AJ007]

Pretending you have a working technology when you don't has been a recent theme in the startup world.

[drivers99]

Thomas Edison claimed to have a long lasting light bulb before he actually did. He showed it to reporters one at a time in a booth. Between observers, he would change out the light for a fresh one. Source "How We Got to Now: Light" (on Netflix currently, at least in the US). Found the clip on PBS. Skip to 2:20 for the specific part: http://www.pbs.org/how-we-got-to-now/big-ideas/light/

[graeham]

He was also pretty bold on pricing, electing to set the initial price off what he predicted eventual costs of production would be. Initially, new products would be sold at a loss.

Perhaps not controversial in the perspective of modern venture-backed startups, but at the time it was a key reason GE won early market share on so many products.

[pluma]

I thought Edison had mostly been dismissed as not even remotely as great an inventor as most people thought he was?

[throwaway7767]

He was a businessman, who hired people to invent things. He was certainly useful, but it's always been surprising to me how much credit he got for inventing things.

[gohrt]

Capitalism and Personal Branding at its finest.

[CPLX]

To a tiny universe of Reddit/XKCD readers perhaps.

In the rest of the world, for example at the offices of Con Edison, or in the city of Edison, New Jersey, he's still considered to be somewhat important.

[Nadya]

Don't forget The Oatmeal readers! [0]

There's a billion and one things one could mention about Tesla. Sadly, only the tiny universe of people who dislike Edison (and see him as a businessman, not an inventor) are aware of Tesla's contributions.

[0] http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla

[pluma]

In a way, Edison is a very American inventor. His skill wasn't in craft or science, his skill was in sales and turning a profit.

[CPLX]

Whoops. In my head that while Tesla rant was an XKCD thing.

[eli]

I hardly think that's a recent development. Plenty of technology has been sold that way for a long time.

[GFischer]

It even has its own term, "Vaporware":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware

"Vaporware first implied intentional fraud when it was applied to the Ovation office suite in 1983; the suite's demonstration was well received by the press, but the product was later revealed to have never existed."

[icebraining]

Vaporware is neither new nor restricted to the startup world. There's actually a whole (sub)genre of music based on the concept!

[drdeca]

Vaporwave?

[rblatz]

It's just an extension of "do things that don't scale."

[trop]

Or compare in literature, to Victor Pelevin's (somewhat dystopian) novel Omon Ra's "highly complex automated systems"...

[TorKlingberg]

> I guess by the time that's possible Facebook's pretend AI will already have cornered the market.

And cost Facebook a lot of money. Are they planning to pay for personal assistants for everyone?

[tonylucas]

You are presuming that they will employ all of the people needed.

Why for example would they not turn this into a platform that easily added the AI benefits for external vendors and services, and just be the middleman collecting a cut in some way.

They are already starting to integrate vendors into Messenger directly after all.

[eggie]

> Are they planning to pay for personal assistants for everyone?

In the new rules of the new economy, this won't be a problem. Money grows on trees. "Ad" infinity!