[giancarlostoro]

Makes me wonder if Mark Zuckerberg had not had this weird vision of making Second Life VR for Meta and focused on AI as it was looming if they could have built a serious competitor to Anthropic and OpenAI. I know he tried, but it was already late to the party, but still, had he tried a lot sooner, would he have gotten more built? I think his obsession with making the VR stuff happen is holding him back.

[bredren]

The key early signals from OpenAI FB missed were when OpenAI Five was featured DOTA 2's The International in 2018 and in April 2019 when it beat the pro team OG.

I think the people who care about that game and used the types media channels FB monitored was too small to show up on the company's radar.

But I'm not convinced Zuck was truly all in on VR. I thought the switch to Meta was a hasty attempt to rebrand under fire of a whistleblower / document leak cycle.

Despite all the money spent on VR labs, I always thought the pivot was much more of a Philip-Morris -> Altria thing than Dunkin' Donuts -> Dunkin'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI_Five#Reception

[stingraycharles]

Zuck is all-in on building their own platform and becoming a gatekeeper like Apple, Google and Microsoft, rather than operating within their ecosystems.

VR was one dream to achieve that, it’s more difficult to envision that with AI which is why I suspect he was more reluctant to embrace it. AI models are more likely to become a commodity and running inside one of the platforms of the gatekeepers, which is not what Zuck wants.

[bredren]

That’s fine but this dream was previously pursued with mobile hardware.

FWIW, oculus represented a true competitive advantage. And I don’t think it was a coincidence that the Supernatural acquisition was temporarily blocked by the feds.

I think Apple was genuinely worried that fitness was (or still is) a killer use case and threat to Vision Pro.

The delay was enough to make FB lose focus / pivot again into AI.

[redleader55]

Meta will always need the next platform. Instagram, Facebook phone, Whatsapp, Reels, Marketplace, Portal, VR, AI... Some succed, some fail. When you are an Ads company, the surface where ads are delivered to is important. I don't think it's a fundamentally different business model from Google's. VR addresses an interesting and increasing niche of people that refuse human contact and prefer the online world - for those people clothes, going out, buying a car, spending money on whatever the current society spends money on might not be so interesting, instead a parallel, virtual world, might be.

As for Claude and OpenAI, no one has a revenue net positive business model yet. They are much better than Meta's Llamas, but the model quality doesn't equal cash in the bank. Things might still change in the end. More players are better for me as a consumer.

[hedayet]

Facebook's strength has never been innovation, but adapting to the changes; mostly through acquisition.

With the 20/20 hindsight - I'd say the VR bet was too early for Facebook. Instead of trying to build a future tech, they should have acquired it another few years later, only after the tech has reached a more mature stage.

Meta still has a chance to catch up in the AI race given they are not trying to build afresh, but once again adapt by throwing cash at it (which has been the biggest strength of Facebook and Zuckerberg. see: instagram, whatsapp, reels, and many more...)

[Melatonic]

I think they were just early with VR in general (they did buy the best VR at the time). And then severely miscalculated what VR would actually be great for.

Eventually we'll get super cheap and light headsets or glasses and gaming will be pretty cool. They should have focused all in on that. It's already a huge industry

[hedayet]

yes. Once some other company figures out how to build light cheap headsets, Meta can acquire or copy that tech - and scale.

That's indeed Meta's strength area.

[mortsnort]

Is being a serious competitor to OpenAI a good business proposition? OpenAI burns through insane amounts of cash and it seems pretty likely that it will ultimately just be replaced by cheaper Chinese models/inference.

The real product is the agent harnesses, which to be fair can be trained specifically to work with an in-house harness, but not sure it's necessary to own the models, especially if Chinese companies are licensing theirs for fine-tuning like we see with Cursor.

[giancarlostoro]

Google is a good example of this, they aren't at the very top, but they're very competitive, and they can afford it, and it may one day pay for itself. Eventually it will be just good enough that in theory you don't need to keep chasing the #1 spot if it just works. I think that's something we all forget too easily.

[Aurornis]

Meta was on a roll with their early research and work with Llama and other models. Then it all just seemed to trail off. I’m sure they’re doing some interesting things internally but it does feel like they were in the right place to have capitalized on it a lot more.

[naveen99]

Except qwen became to llama what PyTorch was to tensorflow.

[jazzyjackson]

meta had the gpus to train llama because of their capital spend on horizons, so at least they were in the game, but maybe he didn't see "chatbot" as a trillion dollar product category