[dgellow]

I never understood why meta decided to join the race. They don’t sell compute like Google or Microsoft. Why not let others do the hard work and integrate their LLMs in your systems if needed? I assume it’s because they have Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Thread data and feel they should be the ones using them for training, but it’s really not obvious how having a frontier AI lab benefits their business

[observationist]

Adtech Money. They've got GPUs, they've got the infrastructure, and they've got the advertisement platform, and the point is getting AI that can exploit the adtech and create a flywheel effect, maximizing return from the data they collect from Insta, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc.

It's not just about LLMs, it's about being able to model consumers and markets and psychology and so on. Meta is also big in the manipulation side of things, any sort of cynical technological exploitation of humans you can imagine but that is technically legal, they're doing it for profit.

[bachmeier]

> I never understood why meta decided to join the race.

I can think of at least two reasons. Price and customizability. If they train their own models on their own data, they potentially have a better model at a better price, and they're not at the mercy of Anthropic's decisions when they decide to raise prices. Additionally, if you use someone else's model, you use it the way they create it and permit you to use it. In a couple years, who has any idea how these models are used. Arguably, a company the size of Meta should be in control of their AI models.

[chermi]

You basically have to be involved if you're meta. Even if there's only 5% chance this AI stuff is as disruptive as the labs claim it is, you can't afford to miss out. Even if you're lagging frontier, you must develop the competency internally. Otherwise you ignored a 5% chance of total annihilation, probably even exposing you to shareholder lawsuits.

[eldenring]

Because there's a realistic chance this is the only important software technology moving forward, and commoditizes Metas's entire business which is software.

[dgellow]

Meta’s business is human attention, human connections, and all derived data. They can use AIs for their systems, but the question is why do they feel the need to spend billions on training and running their own frontier model

[xnx]

Zuck is trying to convince himself he's good, and not just lucky.

[vinni2]

From what I heard Meta is spending hundreds of millions each month in Claude credits for developers. So that’s a huge saving if they have own models that match Opus.

[spindump8930]

Spending tons of money on Claude and the recent token benchmarks came WELL after Meta's huge investments in compute infrastructure for AI as well as the long history of language model development inside science divisions at the company.

[SoftTalker]

LLMs/Chat-based systems will reach a point where Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads, Instagram, etc. are all unnecessary. The idea of opening a browser or a specific app to do a thing will seem antiquated. You can do it all with your chat-based agent. Meta wants to be part of that.

[operatingthetan]

I don't think everyone only wants to talk to machines going forward...?

[SoftTalker]

I don't want to do it now. But that seems to be where we are being headed, like lemmings running for the cliff.

[throwaway173738]

They have realized that the real money is in sitting between us and reality arbitrating what we see or know.

[dgellow]

Sure but they have the platforms, they don’t need their own frontier models for that

[SoftTalker]

The platforms will be irrelevant at some point. "Posting to Facebook" won't be a thing.

[KaiserPro]

A few things:

1) meta was doing this at scale before openAI

2) decent ML is critical to catagorising content at scale, the more accurate and fast the category, the finer the recommendations can be (ie instead of woman, outside as a tag for a video, woman, age, hair colour, location, subjects in view, main subject of video, video style) doing that as fast as possible with as little energy as possible is mission critical

3) The llama leak basically evaporated the moat around openAI who _could_ have become a competitor

4) for the AR stuff, all of these models (and visual models) are required to make the platform work. They also need complete ownership so that it can be distilled to make it run on tiny hardware

5) dick swinging

6) they genuinely want to become a industrial behemoth, so robots, hardware, etc are now all in scope.

[bee_rider]

I think they just want to be a winner in the “next thing.” They hit social networking, but missed mobile operating systems and didn’t compellingly win at social media. Eventually an ambitious person with a bazillion dollars wants a clear win, right?

[storus]

Only thanks to Meta we have competitive local LLMs. Without LLama nothing decent would have been released. Commoditize your complements in action.

[yoz-y]

AI NPCs to fill in the empty Metaverse?

[aylmao]

First and most importantly is the fact they have a lot of very valuable data they wouldn't want to siphon to a competitor. This data is a key strategic asset in the space where they do business.

Secondly though, I think it has to do with the fact Meta is big enough to worry about vertical integration and full control of their business.

The whole reason they've been trying to make AR/VR happen for over a decade now is the assumption of a worst case and best case scenario. The worst case is Apple and Google wants them gone. This isn't as far fetched as it seems, Google has historically been Meta's biggest competitor and even tried to release its own social network back when Meta was threatening them. If either pulls Meta apps from their respective stores, it'd be an immense blow to Meta; their whole trillion-dollar business depends on competitor's platforms.

Meta tried making inroads into the phone business but failed; it is a very crowded market after all. So they changed their strategy. Instead of playing catch-up, they'd invent "the next iPhone" and be the first to a brand new market. This is the best case scenario; they invent a new platform where they can be dominant from day 1 and stop depending on competitor's hardware, not only removing that risk factor for them, but also unlocking a new market they can control.

AI ties into all this because it appears to be key for this next platform to happen. You will communicate with these smart glasses via voice, hand gestures, or subtle movements that a model will have to interpret. The features that could make them stand out as more than just a screen on your face are all AI related; object detection, world understanding, context awareness, etc. If all this were done via a 3rd party Meta would effectively be back on square one: a competitor could easily yank away its model access, or sell it to a competitor. Meta would be again at the mercy of others.

Compared to other big-tech players, I think it's easy to see how Meta is in a riskier position. There's little Google or Microsoft can do to kill the iPhone. There's little Apple or Google can do to kill Amazon's online store. There's little Amazon or Apple can do to kill Microsoft's business deals. Google and Meta are primarily in the business of capturing people's data, attention, and selling ads, and both Google and Apple could do quite some damage to Meta. Beyond expanding it, it's important for them to invest in ways to protect their money-printing machine.

[gallerdude]

I’m sure there’s more to it than this, but it feels like Zuck has pet interests like VR and now AI.

[alex1138]

But no account support, that's boring

Or any quality control (people missing posts)

Or banning the people who should be banned while leaving everyone else alone

This is Zuck: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198

[swyx]

you dont understand why zuck, who paid $1B for instagram when they had no revenue and 7 employees because he is paranoid about platform shifts, decided to join the race for (what is seeming highly possibly) the biggest platform shift in human history?

[oceansky]

He also tried and failed to buy Snapchat, and then copied their feature on all their big products: Instagram, Facebook and even WhatsApp.

[prodigycorp]

The way you put it, I understand it less. lol

[johanyc]

One word: control. It's the same reason Facebook became Meta

[chairmansteve]

Pumps up the stock price.

[awestroke]

Because Zuck has chronic FOMO, he's said as much himself

[addandsubtract]

To download all those torrents, obviously.

[zeroonetwothree]

But then how will Zuck win the billionaire dick measuring contest?