[everdrive]

I don't like Zuckerberg whatsoever, but there are plenty of reasons you could potentially care about his opinion:

- He could be well-placed to see whether AI agent development is successful since at a high level he oversees much of it, and will be getting detailed metrics and things.

- Whether or not his opinion is correct, tech CEOs are notorious trend-chasers, and his opinion could set the tone for other companies.

- He himself might even be a trend-follower in this case, and is presiding over an early dialing-back of AI-hype.

[cafebabbe]

Honest question, is there a single successful large investment made by Meta recently ? I just know about the abject failures :)

[throwaway27448]

llama has been generally useful.

[evilduck]

llama was unintentionally released and has been a flash in the pan for them since. They've failed to capitalize on it at all post-v2. v3 models were a launch mess and quickly surpassed. The only thing it has left in 2026 is name recognition. Honestly their non-LLM things are more important and relevant, like their SAM models. https://ai.meta.com/resources/models-and-libraries/ but none of these seem to be making them serious money or exist and standalone products.

[PaulHoule]

for "the rest of us" building certain kinds of systems on top of it.

as integrated into Meta's platforms it is clearly uncompetitive as a consumer chatbot with the likes of ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini.

Like the other chatbots give me useful answers to questions even if they're wrong sometimes. Meta AI, on the other hand, cracks jokes about my foxwork. That's no so bad because sketch comedy is one of the foxwork skill areas (e.g. if I get you to laugh you are under my spell) but it's not useful and edifying the way competitors are.

[foobarbecue]

Ok, I'll bite. What's "foxwork"?

[PaulHoule]

I played enough video games to be thoroughly steeped in legends about fox spirits from the Sinosphere, almost three years ago I felt I received an invitation that I was a little afraid of. a year and a half ago I read

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0231133383

and found out that people really do it. It took me about 300 days to contract with a community of foxes and started "going out as a fox". At first I didn't want to explain it to people at all but when I botched my explanation and my wife gave me some tough love about "cultural appropriation" I realized I needed a cover story and it is "I go out as a character to do street photography and make people smile"

And it became real. My son didn't believe it until he saw me work: my son saw these two college girls walking down the street and thought "there is no way they would talk to me" and next thing he knows they flagged me down and are asking me questions and I took their picture. I went to fireworks in Groton, NY and the next day in Little York [1] I haven't even parked my car and people I saw the day before are excited to see me.

When I get approached every day it becomes effortless and automatic to make an approach and when I feel like I am getting a 50% take rate I think "I am doing something wrong and I need to regroup", my usual take rate is in the 80-90% range but it feels like 100%. I don't even talk with other street photographers about it on forums because I'm drawing from an entirely different probability distribution.

Thanks to this work, it looks like I will be teaching about magic soon [2] so I was working on a short monologue about blessings on the drive up to Little York which primed me to really respond when people I photographed said simple things like "Enjoy the Fourth of July" and eating soft serve ice cream from a vendor felt like the feast that Martin Prechtel says is the only ritual -- and I am still feeling high from it just like I felt high from going to Litha put on my my pagan friend.

See https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/foxwork

[1] one of the five Yorks of New York

[2] Magic is real, full stop. Science is real too, and there is nothing more scientific than the double-blind test that accounts for the placebo effect which is as I see it: "the patient experiences the treatment as receiving a blessing and feels better" and "the doctor experiences the treatment as giving a blessing and perceives the patient differently"

[foobarbecue]

Ah. I was expecting some technical jargon. You do you, man...

[swader999]

Maybe the glasses. After other companies have failed, they may have something here.

[thorncorona]

Meta retooled all their internal models to be LEM / LLM based recently.

[owebmaster]

Meta Glasses might be the next big thing.

[toasty228]

AR/VR is the next big thing since 2015, the cumulated revenues since then don't even match the yearly revenues they were predicting for 2020 alone. This is going to end up like 3d TVs

[ChrisGreenHeur]

Any day now.

[asdfsa32]

And it is even worst than Facebook and Social Media. We are doomed.

[dominotw]

glasses maybe but not meta glasses. Its not like meta has some patent on it.

[Der_Einzige]

Rayban glasses with the HUD in your eyeglass will go mainstream when they get a 10 hr battery instead of the 1.5 hr battery of today.

[doubleorseven]

- Whether or not his opinion is correct, tech CEOs are notorious trend-chasers, and his opinion could set the tone for other companies

exactly why I won't listen to someone who is falling behind.

[ezoe]

Being a CEO of a large corporation doesn't guarantee you the latest tech insight. You will be easily surrounded by yes men who speak what you wanted to hear.

[everdrive]

Agreed, all I'm saying is that his perception of the tech -- whether correct or incorrect could potentially either be trend-setting, or could be indicative of trends already in motion.

[wolttam]

Case in point: Metaverse.

[rh94]

My thoughts exactly. I think he is well positioned to see edge of ai tech as the money he spent (if allocated well) could give him bit more insights. Although questionoble how much he is still able with his background to understand, I don’t think he is as much engineer as he was used to be