Fuck AI

Oculus hardware was the means to make leap into otherwise unattainable dream of Metaverse. Didn't everyone laughed at the idea of everyone binging Facebooks VR Chat for every social interaction and service? But it so happened, that a byproduct of that idea became an affordable VR headset.

Billionaire Bro Zuck literally writes that the goal now is wiring AI, once again, to every our interaction with the world that sounds self-contradictory and delusional even in short quoted paragraphs. Well, if we get some open models out of it, fine, but it's not like we get superb technologies from a space program. We get nice things from the Torment Nexus they still fail to build.

Why does anyone think "listening to the customers" is how capitalist companies make money?

Because it's a surface level. Most businesses in the world provide services where and when they sell organically. It's a given you sell more ice cream somewhere on the beach in warm season. CC wasn't selling riichi mahjong to bored white people, they created a pretty basic timekiller, one in the millions. They outsmarted competition by shiny graphics, addictive mechanics, gambling-like techniques and marketing. That's not what Zuck tries to sell or do in his speech.

He doesn't promote something simple, like CharacterAI selling their sex bot with nsfw ads targeting lonely people. Or Grok being there to make waifus from the girl you liked in highschool targetting X dot com users. Or even Google suggesting it can make this email for you. Mark once again has a convoluted image of everything-app that solves every problem so you as a person can just physically log off, lol. I don't think even the dumbest person in the room feels nothing is off about it. At best, it sounds like a fever dream about something in the future.

If he wasn't looking so goofy, I could've thought he is talking to investors instead. Like, the better example from the past is cloud infrastructure, and while no one with contemporary mobile internet felt it'd work, it worked with enough push and technological advancement - so much for the needy consumer! But to see that you need to be clever and know the time is about now.

He is telling that the end user's gonna be wrapped in their AI services like in a blanket. And while it's safe to place some bets on that, just in case it works out in the end, his history with Metaverse disaster being a very similar thing doesn't infuse long-term trust in his visions. It's okay for Wall Street to gamble with that toy for a while, but he isn't even Musk in that dimension and calls his shots after everyone else when the hype is already down.

His Meta is a behemoth that wouldn't die anytime soon, he's safe to preach and try anything. But instead of generalized bullshit we hoomans certainly need, he may instead start small and sell something we probably want, that ticks at least one box in our list. Like, I've seen a lot of people still using FB for it's marketplace, and I'm sure some LLM agent can be implemented there to consult both consumer and seller. Like the one who looks for generic pictures, duplicates, untrusty deals, weird descriptions etc on the buyer's side. It seems like an obvious thing that compliments his own service, but to know that he needs to use his own service, lol.