If meta’s marketing team had any self awareness about the state of the ‘brand’, they would know the absolute best thing they could do for probably the next year at least would be to de-emphasize and hide zuck as much as possible, shut their mouths, and try to fade into the background as a silent ‘parent company’. Then they could just let instagram be instagram and hope people forget its part of Meta at all, and if at any point they wanted to spin up or buy a new product, they would not publicize that it is owned by meta. Absolutely no one likes or trusts them. One of worst brands in recent memory at this point.
Like... give it back to the original founders? The company that was bought because Zuck said "they can hurt us"? Like not having a login wall on every page? Like being a site for photographers like it used to be? Like not having fucking Reels everywhere which they stole from TikTok?
That is largely because no one has bothered to build anything remotely close to IG in the last 5+ years besides maybe TikTok. And even then, TikTok is more of an apples and oranges comparison to IG in lots of ways.
Zuck is just yet-another CEO who insists on being visible/part of the "branding" despite irrefutable evidence of brand damage and general shitshow for marketing metrics.
> Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.
Says the person with absolute power over the largest social network in the world.
> Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more. It will free up time for the things you enjoy
Wait, those are the things I enjoy.
I suppose that Zuck means free up time for more Facebook scrolling.
I will literally never believe that Meta gives a shit about the future. Their reputation is so far in the toilet from my point of view that it is already in the sewer.
> Invention, not automation, will be the greatest contribution of superintelligence. Early AI could answer questions and do routine work. Soon it will increasingly help discover new knowledge -- ranging from discovering new drugs to cure a family member's disease to finding new ways to improve your business. While the number of questions a person can ask in a day is limited, the number of valuable things superintelligence can invent to help achieve your goals is unlimited.
Sort of a half-baked tangent of a thought but is it really possible for an AI superintelligence to "invent"?
My overarching thought after reading as much as I could stand of this is: "Wow, sure sounds like Zuck really drank his own Kool-Aid - or if he didn't, at least he wants us all to believe that he did!". The question is not whether "superintelligence" will be accomplished, the question is only how fast. I mean, LLMs are nice, but the jury's still out on whether they alone will be enough for "superintelligence"...
> I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future.
Because they can make a sh*tload of money by doing it (or at least they hope they can)?
AI will almost certainly get to be pretty intelligent. Whether the algo is LLM or something else doesn't matter that much. I note the term LLM doesn't appear in Zuck's thing.
The first part kind of had me going “oh wow, this doesn’t seem like a thinly veiled advertisement for once”. You know, the common thing we see from frontier labs.
Then I got to the examples.
> my agent plans personalized recipes for us to make together each weekend, orders the ingredients, and then offers suggestions as we're baking.
I mean universe forbid you from using a recipe from one of the many talented bakers on YOUR platform. Or even better, asking a family member or family friend.
Time and time again I am shown that none of these big tech billionaires have any appreciation for human craft whatsoever. What's with the attempt to have an LLM do literally everything for you?
It's not healthy to try and be hyper efficient with literally everything in your life, nor is it healthy to remove all human aspects of everything.
Sometimes, it's totally OK to just slow down, allow imperfection, be inefficient, get things wrong, etc.
It's why all their silly consumer-oriented use cases for AI fall on deaf ears, at least for me. Crap like this, I'd never do. I'd also never use an LLM to book and plan my travel, I have no reason to, planning, finding hotels and flights, making my own itinerary is part of the joy. Finding recipes is part of the joy, etc.
They all just want to suck the fun out of everything, and make it hyper-efficient all while stripping away any human element.
It is as if they had zero experience of living as humans. They feel like aliens who never experienced 21th century life and imagine what the daily issues might be.
They always suggest to use agents in a way that makes non issue sound tedious. Unless you have mental health issue anxiety levels, you can do disintersted weekend baking without getting "agentic suggestions". And it is disinterested cooking, cause he had agent plan and pick the meal.
The total usefulness is that it picks receipt for me and creates shopping list. And again, unless you are terminally indecisive, it is not making anything really easier.
Fwiw, Whatsapp is only weakly encrypted. It presumably streams all metadata to the government. Also, if certain sensitive keywords are entered, e.g. pmurt in reverse, that too ostensibly triggers an immediate alert to the government to trigger further monitoring. Whatsapp's backups and notifications have also been well known to be risk vectors. Broadly speaking, most mobile devices and web browsers are extreme risk vectors.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
