Earlier quoted context omitted.
>She uses Meta AI a lot. How?
Health questions or things she would usually call us for. When I was surprised to learn her friends use it.
Interesting, thanks!
Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab
251–260 of 507 posts
Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab
#252Reminds me of "Don't dig for the gold, sell the shovels". Could also be read: > Meta spends 10% of last year's revenue to acquire 49% of a top AI data company and poach their leadership, to ensure they are a key player in what could be a ~5-trillion dollar industry by 2033. Meta has a history of this. Acquiring Oculus (and leaning in on VR), Ray-Ban partnership (and leaning in on AR)... etc. These all just seem like…
Bringing up Oculus and VR is quite fitting, because I think it's the same problem. Meta is attempting to find their next business, but like with social media they don't really have a plan. It worked out well with Facebook and some of the purchases surrounding social media, but it was never a clear path to profit, so they slapped ads on it. Why does Meta want VR to work? Create the Meta-verse? We're back at why, what…
The goal is to manipulate your stock price.
Meta's product is not Instagram or Facebook. It's Meta's stock.
Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What is the big risk here? That this is clearly the wrong person to hire? Maybe Demis or Ilya is worth $15B but Wang? Extremely odd choice...
I don’t think either Demis or Ilya are available for $15bn. They’re already both comfortably billionaires. Demis seems a sensible candidate for heir to the top job at Google in the long term. Ilya is away focusing on super intelligence. It’s not clear to me why either would take a subservient role in a company flailing incoherently around AI, rather than stick with the incredibly high-leverage opportunities they both…
Agreed but if you're paying $15B for a single person you should at least aim high...
Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab
#254Meta buying their way into trends generally seems to pan out (WA, Insta, Oculus). Any reason to think this will be different? I’m not familiar with Scale but the particulars of this deal seem odd to me.
Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Of all the tech companies, Meta is the most ruthless and shameless. Have you seen Oracle?
Not sure if this is true any more, but they used to make a majority of their revenue by suing their own customers.
I get that people hate Oracle for a variety of reasons, but this is just such a ridiculous assertion. They've been one of the largest tech companies for multiple decades. Do you honestly believe that a majority of their revenue came from legal settlements from suing their own customers, at any time in their history?
Do you have a citation for this claim? I mean if the company is as absurdly litigious as you're saying, it stands to reason that you wouldn't make unsubstantiated claims about them in a public forum, right?
Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab
#256From my perspective, Meta is doing pretty reasonable with their AI compared to eg Apple. What is their end goal with AI? I understand Google, Anthropic and OpenAI try to cater to a certain audience with their AI products. I understand the way Apple wants (but is failing) to integrate AI into their products. What’s Meta’s strategy here? What’s their vision?
Meta is a huge nation-state of a company, like Apple or Google, but its actual sources of income are arguably precarious: in the past decades new social media platforms have crept up and become really popular pretty frequently. Ai and Vr are mostly ways to find new sources of income: Meta has the means to outinvest smaller companies like Anthropic, but not the obligation to fit it into an existing product, like Apple.
Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a smart purchase, it's just that I don't see how these datasets factor into super-intelligence. I don't think you can create a super-intelligent AI with more human data, even if it's high-quality data from paid human contributors. Unless we watered-down the definition of super-intelligent AI. To me, super-intelligence means an AI that has an intelligence that dwarfs anything theoretically possible from a human m…
I think this is kind of a philosphical distinction to a lot of people: the assumption is that a computer that can reason like a smart person but still runs at the speed of a computer would appear superintelligent to us. Speed is already the way we distinguish supercomputers from normal ones.
I'd say superintelligence is more about producing deeper insight, making more abstract links across domains, and advancing the frontiers of knowledge than about doing stuff faster. Thinking speed correlates with intelligence to some extent, but at the higher end the distinction between speed and quality becomes clear.
Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab
#258Why is people letting these unelected companies reshape the world?
Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab
#259From my perspective, Meta is doing pretty reasonable with their AI compared to eg Apple. What is their end goal with AI? I understand Google, Anthropic and OpenAI try to cater to a certain audience with their AI products. I understand the way Apple wants (but is failing) to integrate AI into their products. What’s Meta’s strategy here? What’s their vision?
> What’s Meta’s strategy here? What’s their vision?
I don't get it, either. Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp are ways to communicate with people you know, and they have a monopoly on that. (Well, Instagram is also softcore porn and product placement...)
TikTok beat them as mindless entertainment, showing people videos they're likely to watch until they end, and Zuck freaked out. Sometimes people would rather just watch TV than hang out with their friends! OMG! TikTok's bottleneck is that humans have to create the videos, so if Zuck can generate videos to maximize watch time, he wins.
Paying billions of dollars for a data-labeling company, though... Well, I guess it's not easy to put together a bunch of digital sweatshops in Kenya and the Philippines, but is it worth that much?
Re: Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wondered that. But then huge revenue streams for Scale basically disappear immediately. Is it worth Meta spending all that money just to stop competitors using Scale? There are competitors who I am sure would be very eager to get the money from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic etc that was previously going to Scale. So Meta spends all that money for basically nothing because the competitors will just fill the gap if Scale…
Yeah, also the industry could come up with their own Scale if they were forced to. But probs. it just makes sense on paper, Scale's revenue will pay this for itself and what they could do is to give/keep the best training sets for Meta, for "free" now. Zuck's not an idiot. The Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions were phenomenal in hindsight.
[dead]