Why is an AI company pretending that were living in 2022 andworking on a new social media platform?
Theres a shortage of data right nowthat is limiting how quickly and effectively AI models can be trained.
Google has a steady stream of content thanks to running the most-used search engine on the planet and YouTube.
An image of Sam Altman in sunglasses shooting a piece sign.© Bloomberg/Getty Images
The same goes for Meta and its Llama model.
Which isnt a surprise!
AI is effectively just the best pattern recognizer and generator around.
A nice big diverse (hopefully) training data set.
Just because you build a social media data pipe doesnt mean people will actually use it!
Social media is not aField of Dreamsbaseball field.
That plan sort of worked for Meta when it used Instagram to push users to Threads.
Millions signed up as the platform broke records and spawned think pieces.Then it had a huge drop in users.
Then it slowly climbed back up, and now Meta claims it has about 245 million monthly users.
And thats Meta, the company that is arguably the best at making engaging social media platforms.
Theres a small built-in user base.
Theoretically, it could become a hangout spot for the AI crowd.
Thats gonna require the rest of us, and the tradeoffs might be too much for some.
Plenty of people happily exchange their privacy and browsing data for the ability to use social media for free.
But a lot of people (hey, Gizmodo readers!)
have much stronger feelings about their data and content being used to train AI.
For many, it feels like theft.
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