The announcement is probably targeting Wall Street more than any potential "user" (aka advertising target). The press was already bad - internal "code red" at Google due to panic that people saw ChatGPT as an alternative to search.
Meta/FaceBook's head of AI, Yann LeCun, is in similar panic mode, issuing a non-stop torrent of tweets about how useless and unimpressive ChatGPT has... Presumably a reflection that FaceBook does NOT have anything comparable ready to release anytime soon.
FWIW, Facebook's AI division has made some pretty insane contributions to the field relative to Google or Apple. I wouldn't disregard the stuff they're doing, even if I personally don't have a stake in Facebook or Meta's success.
Facebook was first to the punch on AI photo tagging and facial recognition in their systems, but they also did a lot of foundational research on GANs and self-supervised learning. Plus, they do a lot of other tangential research around language and life sciences that might not get funded otherwise.
Some of it is marketing bullshit, but Facebook seems to have a genuine interest in pushing the field forward. Admittedly Google is also not the best example though, seeing as they're the Tensorflow maintainers :p
I don’t understand Yann LeCun‘s reaction considering reputation of the company he works for - they should have already copied and integrated it somewhere.
This may put it into perspective: Yann pushed for and released Galactica.org, a website that generated articles for any prompt requesting information, on 15 November, before the release of ChatGPT. Internal pressure inside Meta caused it to shut down three days later, because it was thought to risk the company’s reputation more than Libra and the Metaverse.
The issue isn’t that Yann didn’t publish an AI app; it is that they did, and it was not as good.
The reality is that OpenAI was lucky. Inside the company, there is an alignment department whose effort was driven to help models share human ethics, and that was initially a bit marginalized. However, one of their projects, RLHF, ended up producing a much superior language model, when they could have initially assumed it would be worse.
Meta/FaceBook's head of AI, Yann LeCun, is in similar panic mode, issuing a non-stop torrent of tweets about how useless and unimpressive ChatGPT has... Presumably a reflection that FaceBook does NOT have anything comparable ready to release anytime soon.