Meta can be a extremely significant player in generative AI. Meta owns few of the largest interface of chat UI through Whatsapp, Messengar and Insta. Inserting a chatbot can hook more people in the eco system. You can book your cab or order your groceries through a simple chat in whatsapp. A primitive version is already there but with introduction of LLM Meta can actually build a app store for whatsapp. Moreover Meta has a data moat which is out of access from Microsoft and Google. It has access to 70% of all human chat conversations in the last 10 years
I don't know, I hate installing apps on my phone. I also hate texting strangers. I put a lot of care into my written communication, and many people in the world are genuinely bad at comprehension.
If I could type a few vague sentences into a box describing what I want, and then have it reliably converted into an unambiguous summary for me to adjust or approve, that would be amazing:
"I would like a gallon of lactose free milk, a pound of fresh chicken breast, a dozen eggs that are on sale, and a bag of frozen hash browns. I need it by 4:30."
5 seconds later up pops a website with a shopping list with product photos, an estimated delivery time with appropriate fee, and an order button linked to Google Pay.
I don’t think an LLM is required for the UX you want. Online grocery delivery already exists. They could easily offer a list-based UI where you upload a list and it populates a cart for you.
I order groceries online a lot. My personal opinion about why this UX wouldn’t work well is that people want to feel like they made an optimal choice. Like when you go to the store to buy an apple, do you just pick the first one? Or do you pick the organic variety that looks freshest? Or maybe you go in for an apple buy decide to get grapes because they look better. There are a few staples I always buy, but generally my grocery purchases are more deliberate. From what I see at the store, many people exhibit such behavior.
My father-in-law visited last week to help with the baby and my wife's broken leg. He asked if I wanted anything from the grocery store. I said, "an instant ramen cup, but not the cheapest brand. Also, watch out because they sometimes have beef broth and I'm allergic." He came back with a choice that I would never have picked myself, but it fit all my criteria and perfectly satisfied my sodium craving.
When I'm outsourcing a chore, I'm doing it to exchange money for time and effort. I would prefer to be able to abstract away the details, and trust that my request will be satisfied. In the current UX, I have to specifically request a tub of "Ben and Jerry's Extra Choco Choo Choo Churn", then be disappointed when the desperate minimum-wage worker somehow buys a version with almond milk because it was the closest one in stock. All I wanted was "a $5 pint of chocolate ice cream" to cheer up my depressed wife, and she's allergic to almonds...
Perhaps an LLM could provide that level of abstraction to customers, while reliably compiling it down to a sufficiently concrete list of options for a worker to retrieve. The abstraction would likely improve the UX, as the workers would have more freedom to choose compatible products rather than arbitrarily specific ones. It would be closer to a personal shopper experience virtually built on top of commodity labor, which seems like the whole goal of these grocery services.
> I said, "an instant ramen cup, but not the cheapest brand. Also, watch out because they sometimes have beef broth and I'm allergic."
This strikes at the heart of the issue. The criteria you’ve placed on the ramen is actually pretty complicated, and yet it is simpler than the criteria many use to select produce, dairy, and meat. Needing to meticulously articulate criteria for the 100+ items purchased every month would be a pain. Items also have interdependencies, e.g. I can only afford the fancy yogurt if I got a deal on something else, and context dependent, e.g. I want to spend more on chicken for the fancy dinner, and less for a weeknight meal.
Of course, these criteria are theoretically learnable by an LLM, but extracting the prerequisite information is hard. So much context exists in your mind. For instance, just looking at your ramen purchase history, do buy chicken ramen over beef ramen because you like chicken better, or is it because you actively dislike beef? It’s hard to say without your explicit input. If every purchasing decision requires explicit input, it seems better to cut out the LLM.
The best UX would be to have a personal shopper. That's the point of using human language. I can be explicit about the properties I care about and vague about the properties I don't care about. I'm not going to pay someone $100 to do my grocery shopping or have my father-in-law do it every week, though. An algorithm that can robustly interpret human language can also optimize a shopping cart significantly faster than a human can, based on massively indexed databases.
Not to be rude but to highlight my point, why are you trying to infer my ramen flavor preferences from my purchase history? I already explicitly said that I am allergic to beef. That's the whole point. It takes practically no effort for a literate human to speak or write down the criteria that are important to them. It is significantly harder for a computer to correctly interpret it, but that's why it seems like an LLM could help.
The Kroger app, at least, lets you specify whether or not substitutions are allowed. Granted, that doesn't solve the problem completely.
On the other hand, the physical store has often been out of certain items over the last couple of years, so I don't think the app is entirely to blame here..
The app's UI and the reality of what the human in the loop does is often inconsistent. In general I would prefer to delegate and give the worker freedom to choose the best option given the unknown constraints. I believe people generally perform better when given more autonomy rather than less. The level of over-specification required to use grocery delivery services at the moment just makes it more stressful than going to the store myself. We've been ordering groceries a lot due to my wife's broken leg, and there's really stupid stuff in every order, like rotten broccoli.
When I do see a worker, they always genuinely seem to be trying their best to find the right thing. I was at a Walgreens at 10pm a couple nights ago, and a poor guy who barely spoke english desperately asked me whether the bag of charcoal briquettes he was holding matched the listing on his phone.
I was under the impression that the messaging apps (WA, Messenger) use end-to-end encryption for the conversations, in which case how does Meta have "access to 70% of all human chat conversations in the last 10 years"?
My own understanding has always been that Facebook cares not one jot about the content of the messages; it's the metadata (i.e. the social network and its patterns of interaction) that's valuable. (Of course that may change, now.)
Indeed, WhatsApp uses e2e encryption. But today's mobile devices are ever more capable with AI accelerators. It's just a matter of time until a locally inferred model is good enough.
“You can book your cab or order your groceries through a simple chat … It has access to 70% of all human chat conversations in the last 10 years.”
I’m feeling like one of those guys in Japan who attacks the customer service robot in the department store—I loath the voice recognition systems behind phone systems for major business (banks, energy suppliers, telcos). I routinely mash #1 until I get to touch tone. I either want to pay a bill or I have a problem the automated system can’t solve—chat bots waste my time & I don’t like talking to friendly robots.
I guess some people are only using their phone and not a website first, in which case a chatbot lets you navigate a much wider set of options by phone. I get it.
Still hasn’t changed my feeling that my mobile phone bot is keeping me chatting just to further train their itself and waste my time. I’m Nexus 1, help me grow as a chatbot.
true, but they've been sitting on their hands as far as actual product improvement, considering their huge resources. Some products have outright regressed with repulsive (and unnecessary) sponsored content and tik-tok style forced feeding. Others are stagnant from the functionality standpoint. Instead of deluding themselves with mass VR, could have done something useful, but didn't, and now someone else is doing it.
I’m not surprised at all - the only way a megacorp-bashing speculation-over-substence article could be voted any higher is if we somehow managed to squeeze “written in Rust!” in there :P
I love VR and AR. I think it’s
incredible and will eventually replace phones as the primary UI. It’s just too versatile, ambient computing around you all the time, anywhere from a single button to a virtual interactive world.
I think though that the tech won’t exist properly till display tech catches up and can give you 10 times more than the Quest 2 gives in a pair of standard eyeglasses. I think we are two decades off still, so all of Meta’s pioneering efforts are way early.
A pivot into AI and spinning off the VR division would make investors very happy and probably be the best move for the company.
> It’s just too versatile, ambient computing around you all the time, anywhere from a single button to a virtual interactive world.
I just watched Dan Harmon's new doc on Decentraland[0] and he raises some really good points about the functional impedance that exists in virtual worlds alongside of all of the grifting that currently exists. Grifting aside, so many applications of VR just don't make sense as a direct virtual representation of the world, at that starts with our inner ear our ability to process visual motion without actually moving.
He shows how these virtual storefronts that your character can walk through are much less efficient at actually allowing you to transact as opposed to a search page on an e-commerce site.
I think it's easy to have romantic visions of how a VR world will look in the future. But if it's driven primarily by profit, as all of the most mainstream attempts have so far, it's going to be an empty crypto hell.
I think the biggest hurdle for VR is being able to use the device for long periods of time. We can view our phones for essentially a full day with some inconvenience, but I can barely stand VR for more than a couple hours without needing to rest my eyes.
Makes a big difference what you're doing. I'm extremely prone to motion sickness but can do vrchat for basically unlimited amounts of time. I think that's because your avatar is mostly synced with your body. That said I can hardly play anything that involves moving your avatar independently of your body, e.g, most games
That's because VR / AR still has a ways to go. It needs to be indistinguishable from real life (moving your head should have a VR object appear in the same real-world spot without a hint of wavering, lighting/shading, etc). The one thing I don't know how they will solve is changing the optical focal point of an object. Your eyes change focus looking at close items (background becomes blurry) or distance (foreground is blurry). Not sure how to have multiple items on one display that are different focal distances.
In theory an array of tiny, low power lasers in the goggles frame shining into your eyes could detect a focus change. This will be a very challenging engineering problem.
How would VR solve the problem with the visual motion not matching motion from the rest of my body? Flight simulator games on a monitor can make me sick.
yeah but that would require a vision of something new and AI-based that is actually relevant to the users, and they seem to have trouble in that department.
A lot of people in the VR content creation space are integrating AI tools into their workflow. It may seem like everyone is distracted by something shiny but what most people are thinking is "Holy shit, this can 10x my productive capacity"
I suspect it will be a technical marvel that will still break, not make. It’ll be an amazing vision of what will eventually replace phones decades from now. Think Apple Newton to the iPhone. I think it will be the high water mark in this generation of VR/AR before the tech gets put on the shelf waiting for compute and display tech to catch up.
The Apple headset is supposed to have dual 4K displays. It's true that you can't render an entire photorealistic world at 120Hz with low latency using a mobile-grade GPU, but there's still a lot you can do in VR and especially AR.
Apple knows how to work within hardware limitations to give users a smooth experience. Like the first gen iPhone, which had perfect lag-free scrolling even if the actual content took many seconds to load.
If only Mark's big bet was on AI and not the Metaverse. Better late than never I suppose. I wonder if he will be brave enough to rename Meta again to an AI-themed name.
An earth-spanning Metaverse controlled by countless human engineers (and countless managers) or LLM/AI (where tons and tons of the dirty work within the metaverse is off-loaded to sophisticated bots)?
I'd rather be interacting in the real world - assisted by smart tech - to make my real life easier/better. This means LLM/AI. There's real value here (if done right...).
The metaverse, for a long time, is still going to feel like gaming 2.0. Just another form of entertainment.
If the article is valid, it's a good move by Zuckerberg.
The article doesn’t say that he abandoned anything, and I’m glad. VR has huge potential but needs big companies like Meta to spend billions on R&D until it hopefully becomes mainstream.
The problem with VR isn’t complicated. People get sick when they use it, and there aren’t any killer apps for it.
These limitations have been known for decades as every VR attempt has run into them. Oculus and The Virtual Boy ran into the exact same problems.
I’m sure someone warned the Meta teams of this and they assumed they’d crack this intractable problem with one weird trick, but they didn’t, and probably nobody will. Certainly not while they’re trying to anyway.
They display those on purpose, because they've found that people who recently bought something are fairly likely to buy another copy in the near future.
Sometimes it's bought as a gift or because they want another one, but I've also seen people break cheap products and then order the same one as if they're supposed to be disposable. (There's the "boots" theory of economic inequality again)
Yes, we’ve been hearing that since 2010 or so. It will be right (again) eventually, probably before we hit AGI. But it’s hard to plan around an event that could come tomorrow or 10 more years from now.
It seems like a silly meme. There was an “AI Winter” with a catchy name once so everyone is always waiting for another one. It’s exactly the kind of stochastic parrot thing that makes LLMs seem so human.
It's not about the efficacy of the techniques we're seeing deployed, it's about the gap between capabilities and promises and the use of AI as a magic keyword for fundraising and relevance. For example, github is now branding itself as "AI Powered".
I've been making a living with many of the tools and techniques from prior to the original "AI Winter" -- but the companies that produced them and that were promising expert systems and other forms of knowledge engineering have very few survivors.
When Meta, which is basically dying advertising company, is promising AI as it's core innovation center, we know that it's a shibboleth for signaling some participation in a notional future economy.
