> “The Grok integration with X has made everyone jealous,” says someone working at another big AI lab. “Especially how people create viral tweets by getting it to say something stupid.”
It's awesome to see the amazing value for society being created by big tech these days.
To think that even a year ago the idea of Instagram-style social media where all posts are openly AI-generated sounded very dystopian, now I can clearly so it is something people would pay for and HN people would gladly build. I wasn’t always a Luddite, but damn they made me one.
> I wasn’t always a Luddite, but damn they made me one.
If this industry didn't pay so well, I would've been gone years ago. I'm lucky to work in a job that I think is ethical and improving the world, but it's so goddamn embarrassing to even be in the same room as the AI and blockchain types and the ad hucksters.
> If this industry didn't pay so well, I would've been gone years ago.
That's the root of the problem. Intelligent and want to live nicely? Then have your mind exploited for profit! Have morals? Compromise on them and get paid.
I know someone who works for a large gaming company who told me upon hearing a friend of mine was entertaining a position at a Musk company told me "your friend lacks a moral compass to work for that man." I reminded them they work for a company who was fined half a billion dollars for willfully exploiting children. They did not take that well.
I've worked at both a casino company and a large mobile game studio, and the latter was way shadier in almost all aspects.
There's a list of 20-ish large companies we univerally agree are evil and openly bash all the time, but the reality is 95% of the industry is at best doing absolutely meaningless work, and at worst work that's deeply negative for the world.
That would be my God. In parts of the gaming industry working there can make you a pariah though. Not a huge portion but I've seen people get rejected based on working there and a couple other choice companies.
It's not gonna pay well for long, unless you find yourself a very tight and lucrative niche. My goal on the other hand is to buy a house in the woods by end of the year and become a woodworker before I have to be assimilated by the AI wave, maybe doing some coding by hand just for the fun of it on the side. Can't wait for "vibe coding" and "2 years of Copilot experience" to figure among the average list of job requirements.
I bought my wife's grandma's house in rural central Louisiana so that her grandpa could retire and not have to worry about medical bills or anything like that.
It already has a "woodshop"[1] on it, and when the contractor finishes (or at least starts) on repairing the years of neglect, I will also be a woodworker in the woods.
I'm currently a "woodworker" in suburban Houston, but usually only average $500-ish per month (heavily loaded toward a couple of times of year - Mid Spring, Back to School, Christmas).
Hey we can't ALL have the same plan, man! The tech oligarchs that own all of society's wealth will only need so much bespoke furniture!
More seriously, my plan had been to build a decent savings and go work for the USPS or the local public transit company, supplemented with savings interest and maybe some woodworking income. But then the 2024 election happened so who fucking knows anymore.
> go work for the USPS or the local public transit company
Those are very honest and useful jobs for society. More than being paid $250,000 a year to design the next startup frontend by copy-pasting some template
Nah, I plan on owning a chunk of acres and start my own homestead. Raise a few animals like some sheep, goats, rabbits, and of course chickens. Build a nice green house and large garden. Just need to find the right plot of land before making it a serious go. Oh, and can't forget the first step. Gotta win the lottery to pay for it. Not all of have those cushy FAANG salaries.
There are rural land loan companies. Or buy with friends or family. I know people who've done the above and don't tell anybody but it's working out fine.
> The point is to not owe people money so that you are self sufficient and not need to make money.
Trouble is, if you become self-sufficient the government will soon swoop in and try to take a piece of the pie, and now you're back to owing people money again.
The ideal is to owe so much money that you become "too big to fail". Then you get all the benefits of being self-sufficient, but with nothing on paper to share.
I actually want to do everything you're outlining as well, but here in the northeast they're trying to sell ~1 acre for > $100,000 in a lot of desirable "rural" towns. Definitely makes it harder to get into unless you want to commit to far far north.
I've been watching a lot of TV shows that have revealed a lot of pros/cons about different areas of the country. The further north means a much shorter growing season which makes a greenhouse even more important. It also means a lot more infrastructure is required to keep any livestock alive during the longer winters. Places like Texas goes the other direction where the heat during the long summers is brutal, but it means early spring and late fall crops. I really wouldn't want to be any further north than 40°.
Got to find that perfect plot of land that has water, some trees for wood, some land that can be farmed and hopefully a clear sky to the south for solar. Oh, and it's gonna need to be far enough from a city so my telescope can finally be used the way it was meant.
There was /r/SubSimulatorGPT2, but you're telling me people would PAY for that? Maybe if you tricked them - which is arguably what Reddit is doing.
Social media's always been about giving people whatever makes them come back to the site, no matter how unethical. If an army of fake fans makes me think I have an army of real fans and keep posting for attention from my fans, they will totally do that. Unless it's illegal.
What you gotta understand is this world is going straight to hell, humanity might not be around much longer. Might as well embrace the chaos and enjoy the ride down. No point in being a Luddite now, the time for that was decades ago.
In George Orwell's 1984, there is a machine called the versificator that generates music and literature without any human intervention, presumably for the "entertainment" of the proletarians.
Each time I think I've seen dystopia and the pinnacle of stupidity someone finds a new way to top it. Either that's an amazing superpower, or I'm infected with incurable optimism.
Data centers do use a lot of water on average. Warmer climate data centers often use evaporative cooling and can run through millions of gallons of water to offload heat. Google's data centers combined chewed through some 6 billion gallons of water last year.
Closed systems are much more water-efficient, and are more common in cooler climates.
This kind of news should be a death-knell for OpenAI.
If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and you wouldn't even be considering it... unless you knew you weren't about to shortly offer AGI.
Alternative is that OpenAI is being quickly locked out of sources of human interactions because of competition, one way to "fix" that is build you're own meadow for data cows.
xAI isn't allowing people to use the Twitter feed to train AI
Google is keeping it's properties for Gemini
Microsoft, who presumably could let OpenAI use it's data fields appears (publicly at least) to be in a love/hate relationship with OpenAI these days.
So you plant a meadow of tasty human interaction morsels to get humans to sit around and munch on them while you hook up your milking machine to their data teats and start sucking data.
I came across a quote in a forum which was part of a discussion around why corporate messaging and pandering has gotten so crazy lately. One comment stuck out as especially interesting, and I'll quote it in full below:
---
C suites are usually made of up really out of touch and weird workaholics, because that is what it takes to make it to the C suite of a large company. They buy DSS (decision support service / software) from vendors, usually marketing groups, that basically tell them what is in and what isn't. Many marketing companies are now getting that data from twitter and reddit, and portraying it as the broad social trend. This is a problem because twitter and reddit are both extremely curated and censored, and the tone of the conversation there is really artificial, and can lead to really bad conclusions.
---
This is only somewhat related, but if OpenAI did actually succeed in building their own successful social media platform (doubtful) they would be basing a lot of their model on whatever subset of people wanted to be part of the OpenAI social media platform. The opportunity for both mundane and malicious bias in models there seems huge.
Somewhat related, apparently a lot of English spellings were standardized by the invention of the printing press. This isn't surprising; it was one of the first technologies to really democratize written materials, and so it had a very outsized power to set standards. LLMs feel like they could be a bit like this, particularly if everyone continues with their current trends of intentionally building reliance on them into their products / companies / workflows. As a real life example, someone at work realized you could ask co-pilot to rate the professionalism of your communication during a meeting. This seems quite chilling, since you're not really rating your professionalism, but measuring yourself against whatever weird bell curve exists in co-pilot.
I'm absolutely baffled that LLMs are seeing broad adoption, and absolutely baffled that people intentionally adopting and integrating them into their lives. I'm in my early 40s now. I'm not sure if I can get out of the tech field at this point, but I'm seriously thinking about options at this point.
The assumption that you can just build a successful social network as an aside because you need access to data seems wildly optimistic. Next will be Netflix announcing working on AGI because lately show writers have been not very imaginative, and they need fresh content to keep subscribers.
I would just like to appreciate your imagery and wordplay here, it’s spot on and I think should be our standard for conceptualizing this corporate behavior.
They also have a contract with Reddit to train on user data (a common go-to source for finding non-spam search results). Unsure how many other official agreements they have vs just scraping.
One distinctive quality I've observed with OpenAI's models (at least with the cheapest tiers of 3,4 and o3) are their human-like face-saving when confronted with things they've answered incorrectly.
Rather than directly admit fault they'll regularly respond in subtle (moreso o3) to not so subtle roundabout ways that deflect blame rather than admit direct fault, even when it's an inarguable factual error about even conceptually non-heated things like API methods.
It's an annoying behavior of their models and in complete contrast to say Anthropic's Claude which ime will immediately and directly admit to things it had responded incorrectly about when the user mentions it (perhaps too eagerly).
I have wondered if this is something its learned based on training from places like Reddit, or if OpenAI deliberately taught it or instructed via system prompts to seem more infallible or if models like Claude were made to deliberately reduce that aspect.
> It's an annoying behavior of their models and in complete contrast to say Anthropic's Claude which ime will immediately and directly admit to things it had responded incorrectly about when the user mentions it
I don't know whats better here. ChatGPT did have a tendency to reply with things like "Oh, I'm sorry, you are right that x is wrong because of y. Instead of x, you should do x"
> Rather than directly admit fault they'll regularly respond in subtle (moreso o3) to not so subtle roundabout ways that deflect blame rather than admit direct fault
Human-level AI is closer than I'd realised... at this rate it'll have a seat in the senate by 2030.
But this is the opposite of fair use. They're licensing the content, which means they're paying for it in some fashion, not just scraping it and calling it fair use.
If you don't like the fair use of open information, I would expect you to be cheering this rather than losing respect for those involved.
Again, like others have contested with you, how is this The Guardian's fault to have issue with? They convinced ClosedAI to give them money in a licensing deal to use their content as training data without having it scraped for free.
Your sense of injustice or whatevs you want to call it is aimed in the opposite direction.
> Microsoft, who presumably could let OpenAI use it's data fields appears (publicly at least) to be in a love/hate relationship with OpenAI these days.
sama probably would like to take Satya's seat for what he no doubt sees as unblocking the path to utopia. The slight problem is he's becoming a bit lonely in that thinking.
I was always wondering if such sociopaths actually believe they are doing sth for noble reasons, or they consciously use it as a trick in their quest for power.
But don't they have ChatGPT, the fifth or whatever most popular website on the planet? And deals with Reddit. Sure that can't touch the treasure trove Google is sittig on, xAI sure won't give them access and Github could perhaps sell their data (but that's a maybe)
If this were their plan, they’d be discounting that some of their users would be controlled by their own AI.
My guess is that they’re trying other things to diversify themselves and/or to try to keep investors interested. Whether or not it works is irrelevant as long as they can convince others it will increase their usage.
> If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and you wouldn't even be considering it... unless you knew you weren't about to shortly offer AGI.
I’m not a big fan of OpenAI but this seems a little unfair. They have (or at least had) a pretty kick ass product. Great brand value too.
Death-knell? Maybe… but I wouldn’t read into it. I’d be looking more at their key employees leaving. That’s what kills companies.
> I’m not a big fan of OpenAI but this seems a little unfair. They have (or at least had) a pretty kick ass product. Great brand value too.
Even if you believe all that to be true, it in no way contradicts what you quoted or makes it unfair. Having a kick ass product and good brand awareness in no way correlates to being close to AGI.
- Product is not kickass. Hallucinations and cost limit its usefulness, and it's incinerating money. Prices are too high and need to go much higher to turn a profit.
- Their brand value is terrible. Many people loathe AI for what it's going to do for jobs, and the people who like it are just as happy to use CoPilot or Cursor or Gemini. Frontier models are mostly fungible to consumers. No one is brand-loyal to OpenAI.
- Many key employees have already left or been forced out.
Counterpoint, ChatGPT as a brand has insane mindshare and buy in. It is synonymous with LLMs/“aI” in the mind of many and has broken through like few brands before it. That ain’t nothing.
Counter-Counterpoint, I still feel investors priced in a bit more than that. Yahoo! Had major buy in as well and AGI believers were selling investors not just on the next Unicorn, but rather the next industry, AGI not being merely a Google in the 90s, but rather all of the internet and what that would become over the decades to this day. Anything less than delivering that, is not exactly what a large part of investors bought. But then again, any bubble has to burst someday.
My dad uses ChatGPT for some excel macros. He’s ~70, and not really into tech news. Same with my mom, but for more casual stuff. You’re underestimating how prevalent the usage is across “normies” who really don’t care about second order effects in terms of employment and etc.
But I'd be stupid not to use it. It has made boilerplate work so much easier. It's even added an interesting element where I use it to brain storm.
Even most haters will end up using it.
I think eventually people will realize it's not replacing anyone directly and is really just a productivity multiplier. People were worried that email would remove jobs from the economy too.
I'm not convinced our general AIs are going to get much better than they are now. It feels like we're we are at with mobile phones.
Sam Altman is incredibly popular with young people on TikTok. He cured homework - mostly for free - and has a nice haircut. Videos of him driving his McLaren have comment sections in near total agreement that he deserves it.
People argue about the damage COVID lockdowns did to education, but surely we're staring down the barrel of a bigger problem where people can go through school without ever having to think or work for themselves.
Not entirely sure what they meant but chatgpt and the likes have forced schools to stop relying on homework for grades and are instead shifting over to assignments done more as an mini exam, more work for the school, but you can't substitute your knowledge for chatgpt in such cases, you actually need to know to succeed.
Well, that may be, but it's entirely possible that this outlook might change.
In the worst case he's poisoned an entire generation. If ChatGPT doctors, architects and engineers are anything like ChatGPT "vibe-coders" we're fucked.
It might not be the best but people of whom you'd have never thought that they would use it, are using it. Many non technical people in my circle are all over it and they have never even heard of Claude. They also wouldn't understand why people would loathe AI because they simply don't understand those reasons.
> If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and you wouldn't even be considering it... unless you knew you weren't about to shortly offer AGI.
Or even if you did come up with AGI, so would everyone else. Gemini is arguably better than ChatGPT now.
Bingo. The secret sauce is never a sustainable long term moat. Things leak, competitors copy, or they make even better things, employees switch jobs. AI looks less vulnerable, since it’s academically difficult and expertise is still limited. But time and time again, new secret sauce ingredients last for months at a maximum, before they are exceeded oftentimes by hobbyists or other small actors.
I remember at Google they said well if source code leaks nobody is actually worried about stealing tech, the vast majority of code is open to all employees, with some exceptions like spam-, ranking, etc. It’s still protected, but not considered moat.
The moat comes from other things, such as datacenter & global networking infrastructure, marketing new products by pushing them through existing products (put Gemini in search, add chrome to Android etc). Most importantly you can use data you already have to bootstrap new products, say Gmail and calendar integrated with personalized assistants.
If you play your cards right, yes there’s some first-mover advantages, but they are more superficial than your average Twitter hype thread makes you think. It can give you the ability to set unofficial standards and APIs, like Kubernetes, S3 – (maybe OpenAI APIs?). And you can set certain agendas and market your name for recognition and trust. But all that can slip through your fingers if a behemoth picks up where you left off. They have so many advantages, except for being the fastest.
In fairness, the AGI definition predicted by doomsday safety experts who don’t have time for such unimportant concerns as copyright or misinformation via this tech, everyone who is most certainly not merely hyping to get investor cash and the utterly serious and scientifically grounded research happening at MIRI, is essentially that one company will achieve AGI, shortly thereafter that will lead to a singularity and that’s that. No one else could create a second because that scary AGI is so powerful and would prevent anyone else from shutting it down, including other AGI. And no, this is totally no a sci-fi plot, but rigorous research. Incidentally, I’m looking for someone to help me prevent OAI from killing my own grandfather, cause that scenario is also incredibly likely and should be taken seriously.
If it’s not obvious already, I believe we are far away from that with LLMs and that the attention those working in model safety give to AGI over current day concerns like Meta just torrenting for model data, are not very serious people, but I have accepted that this isn’t a popular opinion amongst industry professionals.
Not least because letting laws prevent them from model training is bad according to them, either for the same weird logic Musk uses to justify testing FSD Betas on an unwilling public due to the potential to prevent future deaths, or because they genuinely took RB seriously. No idea what’s worse for serious adults…
AI as we know it (GPT based LLM’s) have peaked. OpenAI noticed this sometime autumn last year when would-be GPT-5 was unimpressive despite the huge size. I still think ChatGPT 4.5 was GPT-5, just rebranded to set expectations.
Google Gemini 2.5 Pro was remarkably good and I’m not sure how they did it. It’s like an elite athlete doing a jump forward despite harsh competition. They probably have excellent training methodology and data quality.
DeepSeek made huge inroads in affordability…
But even with those, intelligence itself is seeing diminishing returns while training costs are not.
So OpenAI _needs_ to diversify - somehow. If they rely on intelligence alone, then they’re toast. So they can’t.
I tentatively agree that LLMs have reached somewhat of a ceiling at this stage and diversifying would make sense at this stage, in any other industry. But as others pointed out, OAI and others have attached their valuation directly to their definition of achieving “AGI”. Any pivot from that, if it were realistic in the coming years (my opinion: it isn’t), would be foolhardy and go against investors, so in turn, this is clearly admitting that even sama doesn’t see AGI as possible in the near term.
On the other hand, if you knew AGI was on the near horizon, you'd know that AGI will want to have friends to remain happy. You can give AGI a physical form so it can walk down to the bar – or you can, much more simply, give it an online social network.
Adding social media to your thing is so 2018. Is the next big thing really just a warmed over version of the last big thing? Is sama just completely out of ideas to save his money-burner?
It's an easy thing to slap on to a service with lots of users. Back in the day this would be called a 'message board'. "Social media" requires the use of iframes that can be embedded on 3rd party sites. OpenAI is a login-only environment so I can see them going for a Discord-type of platform rather than something that spreads to the open web.
AGI is a technology or a feature, not a product. ChatGPT is a product. They need some more products to pay for one of the most expensive technologies ever (to not be delivered yet).
I used to think like this but after seeing the amount of money invested into crypto companies which most average people could have quickly dismissed as irrelevant, I'm not sure VCs are a good judge of value.
Capital gains on AI investment doesn't need a breakthrough. I'm sure pharma companies and others are building their own custom models to assist R&D, but those aren't the ones sinking the truly huge sums into consumer-facing LLMs.
We already know fusion exists and happens and has been happening for billions of years - it's well understood. It may not be simple to reproduce and sustain on earth, but there is a fairly clear path to get there.
There has never been an AGI, and there's no clear path to get there. And no, LLMs are not bringing us any closer to a real AGI, no matter how much Sam Altman wants to try to redefine what "AGI" means so that he can claim he has it.
The difference between AGI funding and fusion funding is the people hawking AGI are better liars and the people funding are far more gullible than the people trying to make fusion power a reality.
We already know fusion has been a grind. For decades.
We already know that computation has grown exponentially in scale and cost, for decades. With breakthrough software tech showing up reliably as it harnesses greater computational power, even if unpredictably and sparsely.
If we view AI across decades, it has reliably improved. Even through its “winters”. It just took time to hit thresholds of usefulness making relatively smooth progress look very random from a consumers point of view.
As computational power grows, and current models become more efficient, the hardware overhang for the next major step is growing rapidly.
>We already know fusion has been a grind. For decades.
Let's also not forget that "AI" has been grinding on for at least half a century, with nothing even coming close to AGI. No, LLMs are not AGI and cannot be AGI. They may be a component of an eventual AGI in the future, but we're still far, far away from artificial general intelligence. LLMs are not intelligent, but they do fool a lot of people.
With the paltry amount of money spent on fusion, it's no wonder it's been delayed for so long. Maybe try putting the $1 Trillion into it in the short time "AI" has had its windfall, and let's see what happens with fusion.
>If we view AI across decades, it has reliably improved
That's your opinion. It's still not much better than Eliza. And LLMs lie half the time, just to make the user happy hearing what they want to hear.
>As computational power grows, and current models become more efficient, the hardware overhang for the next major step is growing rapidly.
And it's still going to "hallucinate" and give wrong answers a lot of the time because the fundamental tech behind LLMs is a bit flawed and is in no way even close to AGI.
>That just hasn’t been the case for fusion.
And yet we have actual fusion reactions happening now, sustained for 22 minutes. We're practically on the threshold of having fusion power, but still there is nowhere near the money being spent on it compared to LLMs, which won't be capable of AGI in spite of the marketing line you've been told.
Maybe it means investors think it will happen, maybe it means investors simply think it will be profitable. It could even be investors seeking a market that has juice long after ZIRP dried up.
Once we unlock fusion, humanity starts down a millenia-long path to making the planet permanently uninhabitable (not just temporarily like with climate change) by turning all the water into bitcoins.
I think it might just be about distribution. Grok gets a lot of interesting opportunities for it over X, then throw in the way people reacted to new 4o image gen capabilities.
> Now they've hamstrung themselves into this AGI nonsense to try
AFAIK, they've been on the AGI hype-train for a very long time, before they reached mainstream popularity for sure. From their own blog (2020 - https://openai.com/index/organizational-update/), here is a mention of their "mission":
> We’re proud of these and other research breakthroughs by our team, all made as part of our mission to achieve general-purpose AI that is safe and reliable, and which benefits all humanity.
I'm not sure OpenAI trying to reach AGI is a "strategic mistake" as much as "the basis for the business" (which, to be fair, was a non-profit organization initially).
Someone down below mentioned ads, and I think that might well be the route they're going to try: charging advertisers to influence the output of the AI.
As for whether it will work, I don't know how they're possibly going to get the "seed community" which will encourage others to join up. Maybe they're hoping that all the people making slop posts on other social networks want to cut out the middleman and have communities of people who actually enjoy that. As always, the sfw/nsfw censorship line will be an important definer, and I can't imagine them choosing NSFW.
There could be too-many-cooks in the AI research part of their work.
Also, I don't think Sama thinks like a typical large org managers. OpenAI has enough money to have all sorts of products/labs that are startup like. No reason to standby waiting for the research work.
I haven't been happier online in the last 10 years than after I stopped checking social media. And in that miserable time it wasn't even a naked beg for training data like this.
But I really don't see why anyone would even use an open ai "social network" in the first place.
It does allow one thing for open ai. Other than training data which admittedly will probably be pretty low quality. It is a natural venue for ad sales.
Social media is a plague, including LinkedIn. Anything that lets you follow others and/or erodes your anonymity is just different degrees of cancer waiting to happen.
The best I ever enjoyed the internet was the sweet spot between dial up and DSL where I was gaming in text based/turn based games, talking on forums, and chatting using IRC.
Agreed. I wasn't particularly hooked, didn't use it very much already. As an architect, designer, and professor I had ig, and for the last five years basically only for work. But the feeling of freedom in its absence these past few months has been palpable.
Early fb reconnecting with people I hadn't seen since high school was okay. The blog / Google Reader era happening at the same time was the real golden age for me. And it's been all downhill since.
I use both, and even Reddit has issues. Likewise, HN is topically more like a single, insufficiently modded, subreddit. Still enjoyable, but easily brigades on certain topics. This is most readily seen for anything political.
The term "eternal september" dates back to the 90s, referring to the phenomenon where new undergraduates would arrive and suddenly have access to USENET to make bad posts.
Oh I get one thing - other than ads. So the idea of an LLM filter to algorithmically tailor your own consumption has some utility.
The logical application would be an existing social network -using- chat gpt to do this.
But all the existing ones have their own models, so if they can't plug in to an existing one like goooooogle did to yahoo in the olden days, they have to start their own.
That makes a certain amount of (backward) sense for them. I don't think it'll work. But there's some logic if you're looking from -their- worldview.
Isn't the selling point behind Blue sky is that you can customize your feed your way? I don't know the tech behind that but the feed is "open" isn't it? Can they plug into that?
Social media is this generation's cigarettes. It feels good to use it for a bit, and there's an enormous amount of advertising for it and social pressure to use it, but it's extremely addictive and the long-term personal and public health consequences are absolutely crushing.
I hope one day we can strictly regulate social media & make pariahs of the people who built it, as we did with tobacco. Instead, we just did the equivalent of handing the entire federal government into Phillip Morris's control, so my hopes are not high.
Profile photo for what? Social media? Then you need to be there, which is self-defeating. If you leave your account dormant, no one will find it anyway but the owners of the platforms will still use you to count the number of users.
I mean 90% of users want to quit, but can't. I'm just proposing a way to fight back.
The more people change their profile photos into the campaign logo, the less attractive sm becomes. Maybe at some point even the very addicted users will quit.
90% is implausibly high. If that many people wanted to quit social media, social media would no longer exist.
> I'm just proposing a way to fight back.
I propose an alternative is to just quit yourself and get on with your life. As the people around you understand you are happy without social media, they too can become interested and quit. Social media only works while there are people on it. The fewer of us there are, the less interesting it is.
How many times have there been campaigns to delete social media accounts? They never last, and often even the organisers come back. I don’t see a reason why this time it would work.
All that said, far from me to discourage you. If you feel it’s a worthy goal, I encourage you to do it. I genuinely hope I’m wrong and that you’ll succeed where others have failed.
> I haven't been happier online in the last 10 years than after I stopped checking social media. And in that miserable time it wasn't even a naked beg for training data like this.
Meta/Twitter/etc. are drug dealers.
> But I really don't see why anyone would even use an open ai "social network" in the first place.
I really don't see why anyone would even use Heroin yet they do.
HN skips many of the dark patterns that other social medias have:
- no infinite scroll (you have to click on "More")
- no personal recommendation
- no feedback loop between your upvotes and the feed
- no messaging or following between users
HN looks a lot more like news groups from back in the days.
The comment threads are basically "infinite scroll". They're paginated once they hit 500 or something. Scanning a SM post takes 2 seconds, HN comments much longer.
But I can’t follow them.
I don’t get notifications when they post new links or comments, I can’t send them specifically my links and comments.
I have no groups or circles.
HN is more of a discussion forum and not for connecting with others.
>One idea behind the OpenAI social prototype, we’ve heard, is to have AI help people share better content. “The Grok integration with X has made everyone jealous,” says someone working at another big AI lab. “Especially how people create viral tweets by getting it to say something stupid.”
This would be a decent PR stunt, but would such a platform offer anything of value?
It might be more valuable to set AI to the task of making the most human social platform out there. Right now, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, etc. are all rife with bots, spam, and generative AI junk. Finding good content in this sea of noise is becoming increasingly difficult. A social media platform that uses AI to filter out spam, bots, and other AI with the goal of making human content easy to access might really catch on. Set a thief to catch thieves.
Who are we kidding. It's going to be Will Smith eating spaghetti all the way down.
An interesting use for AI right now would be using it as a gatekeeping filter, selecting social media for quality based on customisable definitions of quality.
Using it as a filter instead of a generator would provide information about which content has real social value, which content doesn't, and what the many dimensions of "value" are.
The current maximalist "Use AI to generate as much as possible" trend is the opposite of social intelligence.
It's a nice idea in principle, but would probably immediately become a way by the admins to promote some views and discourage others with the excuse of some opinions being of lower quality.
I think that's right. Twitter without ads, showing you content you _do_ want to see using some embeddings magic, with decent blocking mechanisms, and not being run as a personal mouthpiece by the world's most unpopular man ... certainly not the worst idea.
Why would AI be any better at filtering out spam than developers have so far been with ML?
The only way to avoid spam is to actually make a social network for humans, and the only way to do so is to verify each account belongs to a single human. The only way I've found that this can be done is by using passports[0].
I've never been comfortable with this idea that people should use their real identity online. Sure they can if they choose to, but IMO it absolutely shouldn't be required or expected.
The idea that I would give a copy of my passport to a social media company just to sign up, and that the social media company has access to verify the validity of the passport with the issuing government, just feels very wrong to me.
I agree. That’s why onlyhumanhub doesn’t expect you to share your name. The passport verification is there to ensure you are a unique human, but the name of that human is not stored.
I’m perfectly happy talking to someone without knowing their real name. I just want to be more confident that they’re a unique human, and not just another sock puppet account run by some Russian agent (or evil corporation) trying to change people’s beliefs at scale.
There's almost no time investment in building onlyhumanhub. It's only a few months old (based on the copyright), have effectively a text-only homepage, and account creation which I assume allows you to upload photos of your passport and link your existing social media profiles.
There are so many ways that could go wrong, from this being a phishing attack to this being a well intended project that happens to create a database linking passport IDs to all of a person's social media accounts.
The idea that they may eventually offer a social media platform that doesn't require public use of your real identity is all well and good, but they're still a honeypot for doxing.
Not strictly but Debian, where member inclusion is done through an in person chain of trust process so you have clusters of people who know each other offline as a basis.
Also, most WhatsApp contacts have been exchanged IRL, I presume.
Yes, this does mean that dual nationals can have two separate human accounts. But it’s still better than an infinite number of accounts, which is the case for social networks right now.
You can always get around identification requirements, for example by purchasing a fake passport in this case. The idea is to increase the cost/friction of doing so as much as possible.
A fake ID is a lot harder to get your hands on than a new email, burner phone, etc.
No, nothing of value. If you ever want to lose faith in the future of humanity search "@grok" on Twitter and look at all the interactions people have with it. Just total infantilism, people needing tl;drs spoon-fed to them, needing summarization and one-word answers because they don't want to read, arguing with it or whining to Musk if they don't get the answer they want to confirm what they already believe.
the worst is like a dozen people in the replies to a post asking Grok the exact same obvious follow-up question. Somehow, having access to an LLM has completely annihilated these commenters' ability to scroll down 50 pixels.
Before we get too excited with disparaging those seeking summaries, it's common for people of all levels to want summary information. It doesn't mean they want everything summarized or are bad people.
I'm not particularly interested in "tariffs, what are they good for, what's the history and examples good or bad"... so I asked for a summary from grok. It gave me a decent summary. Concise and structured. I asked a few follow-ups, then went on with my life knowing a little more than nothing about tariffs. A win for summarized information.
> people needing tl;drs spoon-fed to them, needing summarization and one-word answers because they don't want to read
It's bad that this need exists. However, introducing this feature did not create the need. And if this need exists, fulfilling it is still better, because otherwise these kind of people wouldn't get this information at all.
This is worse because the AI slop is full of hallucinations which they will now confidently parrot. No way in hell does this type of person verify or even think critically about what the LLMs tell them. No information is better than bad information. Less information while practicing the ability to critically use it is better than bad information in excess.
You also can get Grok to fact check bullshit by tagging @grok and asking it a question about a post. Unfortunately this is not realtime as it can sometimes take up to an hour to respond, but I've found it to be pretty level headed in its responses. I use this feature often.
True. I see that too. It's a good addition to community notes. It can correctly evaluate "partially true" posts and those lacking details, so it's great at spotting cherry-picked information.
Anyone can be anything and do anything they want in an abundant, machine assisted world. The connections, cliques, friends and network you cultivate are more important than ever before if you want to be heard above the noise. Sheer talent has long fallen by the wayside as a differentiator.
…or alternatively it’s not The Culture at all. Is live performance the new, ahem, rock star career? In fifty years time all the lawyers and engineers and bankers will be working two jobs for minimum wage. The real high earners will be the ones who can deliver live, unassisted art that showcases their skills with instruments and their voice.
Those who are truly passionate about the law will only be able to pursue it as a barely-living-wage hobby while being advised to “not give up the night job” — their main, stable source of income — as a cabaret singer. They might be a journalist or a programmer in their twenties for fun before economics forces them to settle down and get a real, stable job: starting a rock band.
The Culture is about a post-capitalist utopia. You’re describing yet another cyberpunk-esque world where people have still have to do wage-labor to not starve.
You’re right so I made a slight edit to separate my two ideas. Thanks for even reading them at all! I try to contribute positively to this site when I can, and riffing on the overlap between fiction and real-life — a la Doctorow — seems like a good way to be curious.
The culture presents such a tempting world view for the type of people who populate HN.
I've transitioned from strongly actually believing that such a thing was possible to strongly believing that we will destroy ourselves with AI long before we get there.
I don't even think it'll be from terminators and nuclear wars and that sort of thing. I think it will come wrapped in a hyper-specific personalized emotional intelligence, tuned to find the chinks in our memetic firewalls just so. It'll sell us supplements and personalized media and politicians and we'll feel enormously emotionally satisfied the whole time.
That's why it's so important to reduce all of your personal data points online. Imagine what they can reconstruct based on their modeling and comparing you to similar users. I have 60 years of involuntary data collection ahead of me. This is not going to be fun.
> I don't even think it'll be from terminators and nuclear wars and that sort of thing
I do. And I don't even think the issue is a hostile AI. There are 8 billion people in the world. Millions of those people have severe mental issues and would destroy the world if they could. It seems highly likely to me that AI will eventually give at least one of those people the means.
That'll be great for the world's natural outsiders. Those that hate pop music and dislike even taylored ads because of the creepy feeling of influence. Or who don't follow any politicians because they're all out to hoodwink you.
Oh, a subset will be at risk of being artificially satisfied but your hardcore grouch will always have a special "yeah, yeah, fuck off bot" attitude.
Alternatively they can sell you anything if they can make you feel content or euphoric on their command. Get your new drug gland today, free of charge, sponsored by Blackrock
There is a bias there in action: we are assuming that the entire world is like this thing we just happen to be thinking about.
It is not.
Even if it were just a minority, there are plenty of people outside "this thing" that will profit from the ((putative) majority's) anesthesia. Or which at least will try to set the world on fire (anybody remember the elections in USA a few months ago? That was really dumb. But sometimes a dumb feat shows that one is alive, which is better than doing nothing and being taken for dead. Or it is at least good-enough peacocking to attract mates and pass on the genes, which is just an extravagant theory of mine that I'm almost certainly sure is false. And do not take this as an endorsement of DJT). I'm not being an optimist here; I've seen firsthand the result of revolutions, but it may be the least-bad outcome.
> I've transitioned from strongly actually believing that such a thing was possible to strongly believing that we will destroy ourselves with AI long before we get there.
I think we'll just die out. Everyone will be too busy having fun to have kids. It's already started in the West.
I wouldn't call my kid-skipping activites fun, but go off.
Spending a life on the treadmill doesn't encourage more walks. It encourages burning it down. All I've known is work. Pass on more, thanks. I hear you/others now:
But past generations managed...
That's exactly my point. Despite all of our proclaimed progress, we're still "managing". Maintaining this circus/baby-crushing machine is a tough sell.
To get where I could afford to have kids, I became both unprepared and uninterested.
What's more: I'm one of the lucky ones. I was given a fancy title and great-but-not-domicile-ownership-great pay for my sacrifice. Plenty do more work for even less reward.
While the west has gone this way, there also seems to be a strong undercurrent (at least here in Australia) of "we can't afford to have kids (yet)".
As housing has moved further out of reach of young people, some don't seem to feel their lives are stable enough to make the leap. The trend was down anyway, but the housing crisis seems to be an aggravating factor.
This subject has been investigated a lot. In many countries governments make it much easier and more affordable to have children, and it doesn't seem to make any difference.
I agree, using housing as a source of wealth has broken a whole generation. When the boomers of the world start to massively die out (any year now), housing will deflate, but not spectacularly without a crisis (people don't want to settle where the cheap houses are in a bull market).
> The real high earners will be the ones who can deliver live, unassisted art that showcases their skills with instruments and their voice.
We already have so many of those that it’s very hard to make any sort of living at it. Very hard to see a world in which more people go into that market and can earn a living as anything other than a fantasy.
Cynically - I think we'd probably end up with more influencers, people who are young, good looking and/or charismatic enough to hold the attention of other people for long enough to sell them something.
> Those who are truly passionate about the law will only be able to pursue it as a barely-living-wage hobby while being advised to “not give up the night job” — their main, stable source of income — as a cabaret singer. They might be a journalist or a programmer in their twenties for fun before economics forces them to settle down and get a real, stable job: starting a rock band.
Controversial stance probably, but this very much sounds like a world I'd love to live in.
What this tells me is that xAI / X / Grok have together become a much bigger threat to OpenAI than they anticipated. And I believe it's true -- Grok's progress has been much faster than ChatGPT's over the past year, even if we can nitpick evals over which is technically "better" at any moment. The fact that it's hard to tell is itself a huge statement considering the massive advantage OpenAI and ChatGPT had not too long ago. I mean, Grok was basically a joke when it first launched!
It already is a search engine and has been for a while.
I think you don't recognize it as such because it's incorporated into the chat box, but I use chatgpt as my search engine 90% of the time and almost never use google any more.
I think the social stuff will also just be incorporated into the chat interface in the form of 'share this image', etc, and isn't going to be like twitter with a bunch of bots posting.
They just want the next wave of Ghibli meme clicks to go to them, really.
This will be built on the existing thread+share infra ChatGPT already has, and just allow profiles to cross-post into conversations, with UI and features more geared toward remixing each other's images.
The answer seems more obvious to me. They dont even care if its competitive or scales too much. xAI has a crazy data advantage firehousing Twitter, llama FB/IG and CGPT just has, well, the internet.
Id hope they have some clever scheme to acquire users, but ultimately they want the data/
I actually would love this. I hate having to go to another website to share some thoughts I had using tools in a platform.
I miss the days when experiences would actually choose to integrate other platforms into their experiences, yes I was sort of a fan of the FB/Google share button and Twitter side feed (not the tracking bits though).
I wasn't a fan of LLM and the whole chat experience a few years ago, I'm a very mild convert now with the latest models and I'm getting some nominal benefit, so I would love to have some kind of shared chat session to brain storm, e.g. on a platform better than Figma.
The one integration of AI that I think is actually neat is Teams + AI Note taking. It's still a hit or miss a lot of the time, but it at least saves and notes something important 30% of the time.
Collaboration enhancements would be a wonderful outcome in place of AGI.
Controversial opinion: it's not about the generator of the content, human or not, but about the originality of the content itself. Human with the help of AI will generate more good quality as a result.
Humans are just as good as bots in generating rubbish content, if not more so.
Twitter reduced content production cost significantly, AI can take it another step down.
At minimum, a social network where people share good prompt engineering techniques will be valuable to people who are on the hunt for prompts. Just like the Midjourney website, except creating a high quality image is no longer a trip to the beach, but a thought experiment. This will also significantly cut down the cold start friction and in combination with some free credits, people may have more reasons to stay, as the current chat based business model may reach it's limit for revenue generation and retention, as it's just single player mode.
If we need unique valid human language outputs I'll still disagree. Most human output is garbage. Good luck on your two tasks: 1) searching for high quality content 2) de-duplicating. Both are still open problems and we're pretty bad at both. De-duping images is still a tough task, before we even begin to address the problem of semantic de-duplication.
The idea is to let humans be humans, make a mess, debate, have their opinions, and AI comes after that and removes the herp derp from the useful parts.
As a test of concept copy paste this whole page, put it in a LLM and ask for an article. It will come out without junk, but will reflect a greater diversity of opinion, more arguments, will do debunking, and generally have better grounding in our positions than the original content.
So it's careful synthesis over human chats that is the end value. Humans provide that novelty and lived experience LLMs lack, LLMs provide consistent formatting and synthesis. The companies that understand that users are the source of entropy and novelty will stop trying to own the model and start trying to host the question.
Wondering why reddit doesn't generate thousands of articles per day from comment pages. It would crush traditional media in both diversity and quality. It would follow the interesting topics naturally.
This is why LLMs are so helpful in writing research proposals. If I’m writing a proposal, I basically need to vibe on a concept without worrying about it sounding entirely professional / buttoned-up and concise - otherwise I get bogged down in word smithing. So I tell it about the concept I’m trying to get across, and it converts that into a more concise and punchy paragraph, while also providing critical technical feedback (if I ask) and making sure I’m using terms of art correctly. As you put so eloquently, it removes the herp derp.
And then, kind of like how LLMs are good for boilerplate code but get less helpful as you get to more specific problems, this approach works for the first few paragraphs but deteriorates the deeper in you get.
The idea is to use the LLM as a word smith, it doesn't conceptualize novel ideas from itself, that is your job. I would normally chat the topic until it gets it, and after that I ask it to write it up as an article.
Feels like a natural next step, honestly. If they already have users generating tons of content via ChatGPT, hosting it natively and adding light social features might just be a way to keep people engaged and coming back. Not sure if it's meant to compete with Twitter/Instagram, or just quietly become another daily habit for users
Perhaps, but currently OpenAI is stuck sharecropping with existing social networks – producing the content but not deriving the value. It is hard to move grander visions forward when you don't own the land.
So Facebook is trying to get into AI (e.g. its chatbot-"user" debacle) and OpenAI wants to form its own social network. Our world is becoming the recycled shit-food of this technological ouroboros.
If a front figure of a big tech happens to go plant based, that simply means a good role model for Ai in this time (and humans..). I’m for a big YES. At first I wasn’t positive due to a sense of bloating the service and risking forms of leaking, but considering that most social plattforms needs more ethical thinking integrated and that social media can be done in new smart way; it’s much easier than making a AI-driven Search Engine (takes extreme compute to be as good as people likely expect without bringing a negative opinion for chatgpt as such; since high quality tailored answers will take some compute..) to make a meaningful social ’plattform’; interaction with Ai can be done much cooler than today in co-exploration :) ..
Okay, thinking charitably here... maybe a play at getting training data they don't have to steal? (although it does seem like rotating the ladder instead of the lightbulb...)
I think a social network is not necessarily a timeline-based product, but an LLM-native/enabled group chat can probably be a very interesting product. Remember, ChatGPT itself is already a chat.
Yes, this. That's my bet if OpenAI follows through with social features.
Extend ChatGPT to allow multiple people / friends to interact with the bot and each other. Would be interesting UX challenge if they're able to pull it off. I frequently share chats from other platforms, but typically those platforms don't allow actual collaboration and instead clone the chat for the people I shared.
Gotcha, the NLP-enabled version of the good old IRC weatherbot.
For a moment I had a funnier mental image of a chat app with an input field that treats every input as a prompt, and everyone's chatting through the veil of an LLM verbosity filter.
There might be something chat RPG-like there worth trying though ...
Doesn't matter. Subreddits create vast islands of value. A single sub overrun with bots is quarantined effectively.
That is why Reddit is one of my favourite social sites. It is algorithmic but if you go to r/assholedesign you get asshole design. (and an anal mod who keeps it like that) Etc.
I guess where this is all going in the long run is something with an interface similar to TikTok, where the user gives rapid feedback to train an algorithm to generate content that they "love", er, that maximally tickles their reward circuitry.
Sounds like they are thinking about instagram, which originated as a phone app to apply filters to a camera and share with friends (like texting or emailing them or sending them a link to a hosted page), and evolved into a social network. Their new image generation feature has enough people organically sharing content that they probably are thinking about hosting that content on pages, then adding permissions + follow features to all of their existing users' accounts.
honestly it's not a terrible idea. it may be a distraction from their core purpose, but it's probably something they can test and learn from within a ~90 day cycle.
With all the other social networks trying to keep their data private because they all want to try their own AIs, it makes sense that OpenAI would want to have its own social network that wouldn't charge them for the data. I still doubt they actually launch it.
Counter opinion - What tech people don't seem to realise about AI is that putting it into a user-friendly format for the average person is what has led to this current revolution, i.e. ChatGPT
This is just the next step of that. This also doesn't stop them working on 'AGI', you need the data as well as the models, as most people familiar with the field will known. I will be happy to be proven wrong on this prediction.
It makes no sense to build a social network nowadays.
With Mastodon and Bluesky around, users have free options. Plus X and Threads, and you can see how the market is more than saturated.
IMHO they should look into close collaboration/minority stake with Bluesky or Reddit instead. You have a huge pool of users already, without the need to build it up from the ground up from scratch.
Heck, OpenAI probably has enough money to just buy Reddit if they want.
I don't know about Reddit, but Bluesky would never in a million years partner themselves publicly with OpenAI. I can't comment on the opinions of the team themselves because I just don't know, but the users would revolt. Loudly.
Seems telling that an org had arguably the leading AI, as the planet knows it at least, and still can't exist without putting ads in front of eyes. So much for the hype.
The whole value proposition of a social media is that everyone you know (almost) is on it. That's why young people don't use Facebook.
They'd be better off buying one
I've always thought that the social networks like X and BlueSky are sort of like the distributed consciousness of society. It is what society, as a whole / in aggregate, is currently thinking about and knowing its ebbs and flows and what it responds to are important if you want to have up to date AI.
So yeah, AI integrated with a popular social network is valuable.
Both are founders of a so-called non-profit and are suing each other. Their legal arguments are public at this point. By reading them, one may understand that it's hard to choose between 'yes' and 'no' as an answer. Maybe, we could request and take into account the opinion of what they 'created' that might outlast them and their conflict, namely AI.
An idea which sounds horrifying but would probably be pretty popular: a Facebook like feed where all of your “friends” are bots and give you instant gratification, praise, and support no matter what you post. Solves the network effect because it scales from zero.
Sam Altman is retaliating against Musk for Grok and Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, trying to ride the wave of anti-Musk political heat, and figure out a way to pull in more training data due to copyright troubles.
If they launch, expect a big splash with many claiming it is the X-killer (i.e. the same people that claimed the same of Mastadon, Threads, and Bluesky), especially around here at HN, and then nobody will talk about it anymore after a few months.
Not-exactly-devil's-advocate: you're trying to sort content by quality. That's elitist. Also, those those filtered contents are worth more. You can't have only premium contents.
Someone should do it anyway and make it dominant anyway ASAP.
Let the robot run ONE SITE. You still have Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, Facebook, Reddit, etc., if you want a non-stop stream of political content on your feed.
Some of the comments here are so detached from my reality that I have to wonder whether I'm the crazy one.
Nobody I know would be interested in a social media platform that is just AI. Contrary to what some commenters here seem to think, most people are interested in things like upvotes and likes and whatnot... because they understand it's (mostly) humans on the other end. Without that, it would all be rather hollow, and nobody would want to participate in it. I think most people would find the insinuation that they're so shallow as to want that a bit insulting.
I wonder to what degree this move would be genuine company strategy, and to what degree it'd just be what the sub headline says: "Is Sam Altman ready to up his rivalry with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg?"
Sounds like OpenAI want to further leverage their platform into a tool for directing public opinion. Or maybe this is just a middle finger directed at Elon Musk by Sam Altman, who knows.
A social network that faithfully and intelligently curated posts according to my own continuously updated (explicit) direction would be most excellent.
But it would also juice echo chamber depth and further amplify extremist "engagement".
And the monetary incentives for OpenAI to generate most of the content, the "people", and the ads, including creative hallucinations and novel extremisms, so they directly match each of our curation directions, would enshittify the whole thing within a short minute.
--
The time has come to outlaw conflict of interest businesses that scale (the conflict).
If a startup plan includes "sales" and "customers": Green light go.
If it talks about ways to "monetize": Red trash can.
I don't believe it was well designed, it felt clunky to use, concepts weren't intuitive enough to understand after a few uses.
I tried to use it for a few months after release, always got frustrated to the point I didn't feel like reaching out to friends to be part of it.
The absurd annoyance of its marketing, pushing it into every nook and cranny of Google's products was the nail in the coffin. I'm starting to feel as annoyed by the push with Gemini, it just keeps popping up at annoying times when I want to do my work.
AI bots already make up a significant percentage of users on most social networks. Might as well just take the mask off completely--soon, we'll all be having conversations (arguments, most likely) with 'users' with no real human anywhere near them.
I've been saying for a while that the next innovation beyond TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube is to get rid of human creators entirely. Just have a 100% AI-generated slop-feed tailor made for the user.
There's already a ton of AI slop on those platforms, so we're like half way there, but what I mean is eliminating the entire idea of humans submitting content. Just never-ending hypnotic slop guided by engagement maximizing algorithms.
Nice in theory but don’t know how practical it is to actually do.
How do you define “good”? Theres obvious examples at the extremes but a chasm of ambiguity between them.
How do you compute value? If an AI takes 200 million images to train, wait let me write that out to get a better sense of the number:
200,000,000
Then what is the value of 1 image to it? Is it worth the 3 hours of human labour time put into creating it? Is it worth 1 hour of human labour time? Even at minimum wage? No, right?
Hahaha they’re cooked. GPT 4.5 was a massive flop. GPT 4.1 is barely an improvement after over a year. Now they’re grasping at straws. Anyone actually in this field who wasn’t a grifter knew improvements are sigmoidal.
What a dumbfuck article. It's essentially a gossip-rag level story based on a few random and meaningless tweets from a couple of billionaire douchebags.
I speculated a ways back [1] that this was why Elon Musk bought Twitter. Not to "control the discourse" but to get unfettered access to real, live human thought that you can train an AI against.
My guess is OpenAI has hit limits with "produced" content (e.g., books, blog posts, etc) and think they can fill in the gaps in the LLMs ability to "think" by leveraging raw, unpolished social data (and the social graph).
But collecting more data is just a naive task. The reason scale works is because of the way we typically scale. By collecting more data, we also tend to collect a wider variety of data and are able to also collect more good quality data. But that has serious limits. You can only do this so much before you become equivalent to the naive scaling method. You can prove this yourself fairly easily. Try to train a model on image classification and take one of your images and permute one pixel at a time. You can get a huge amount of scale out of this but your network won't increase in performance. It is actually likely to decrease.
It's awesome to see the amazing value for society being created by big tech these days.
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