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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

Has Mark become distracted from his VR obsession by AI?

It's so crazy but Mark's personal boredom or interest in either of these could swing the whole direction of computing one way or the other.

I do think VR could be the ultimate application of generative AI - one of the biggest bottlenecks at the moment is how expensive and tedious it is to make the 3d content necessary to fill out expansive VR worlds. It could also be central to actually making viable things like codec avatars which currently are stupendously compute intensive but perhaps don't need to be if you can generate the output using AI instead of actually coding and decoding it at the other end.

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> VR obsession

Seems uncharitable. He's making a long term bet. Nothing wrong with that. People would complain if they never pursued any new avenues.

> I do think VR could be the ultimate application of generative AI

Then it seems a good thing for them to pursue then?

Yeah I agree - while I think Mark is showing some pretty knee jerk decision making lately (copying twitter subscription, chasing AI), I think the massive investment in VR shows a vision - if it will pay off or not is up for debate. And this is from someone who severely doesn't like him, there's plenty to good reasons to dislike him but I think the VR move is more strategic than people give it credit for.

> I think the massive investment in VR shows a vision - if it will pay off or not is up for debate.

The Softbank way!

Yeah, the key difference being softbank has a large enough portfolio it theoretically doesn't matter if most of them don't work out. I think it's a poor long term strategy, but that's with hindsight, and I understand the reasoning.

Captain Ahab made a long term bet, too.

As did Frederic Tudor. His bet was similarly unprofitable in its first few iterations, but now you can buy ice by the tonne in New Delhi.

I don’t mind when rich people make huge bets with money that’s within their control.

Facebook's investment on AI/ML has been huge and had a great contribution on the field. They are not new players chasing a fad. They foresaw this long ago, as did many other big companies too.

Here’s some recent ML work from Meta that I really like:

Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761

also this https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.02252.pdf

They foresaw it and the best the CEO could come up with is "multi-modal experiences" and "more photo filters"?

> Has Mark become distracted from his VR obsession by AI?

Possibly more like "people in our VR spaces aren't finding many other people to engage with. Let's generate AI partners that are hard to tell from real people to make up for that."

Oh man, that's kinda terrifying. Then suddenly "everybody in the world" loves Facebook and shills them every chance they get

They'll call it 'seeding', and claim Reddit did the same thing a decade ago when it too was barren.

At least those seeds were by humans, and if you replied, you replied to a human

I think it would be beneficial to have even just ChatGPT level AI bots in virtual worlds. Getting a lot of players online in the same location is hard both network wise and socially. Bots could fill that gap especially for games. Empty VR worlds feel weird so this could bring them to life and free you from designing only smaller spaces or natural landscapes to compensate for the lack of people.

While synthetic worlds are still tedious to create, “nanite” tech in Unreal Engine 5 makes it dead easy to recreate real-world environments within a virtual world. Heck, you can buy almost real forests and cities - enough to create a full-fledged game - for under $200

Well with somewhat justified mockery for his metaverse vision. Meta's reality lab isn't doing too good. minus Quest/Quest2, the execution for XR is just really sloppy, even John Carmack can't stand the pace of Meta[1], fixes takes 6 month(!) to push through.

Even if Zuck wanted, his team doesn't seem to be able to pull that off, be that of tech limitation or just too many value-extract in the team. It doesn't seem XR is the reality. at least from forseeable futures.

[1]: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1626389610635923457

It's possible that he's noticed how much in the way of continuous press that ChatGPT and Bing have received, compared to the mocking that his VR Microsoft Office has.

I 'm glad i got the OQ2 at the initial price. It's a great product unrivaled for many years, i just hope they dont brick it.

He's talking about text and possibly video here, not VR.

Generative AI is key to passthrough AR that goes beyond simple greenscreen-like overlaying and does things like transform people and the environment being viewed.

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