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Comment by stephen_g | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that they say this cable is “potentially for AI” - I really wonder to what end? The ‘Ask Meta AI’ thing they’ve put in Facebook and Instagram seems pretty useless, the comment summaries are potentially kind-of useful but surely actually reduces the engagement (if it makes people less likely to read the comments and therefore less likely to comment themselves, or like or reply to comments).

So that mostly leaves “AI generated nonsense content” for Facebook and Instagram which surely people are going to get sick of fast…?

Just really not actually seeing where they actually get a useful product out of AI here…

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> Interesting that they say this cable is “potentially for AI”

Where did you read that? It’s certainly not in TFA. There’s a second article from the same substack linked on the page that speculates it “ may be heavily influenced by AI considerations”, which is not really the same as “potentially for AI”. https://subseacables.blogspot.com/2024/10/facebooks-semi-sec...

Yes sorry, it’s from the second, more recent article which has more information about this cable.

Sure but you still made up a quote that isn’t in that article either

It's a paraphrase, not worth getting so hung up about...

Just don't put it in quotes if it's a paraphrase, problem solved

Quotes are for direct speech. Never, ever, ever for paraphrasing. The entire point of quotes is to indicate that the thing is not paraphrased, but what was said verbatim.

So it kind of is worth getting hung up about. But hey, today you learned this! :)

Also, AI doesn't seem that network-intensive to me. Chatting with a LLM is nothing, and image and voice processing/generation is not that much either, compute dominates the costs and latency is high no matter where you are. The models themselves are kind of big, so is training data, but you don't need to move them very often.

I would understand better if it was for VR, or simply video/communication.

AI data centers are not latency sensitive because their purpose is model estimation, not service delivery.

But they still need fibre optic connnections to move immense amounts of data.

> The ‘Ask Meta AI’ thing they’ve put in Facebook and Instagram seems pretty useless, the comment summaries are potentially kind-of useful but surely actually reduces the engagement (if it makes people less likely to read the comments and therefore less likely to comment themselves, or like or reply to comments).

Your comment made me think... What if the idea is that Facebook (I refuse to call it meta) is afraid of the very same thing you outlined and therefore thinks that better to be in control of whatever does the cannibalizing with summaries as opposed to letting the OS vendor or potentially web browser vendors control the "AI"?

I don't know the future but maybe it is possible that what we have now with AI slop is something like an uncanny valley and there is something better once we wade through this trash? Even if not, it is probably better for them to throw cash at this and it turns out to be a nothing burger than they miss it and now their whole business is in jeopardy.

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