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Comment by Octoth0rpe | Hacker News Reader

The current leader for me for worst questions suggested by Meta's AI was on a photo someone took of some conspiracy theorist's van with the spraypainted message "THEY EAT BABIES IN DENVER". The suggested questions from their AI were:

- Baby-eating restaurants in Denver

- Denver's unique food scene

wtaf meta.

Beyond that, I simply don't see how Meta can possibly ever monetize their investment in AI. People are and will continue to be willing to pay OpenAI, Anthropic, google, microsoft. No one will pay Meta for their AI. And if their investment was only a couple million and they got some useless suggested questions out of it, whatever. But the size of their investment sure makes it look like someone thinks they'll make money off of it.

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Meta doesn't need to monetize their investment in AI. They need to their eyeballs and not lose them to OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. If they give away AI and people use it to make content for FB/IG that's all they need.

> They need to their eyeballs and not lose them to OpenAI, Anthropic or Google.

At this point I'm not sure how they could 'lose eyeballs' to those 3. There doesn't seem to be any kind of market overlap. Unless we're talking about the very abstract sense of doing _anything_ other than use a meta product is a potential lost eyeball in which case you might as well add the national park system to the list of people they can't lose to, and I don't think that's a useful way to talk about the cost/benefit of Meta's ai spending spree.

They are all "things I do on a cellphone" and more precisely "things with infinite ability to absorb free time on a cellphone" (as opposed to things like Uber which exist to get something done).

It scales in a way that national parks do not and national parks are not competing for the time you spend in the bathroom at work.

Yeah, it's incredibly ham fisted. I do not understand Zuckerberg's brain. The man is incapable of coming up with a good product or it was some product engineer given absolutely free reign to do whatever they wanted. AI summaries do not go with a product made for posts of friends

Meta doesn't need to monetize their AI directly the way OpenAI or Anthropic would do. Meta runs ads, and they can use AI to help advertisers create content, target people, engage, etc.

> Meta runs ads, and they can use AI to help advertisers create content, target people, engage, etc.

It is hard to imagine the level of spending they are doing if that is the sum total of their use case: shoring up a moat for which there really aren't any significant competitors in the first place. It seems like it can only be justified by eventually rolling out some kind of subscription service for... something, but for the life of me I can't think of what they might be able to actually sell to people or corps.

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