Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cookingboy | Hacker News Reader

Everyone made fun of Zuck when he acquired Scale for billions and then put Alex Wang, a 20 something to be in charge of Meta Superintelligence and forced out Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner.

Even industry insiders were skeptical when he started hiring top talents from other labs away for 9 figure compensation packages.

And Wall Street definitely hated Meta for their CapEX spending.

Now looking at Muse the consumer product and this new model, I think there is a good chance that Zuck is proven once again as a great executioner, especially when they aren’t innovating in a completely new and unproven product space.

View on HN

> especially when they aren’t innovating in a completely new and unproven product space.

I have no doubt at all that Muse will turn out as great as the other product space Meta pioneered under Zuck - the Metaverse and it's constellation of devices.

Metaverse was right direction with poor execution. Also, it was early... and is still early (if tried again). The world is not there yet for such a thing.

That's just another way of saying that Meta failed to deliver a product that matters to the world today

The Quest literally outsold the Xbox despite being a brand new "gaming console". Very difficult to call this a failure if you understand technology.

> Very difficult to call this a failure if you understand technology.

BlackBerry phones also outsold the XBox (and the Quest), and one doesn't need to understand technology to call it a failure.

I'm talking about the metaverse, not quest. The quest sold well before any of the metaverse nonsense

I'm less confident of you it was even directionally correct. And I'm not really a Meta or Zuck critic in general (the rest of the biz is doing great and Metaverse didn't hurt too much).

Timing is not a detail.

How was it the right direction? None of the VR stuff is profitable or even has a path to profitability since it's such a niche audience who wants that stuff

What's your definition of metaverse? I'm just curious how in practical terms it's actually any different from what is already available via the internet. Like aren't VRChat and World of Warcraft metaverses?

In this context we are referring to the vr world from Meta. Otherwise it's same as the two examples you quoted.. just, worse... and boring.

I always felt it failed due to lack of it being a somewhat open standard. Like if they made a metaverse type file that acted almost like an HTML file that you could upload and create your own little space there with, maybe pay them for hosting and a domain etc, I think it might have worked.

That’s precisely my point, Muse isn’t a new product space at all. AI agents already exist in enterprises and even in the consumer space, there is OpenClaw and Hermes.

I know people like you will point out Metaverse as a failure, but that’s really the exception instead of the norm.

The normies aren't running claw or hermes, they're logging into facebook from their chromebook and clicking "try now"

Ultimately that’s Meta’s superpower.

Taking stuff everyone is already doing and making it easily accessible through Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp.

They’ve been throwing stuff at the wall to see what will stick and after years a cloud based OpenClaw clone seems to have (it’s early days still).

That’s simply leveraging their unprecedented platform dominance.

> That’s precisely my point, Muse isn’t a new product space at all.

How about the Facebook phone then?

I've been running OpenClaw for a year--its been fine, but I really wanted an enterprise experience and to spend less time troubleshooting my agent. Muse exceeded expectations out of the gate, and still does. It has become my daily driver and I shutdown OpenClaw last week.

I get that some are adverse to Meta or want to run local. I don't care who wins the personal agent space, so long as it's not Apple. Buying Siri and having it be useless for anything beyond setting timers for 5 years, is kind of unforgivable. I don't like them in the "default" position to win the personal agent space.

> Buying Siri and having it be useless for anything beyond setting timers for 5 years, is kind of unforgivable

I don't follow, that was just the state of the art at the time, Alexa, Cortana, Hey Google, were all similarly shit. And none has yet offered a scaled up assistant at the free-tier/cheap bundled sub yet.

Quest headsets are roughly as popular as Xbox and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have sold an order of magnitude more units than all other smart glasses combined.

But it's far far too early to draw any conclusions around that.

As I noted in a reply in another subthread: RIM also moved a lot of BlackBerry phones once.

Also, Meta smart glasses are reverse-Metaverse devices; they are instances of the machine navigating the human world, as opposed to humans navigating the machine world.

Sure, but the $100 billion Meta has spent so far on "the Metaverse" is actually false reporting, because the majority of that has been spent on smart glasses.

So when discussing the spending efficiency, that matters.

> Zuck is proven once again as a great executioner

Or Lecun was just bad.

couldn't feel the AGI

Executor is the word, but everyone also knows what this was supposed to mean.

Let’s be honest it’s funnier as written.

> executioner

I suppose you're not a native English speaker, btw: besides the dubious statement, probably "executor" is the word you wanted to use.

>I think there is a good chance that Zuck is proven once again as a great executioner

I've never heard of Zuck being considered a "great executioner." In fact, I'd argue that you just described why his execution is pretty bad lol

There's a difference to pushing out models and having people and more importantly, enterprises, using them.

There's a ton of good models out there, but most are not making any money or profit.

So let's see what happens next. But I don't see any or many enterprises switching from using their Anthropic or OpenAI models to use Meta.

> Everyone made fun of Zuck when [...] forced out Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner.

Really? You'd have to be pretty dumb to keep LeCun, someone who hates LLMs and keeps making claims that end up being proven false in matter of months.

Put someone in charge who made their way by underpaying people to sit and label data vs the inventor of convolutional neural networks. Its no coincidence that shortly after his tenure ended, a model that took a long time to prepare started becoming actually useful.

Comments like this one reinforce the obvious truth that the people who are most "pro ai" are the ones who understand it the least

laughs in VRChat

The real cash cow for AI at the moment is mostly corporations/enterprises, especially with software developing. That's where Anthropic is making their fortune now.

Personal intelligence is nice to have but I won't be paying a subscription for that when the free tiers are more than enough for my needs, unless somehow meta comes-up with a hardware device totally changing the way how we use personal AI (something similar to what iPhone did for mobile phones).

this really really really feels like that dropbox comment to me

Reply on news.ycombinator.com