It’s still hard to create something successful.

Remember that Mark Zuckerberg has had “AGI” for over a decade in the form of tens of thousands of human software engineers and Facebook still has barely been able to create a new successful product on their own without acquiring it from a smaller company.

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robofanatic 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Mark Zuckerberg has had “AGI” for over a decade in the form of tens of thousands of human software engineers

This makes me think that companies like Open AI, Anthropic etc are simply new types of body shoppers. body shoppers don’t have their own products they just supply talent to help other companies make products and services.

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utopiah 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Mechanical Turk at scale.

	▲	robofanatic 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Body shoppers on steroids

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bee_rider an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As much as Facebook was a silly and poorly coded site at the time, Zuck seemed to do better in like 2007 when it was pretty small. I wonder if increasing the capabilities of somebody who still has ideas left and isn’t burdened by a bloated organization is the real benefit here.

	▲	swiftcoder an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Successful people also tend to overestimate what portion of that success was down to timing/luck. Zuck had a lot of early-mover advantage in the social media space (especially in the university demographic Facebook started out in). A lot of his later ventures have been trying to break into markets that are already crowded by more established players, and that's just a lot harder to execute on.

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KaiserPro 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Facebook cannot make products, its that simple.

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epolanski 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Oculus?

	▲	KaiserPro 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I worked for oculus, well reality labs. Lots of talented people, and decent hardware, once the stupid politics was overcome. But. In all the time I worked there, we never managed to get "join my friends" feature get made. Trying to join your friends in a game was so fucking hard. You'd think being a social company, who's whole point is connecting people, this would be the first feature. But no. Threads is the only product they have launched in the last 5 years that anything close to successful. Even then it only launched because management ignored it, let them get an MVP out the door before swelling the size of the team from ~8(?) to >>2k The time to fun was also waaay too high. it got better towards the end, but in 2020-2023 it would take ages to log in, update, load, get kicked out, reboot and then join.
	▲	swiftcoder 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Oculus was shipping hardware/software before the Facebook acquisition, and proceeded to slowly bleed out post-acquisition. We shipped a few decent VR headsets in the middle there (Quest 1, 2 and 2s/3), but most of the other initiatives within Meta's reality labs withered on the corporate vine...
	▲	raw_anon_1111 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		That division is losing billions a year. I wouldn’t call it a success
	▲	utopiah 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Did they make though or did they buy? What did they actually buy that wasn't already done at Valve?
	▲	toast0 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Acquired