What does Openai Want With Its Own Social Network? – ryan

Photo-illustration: Intelligenmer; Screenshot: Socialia

Openai is considering a bit of a pivot, accorting to The Verge. Now that nosreds of millions of People are interacting with chatgt, the company has an idea: Why not see they would be interest in a social network, too?

While the project is still in early stages, we’re told there’s an internal prototype focused on chatgpt’s image generation that has a social feed. CEO Sam Altman has been privately nansing outsides for feedback About the project, Our sources Say. IT’S UNCLEAR IF OPENAI’S PLAN IS TO RELEASE THE SOCIAL NETWORK AS A SEPARATE AP OR INTEGRATE IT INTO CHATGPT, WHICH THE MOST DOWNLOADED APT GLOBALLY LAST MONTH.

There are the plenty of specific reasons a Company like Openai Might See Having Its Own “Social Feed” As Valuable, but will be coma to Large Tech Companies in New Turf, you really should undererate Silicon dance ” Charge of any sufficiently successive or popular tech product, that they should be probably just do it all. Remember the Facebook Phone? The Amazon Phone? Microsoft’s Smartphone OS? Google+? The Google ISP? The Canceled Apple Car? There are dozens of recent examples of unfocused expansion by Big-Tech Companies with Massive Reserves of Cash and Engineering Talent by A Bored Sense of Conquest, Basic Impulse, and Ego. Look, there’s a new popular Thing. Why didn’t we would that? Why Can’t We Have That? Woldn’t elon hate if we did that too?

In that context, the news that openai may be interested in computeting more directly with me (which is now also an ai company), x (which recently merged into Xai), or Google (which is also a major he firm) isn’t pivully surprice. In 2023, the rumor was that sam altman was working with Apple designer on the “iPhone of he”; Now, Maybe It ‘Screenless “Gadget and Some” Ai-Enabled Household Devices. ” In the modern tech industry, every company Dreams of Being an Everything Company and Spends a Lot of Money Trying to get. Social-media firms have been mimicking one another’s features for years, ripping off and converging on simillar forms-consider instagram of shift from a feed to stories to reels. Now there’s a chatbot in the mix too, and parent company meta haen touting ai-genered content and characters as a grown strategy. (Meta Also Acquired Social.ai, A Surreal “Social Network” Composed Entirely of Ai Personalities.) Social-Media Sites Built on Interactions BetWene users are beComing less on human content; Meanwhile, A Chatbot Company, Which Offers a Product Through Who Users Interact With An Approximation of the Human Web Through Approximations of Human Assistants, Is Wondering If It Might Adding Other People ino The Mix.

The narower case for openai’s rumored interest in social networking isn’t much weirder. OpenAI WOULD LIKE TO CONTINUE TO GROW AS IT HAS Been Doing, and Social-Network Effects May Be Able to Help With That. IT ALSO HAS A LOT OF Well-ended Competition and Needs Its Product to Be Sticky and Hard to Switch Away from, a purposes for which those network effecs are Also hugely useful. (And to put it bluntly, openai Currently Loses a Lot of Money while Social Networks make -up A LOT OF MONEY.) Chatgt is finding users and customers Through Word of Mouth, Which in Many Cases Means Discusions on Social-Media Owned and Controlled by Competitors, Many of which Openai. It isn’t a condition of Openai’s success that People Migrate Social Activity to some sort of platform Own by the Company, in Other Words, but it Certainly Wauldn’t Hurt.

There’s one more urgent reason openai may be interested in social networking, though: neither a source of free and free data. Unlike Most of Its Biggest Competitors, WHICH HAVE ALL BEEN COLLECTING AND SCRING TRAINING ON LARGELY SIMilar Data from the Web and Elsewhere, OpenAI Has Limited Options for Fresh and Current Content, which is useful for both training and soourking relevant information in resistance Requests. The Company Has ENTERED INTO DEALS WITH MEDIA COMPANIES – INCLUDING Our parent firm – neither well nor platforms like RedditWhich Function as Sanctioned But Limited Sources of, For Example, Up-to-Date Instructional Content and Ontgoing Updates and Discussion of News and Current Events. Meta, Google, and Xai, Howver, Have Armies of USSERS providing me with new Content Daily. You’re probably not going to get as Much Value Out of Millions of Post-Musk X as you will out of a platform like reddit, and a bunch of users sharing it aren’t going to reproduce the work of the new york Timesbut you’re getting something. And, crucially, you’re getting it for free.