I hadn’t seen this emails before. I’m surprised by how outward looking and myopic at the same time Zuck’s emails are, this one particularly so (the one about chat bots also comes to mind).
Ask yourself where you were in 2015 and see if you can get their take on VR or AR. For me it felt like magic. Like using an iPhone for the first time. Yes, VR and AR is absolutely the future. But social communication and media communication is just a myopic view on what the possibilities are! Interactive consumption is / was where it is at. A hybrid of games + educational experience was for me the quintessential experience a la Assassin’s Creed meets walking simulator.
I would love to just learn about places where I go passively with AR. I’d love to meet people and have fun stories shared via AR (as I proof read this, I’m not so sure about this but there’s potential).
Facebook absolutely should have built the platform first and if they did that developers would have come to build the apps. I’m surprised with 40k to 80k on staff they weren’t able make much headway into this until the past year.
Somewhat relatedly, did Zuck really write these emails in 2015? The color of the text for the date is highlighted weird. I’m surprised that the chat bot effort happened after this email. Perhaps, he figured chat bots would be a gateway to AR?
I think Zuck was focused too much on the control Apple and Google have on the average person’s eyeballs / pocket and on Facebook itself. The Facebook phone was an obvious attempt at trying to pry loose but they should have just kept at it. They could have built a Google Daydream like experience around their own Facebook phone.
All for the best I guess. I’m glad Facebook is failing. They have harmed more relationships with their algorithms imo than helped keep them together. The world might have been a better place if Facebook’s feed wasn’t trying to be so “engaging”.
If there's a good AR headset you'd have to be able to stop me (and a million other people) from forcing wikipedia onto the device. That might be a harder technical challenge than actually making the AR headset.
Sure but the vision/nlp models required to enable context-sensitive vision apps (i.e. an app to "give me facts from Wikipedia about what I'm seeing"), those models are closed and owned by big companies like Google and OpenAI.
The previous two computing revolutions "personal computers" and "apps/websites" were enabled by the openness of the OS and the openness of TCP/IP and browser vendors, respectively. If the next "AR/VR" revolution depends on complex vision models, there's no guarantee they'll be open for independent devs. And judging by the last few years, it's highly likely they won't be.
BTW I think there's good reason they don't release GPT-3 or DALL-E or PaLM or whatever. That shit is dangerous.
Edit: ok you can hack the hardware to let you run the models or make the necessary network calls to run them. That's still way different than Wikipedia which is a first class webapp where you don't have to hack anything to use it.
Ask yourself where you were in 2015 and see if you can get their take on VR or AR. For me it felt like magic. Like using an iPhone for the first time. Yes, VR and AR is absolutely the future. But social communication and media communication is just a myopic view on what the possibilities are! Interactive consumption is / was where it is at. A hybrid of games + educational experience was for me the quintessential experience a la Assassin’s Creed meets walking simulator.
I would love to just learn about places where I go passively with AR. I’d love to meet people and have fun stories shared via AR (as I proof read this, I’m not so sure about this but there’s potential).
Facebook absolutely should have built the platform first and if they did that developers would have come to build the apps. I’m surprised with 40k to 80k on staff they weren’t able make much headway into this until the past year.
Somewhat relatedly, did Zuck really write these emails in 2015? The color of the text for the date is highlighted weird. I’m surprised that the chat bot effort happened after this email. Perhaps, he figured chat bots would be a gateway to AR?
I think Zuck was focused too much on the control Apple and Google have on the average person’s eyeballs / pocket and on Facebook itself. The Facebook phone was an obvious attempt at trying to pry loose but they should have just kept at it. They could have built a Google Daydream like experience around their own Facebook phone.
All for the best I guess. I’m glad Facebook is failing. They have harmed more relationships with their algorithms imo than helped keep them together. The world might have been a better place if Facebook’s feed wasn’t trying to be so “engaging”.