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Ziggy's avatar

I'm more with Brad's original take on Facebook, but it is taking a long time. The Facebook part of the Meta empire is slowly going the way of MySpaces--the youngs avoid it. Zuckerberg apparently realizes that monetizing WhatsApp aggressively will kill it quickly. I guess Instagram is doing okay. Zuckerberg's acquisition strategy hasn't yielded any more Instagrams lately. And Meta's in-house work--uhhhhhhh. Pervert glasses Mark 2?

Ihor Gowda's avatar

happy paid subscriber to both DeLong and Marcus :)

Michael Dawson's avatar

I was piqued by your use [coughs at possible pun] of the term "user surplus." Users are users, not "consumers," after all, inside their own milieux.

David Roberts's avatar

The difference is that neither Google nor Facebook had the level of competition that Anthropic and OpenAI has.

Kent's avatar

OpenAI is Patroclus, right? Though I don't think their death will cause Zuck much anguish. He might even buy the corpse.

The most profitable application of AI won't be a translator from requirements to coding, but the old protection racket. AI will hack into enough computer systems that we'll all have to buy another AI for security-- an American frontier one to protect us from that reputed foreign AI.

Milo's avatar

Hey, was your analysis of marcus claude written? It felt it, with "load bearing" comment and the argument hedges. No shade here, brad, im here for it regardless...