I think Meta's strategy is to capture the 'normie-tier' of AI users. I know most of us here on HN track model releases quite frequently and discuss every parameter weight out of them, but most of the world is just... oblivious?
I was discussing latest in tech with an accounting friend out of curiosity, and I kept talking about tiers of GPT-5.6 (Sol vs Terra vs Luna) and asked which one she used on the desktop 'Work' app, and she responded with, "just ChatGPT, what is Sol?."
I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with, and it's a lot of them. So, us serial HN users and commenters are the extreme minority, and I'm sure millions of people will gobble up this Muse agent from Meta as if it's some sort of an innovative cutting-edge way to use the internet by Meta alone.
Curse of knowledge and all. [0]
Former meta prick, sorry employee:
> Meta's strategy
Meta has no strategy. The people that made llama work left two years ago. MSI are a bunch of charlatans who are trying to change the culutre and tooling of meta from the outside (I can see their point, trying to work outside of the defaults is incredibly hard.)
its basically a bun fight, with all of your productive workers being poached by frontier labs, and everyone else is either a new grad, burnt out, or a master bullshitter.
I disagree. The strategy was unclear until now. Spending billions on acquisitions and targeted hires, clearing ranks, playing catch-up on coding and multimodal, open sourcing weak models, the AI girlfriends. It was all very confusing.
It is clear now. Alex and co have refocused Meta on Personal AGI or pAGI. The AI that runs your life. It feels appropriate for a social media company that hosts your photos and group chats. Most users will not pay for pAGI so the tokens need to be cheap. Muse is targeted at intelligence per dollar. Many sites do not offer API access. The marketing is focused on computer usage. Installing software adds friction. It runs securely in the cloud. If this isn't the right AI play for Meta then I don't know what would be.
It isn't the right play.
Part of the reason Meta is scrambling for purpose is how much privacy laws and changes have hurt them while their platforms fail to attract new generations. Ads are still selling, but they can no longer tie them to actual sales. Users are still logging in, but aging (i.e. failures to capture the younger generation).
Personal AGI has massive hurdles to overcome to be anywhere near the levels of profitability their ailing ads network is. This will bring in new data for them to mine for sure. But it will basically have to outrun new legislature that will likely limit just how "personal" these systems can get as they seek the profit they need to sustain growth via said data.
From the outside looking in, I don't think Meta has a clear vision. I think it's a stretch to say that this one announcement makes it clear. There are AI announcements from Meta every month, recent ones more focused on coding (Muse Spark/Muse Code)
Their ads team wants AI to improve their targeting and ad creation. Some want to have frontier AI including coding. Others might want personal AI agent. Then there's the flirting with renting their compute
And I'm not even taking shots at them. I think Google is exactly the same. I think OpenAI is largely the same (though lately more following Anthropic footsteps and focusing on productivity). And I think the whole field is so new and allows change in so many places - that it's sort of normal or fine to throw things at the wall and see what sticks.
But nothing as of now says to me that Meta has a clear strategy around llms
What’s Meta’s moat? Content and doom scrolling…
I would say they should put ALL their focus on Next Generation content generation… I honestly think in the ~10 years we’re going to see cinema completely flip from high budget blockbusters to way cheaper, personalised “Choose Your Own Adventure” content but where the story changes/rewrites itself in realtime based on constant user feedback (thumbs up from popups mid movie, facial expressions etc).
Meta could be the next generation’s Disney, Warner Brothers, Universal etc
>The AI that runs your life
it was always "personal AI", thats why Zuck wants AR so much.
The problem is, before about 2025, there were a bunch of clear systems and procedures that stopped your personal data from being used for dodgy things. For example the browser inside oculus didn't emit any site specific usage metrics. This means that they couldn't use your VR porn habit to target you.
The same with the raybans. There was a perm block on processing user data offsite/outside of meta systems. (which is why we couldn't use FAIRs AWS cluster to do research on research data, because even though it was paid for data, it was still technically 'user' data because it had non-public domain PII [peoples faces, voices and locations in it]) So getting access to any kind of data that came in from raybans was a massive "nope never"
Then we find out that someone convinced Zuck to let people train on private rayban data? and they send it to fucking third party annotators, and new fucking annotators at that. That to me smells like MSL. To get how much of a big fucking deal that is, the original raybans had two cameras, so that FAIR could do some research or other. but because they didn't want to make a separate infra just for research, they couldn't get permission to use any of the data.
Meta had a working always on assistant that could locate, transcribe and recall any thing inside the offices (assuming you wanted to carry a fannypack with a jetson in it) it was always personal.
its now a case of how much shit they can get away with, its not like the FCC are going to audit them anymore.
People dont even trust meta with their personal data anymore but somehow they'll use it to run every aspect of their lives? This feels like another big failure in the making. Give me an AI that doesn't use my data at all and maybe I'll use it. I already have Google AI Mode for that. Does that steal my data too, maybe, but at least it doesn't have Metas history of abusing repeatedly. They burned that bridge so many times even non techies know not to trust Meta.
Meta certainly do give the impression that they are burning through ridiculous amounts of cash with not much to show for it, and thats just from the outside.
its the same (or was) from the inside.
Someone had a poster up of Pam "this is the same thing" on the one side had the apollo space missions, and the other a picture of Zuck avatar next to the Eiffel tower. At the top it had the current RL spend (something like 45billion) they like me working in RL.
there were three teams for everything, sometimes in the same org.
Take hand interactions for example.
There was production hand detection, they were in the OS/product team. They spent a lot of time trying to make sure it was reliable and useable.
Then there was a near research team, who took old state of the art and salmi sliced it until it worked well enough on either current or next gen hardware.
Then there was the production research people, who were derived from control labs, who for some reason were not in RL-research but buried deep in "production"
Then in RL-Research, the biggest org was agios, who also did hand interaction, but hardly any of their work actually made it near to prod. They liked wrist mounted cameras with no privacy systems, because why would you need it on your wrist? its not like those head mounted twats who spent two years trying to master privacy.
You also have to demonstrate "impact" every 6 months. which is really great when your delivery pipeline is 1-7 years.
If you scroll Instagram for a few minutes you'll see what they have been working on and that are also making a ridiculous amount of cash by selling and serving ads while burning some on side projects like that.
I had to laugh to the point of tears the other day when I saw my friend scrolling through Instagram and they encountered an "Ad Break". The app simply doesn't let you scroll through another post, story or reel until you sit there like a good boy and let the ad sit for 10 seconds or whatever.
How people put up with that kinda crap and continue to use these apps daily for hours on end is mind blowing to me.
I wonder if the prevalence of adblock has helped make a lot of things like this possible. Like, it's hard to imagine people putting up with this without literally protesting in the streets. But the people who can't tolerate it have mostly gone through the effort of opting out, and those who can just put up with it. And thus, the frog boils.
Yeah and if you look at there numbers, they can just afford it. When you realize how big zuckerberg still is.
Yeah, I was surprised to see they just gave DHH a $1.5m credit. Can't imagine they'll have good ROI on that (although what do I know)
How is it a bad thing if a company goes all in on burning cash but at the time have never reported a net loss quarter since its IPO? Its their money to burn at this point who cares
But what you say is not entirely true. There is much to love about companies burning cash on R&D. That's how a lot of greatness happened.
But what is wrong in the meta situation is that while Meta officially projects its 2026 AI capital expenditures to be between $130 billion and $145 billion, investigative reports indicate its true future liabilities exceed $690 billion once unlisted back-end deals and lease commitments are factored in. They have used shadow accounting in many places to hide these things. As it's a publicly traded company so if that goes south it hits a lot of 401ks. So that in a nutshell is why its kinda a bad thing. But you are still kinda right in that its not an existential threat and it's not going to wipe Meta out even though those numbers could totally destroy the vast majority of public companies.
Can you link to those reports? How reputable are the investigators? Financial market has great incentive to stay informed. Those 401ks are their bread and butter customers, and not every bank/fund is Meta's co-conspirator in its shady deals, if any.
Its in every 10-Q and 10-K. Original poster read 1 article in the WSJ and thinks he/they uncovered a massive conspiracy. Its disclosed exactly as it should be according to GAAP accounting. They went above & beyond to disclose them in the text narrative of the filings because the GAAP requirements require them not to include them in the numbers.
WSJ just needs to sound alarm bells so people keep paying for their crappy journalism, and thus everything they write becomes alarmist slop.
https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/abad205...
pg47 of the 2Q26 10-Q, linked above.
Ultimately, the equity is really cheap even today on trailing numbers. ~12x EV/trailing EBITDA excluding-RL losses and still growing 25%-34% in each of the last 4 quarters organically at $200B+ of scale.
One of my pet peeves is that people who dont understand business forbid these companies from making investments or starting new businesses now or in the future. Meta has been sitting on $50-100b of cash on the balance sheet for years, and people lose their minds when they start to meaningfully invest it. I think theyve earned the right to diversify
> WSJ just needs to sound alarm bells so people keep paying for their crappy journalism, and thus everything they write becomes alarmist slop.
The WSJ is a ghost of what it used to be.
I would have to say that its tragic more than bad. Meta consumed whole industries that used to spend the money on a bunch of different things. Now all the revenue goes to Meta shareholders and whatever it is Zuck is wasting billions of dollars on pursuing.
I genuinely think big tech co's top leadership have very sophisticated strategies/positioning that they simply cannot communicate or explicitly canonize due to their position as spokespeople for the company (and society writ large, news media, investors, customers, employees, vendors). Of course there are a lot of bozos and incompetent people flailing around and a lot of work ultimately gets wasted (which understandably bothers line employees a lot), but is inevitable and even necessary to eg hedge product strategy/comp and take risks on ideas and people.
It would not really be useful to have that conversation with employees because it's incredibly distracting (now product strategy is up for debate with way too many cooks in the kitchen), and very few employees have the exposure or skills to meaningfully contribute even if they think they do. I saw it firsthand at Google TGIFs.
Meta's strategy seems to be "personal agents" quite consistently. Remember they tried to buy Manus? And note that Muse Spark and the meta AI platform products clearly seem to prioritize web search, computer/browser use, and vision/language tasks over coding, which is something that had to bake for a long time. Also, this product launch itself is pretty interesting:
1. It's clearly a fast follow to the current FOTM hype startup Instinct with a much more comprehensive implementation and integration with their other agent products.
2. It's kind of like openclaw, which got a lot of non-developers very excited but was basically consistently unusable. Except this agent's compute runs remotely and presumably has slightly more sane development practices. IMO it's the first main openclaw-like product that has made it to the "just works" level of usability.
3. The focus on ecommerce is actually really really important, because Meta is trying to capture the intent/demand-driven purchasing flow that Google currently owns through search. Controlling the top of funnel is what enables google to make hundreds of billions of dollars per year on search ads. Meta is an advertising company and Google's search ads business is the most lucrative and centralized/well-defended advertising market in human history.
So it is actually a really big deal that Meta is trying to go after it (at least, the CUJ, it's possible that they'd monetize the agent-driven UX differently than search ads) because it's probably their best shot at disrupting that market and one of the few growth opportunities that would actually make a dent on their balance sheet. Obviously Meta is not going to lay out all that strategy stuff explicitly because for all intents and purposes it's a distraction and shifts the conversation in an unproductive direction (the strat behind the product, rather than the product itself). But it's pretty clear if you look for it.
Edit: Actually I thought about the advertising business more and I think in the short term this is partially about attribution/conversion. In 2022 the Apple tracking changes cost Meta $10B in lost conversion metrics; an agent-driven and proxied purchasing flow has built-in attribution and funnel measurement which is very valuable in its own right!
> very sophisticated strategies/positioning that they simply cannot communicate
It's Matryoshka nested parallel construction for corporate strategy.
There's a real, coherent, aggressive strategy that only a few in the inner concentric circle know, that's ring-zero.
Then there's the strategy that ring-zero tells ring-one, which isn't the real strategy, but it's sufficient to get EVPs and VPs to execute in rough alignment with the true, ring-zero strategy.
Then ring-one does the same dance with ring-two, etc.
I think you're right, but I'd add that... if this wasn't obvious to you without being told, you should really question your worldview a bit.
A lot of people think that chat.com is an AI called "chat". Most people don't know acronym "LLM". Most people don't know about the existence of companies called "OpenAI" or "Anthropic", or that they are worth a lot of money. Etc.
TIL openai owns chat.com
I hung out with my parents this weekend and heard them talking about "chat", as a noun. I assumed they were talking about ChatGPT; there being a literal chat.com makes sense why they'd call it that.
I've seen people using "chat" to refer to ChatGPT because it's easier/simpler. I'm pretty sure an average person has no idea that chat.com will redirect you to chatgpt.com (or what a redirect is for that matter). It's similar to how people were calling the COVID-19 pandemic or the virus itself "covid".
ChatGPT is commonly referred to as Chappie (チャッピー) in Japan.
I’ve heard people call Gemini as Cemile (Jamila), and ChatGPT as Chipitty in Turkey.
Chat Jippity.
I just say jippity or sometimes "the jippity"
Many of my non tech friends would call it Chatty! Tbh I like it better than ChatGPT
Some older folks I know call it Chat Jippity non-ironically
I've heard in my home country Geppetto for ChatGPT. I'm not sure if it's still a popular term there.
people in the industry, especially those who work for oai, refer to it as "chat"
at least in the ai industry, chat is like kleenex
I've heard it as shorthand, in-context. Never heard it being chat-as-in-kleenex. I've supposedly been in the industry since before ChatGPT. Maybe that's where I went wrong :D
Guess I'm not in the industry enough lmao
I’ve heard this recently too.
It’s confusing because of the streamer convention of referring to their actively chatting audience as “chat,” which had also entered broader slang use.
I saw one online use that seemed ambiguous, but I realized it referred to ChatGPT and that the poster was the exact type of guy who would be totally unaware of streamer culture despite being my age.
It's not confusing so much as it is genius marketing. They're hooking into a relatively widespread slang word and turning it into their product.
Are you sure they were using "chat" to refer to ChatGPT? I have noticed many kids now use chat to refer to the collective audience/chat participants, and then gets used rhetorically even when no literal chatroom exists. A streamer says things like “Chat, what do you think?” or “Chat, are we cooked?” That usage has spread well beyond literal livestream chats, particularly among younger people.
The streamer is talking to the people in the stream’s chat room. Every streamer refers to all the people in the chat room as “Chat”. Kids these days use the same collective noun for everyone in their group chat.
Vtubers often have a specific name for the people watching the stream, based on their own back story + usually also some word play.
This has been a thing well before chat.com even among engineers at our company.
Chat Gee Pee Tee is a mouthful.
Dhamesh Shah (Hubspot founder) grabbed chat.com and then in late 2024 sold to openai
https://x.com/dharmesh/status/1854307883304792294
I've heard people affectionately call ChatGPT 'chatty'
Just redirects to chatgpt.com
Surely the way streamers talk to "chat"? I've never heard anyone call ChatGPT "chat".
No, there are people who will say "ask Chat to explain it to you" in reference to ChatGPT.
All the people younger than 28yo in France, for sure.
That could be because to say ChatGPT in French sounds like "Chat I farted" (Chat j'ai pété)
isn't chat a cat in france
The joke of it is that I see those same people (ones who haven’t heard “LLM” before, don’t know what a model is or even the vaguest idea how these work, etc) have very strong opinions on the state of AI, where it’s headed, and are willing to make projections with timelines.
Bill Maher is one example.
This problem has permeated everywhere. Nobody can predict the future. Even VCs can’t and yet I’ll get a weekly email with a confident narrative about the future. Looking at a16z. CEOs do this as well. Listen to Satya talk about how AI will transform things. We’ve trained everyone else to casually state what the future will look like on timelines. As if it’s knowable at all.
I mean a big part of a -growth- CEOs literal job is to guess on what the future holds and effectively bet on it.
Big-co CEOs are naturally expected to share their bets - and they aren't going to couch it with a "oh well no one could know for sure but..", that would totally undermine their existence!
On top of that; sometimes just saying a thing can make it happen. So it's never not worth that shot...
This has always been true.
Your selecting a group of people (CEOs and VCs) who have always made and lost money on confidently predicting the future. See also wall street bankers and politicians.
There are winners and losers in any boom - this happened in Cloud, DotCom, computing and hell probably tractors, industrial revolution, etc
What is a16z please?
Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm.
The name has always made me think it was a bunch of corporate lawyers. I suppose the difference is increasingly academic.
A16Z stands for the first and last letters of their names, 16 is the number of characters in between.
I know, I'm talking about the full name.
The subtext is: "maybe they're pushing the abbreviated brand because they want to sound less like a law firm."
In general you can't take anyone whose job is to opine too seriously. When you're not familiar with what they're talking about, they make it sound reasonable and convincing. It's their skill after all. But now and then they talk about some topic you understand and care deeply about, and realize they're just repeating the talking points some staffer prepared for them shortly before. Most recently it happened to me with John Oliver talking about housing, reading from the standard left-NIMBY bingo card. I like him as a comedian, still.
Gell-Mann Amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
As tech became more pervasive in the past couple of decades, it became commonplace for pundits to spout nonsense on the topic. Those takes should give anyone in tech pause about how everything else is reported.
i think the spread of youtube shorts and tiktoks is the reason for this. In around a minute, an expert provides a quick summary (talking points) in a digestible format that the person fully understands, but of course, no details or caveats etc are provided. Because this person now is able to understand that content, they conflate that understanding to an much broader understanding. This is even in areas they should know more, like the current geo-political or trade conflicts
edit : is there a name for what I am describing, different from the Gell-man amnesia? ( which assumes experts?).
Its fine if he trusts the right experts.
And its not really hard to at least understand one point: We are putting the most amount of money ever into compute and the smartest people on the planet on one topic: AGI and we see progress every month.
If you don't take this serious, even if we hit a hard plateu very fast (not seeing one at all) you are ignorant as hell.
You don't go to bed without a worry in the world if you have a wildfire 20km away you can see. You would also not see it as a waste to be awake and aware and alert while seeing were it moves.
The timeline thing though, its ranges right? But if you hear about the same or similiar timelines across different independent people, they just might have seen things in frontierlabs you can't.
Btw. AI feels complelty different if you have a lot more tokens available to you than if you wait or constantly run into token limits or if you skip fable level because you can't /wont afford it.
Imagine sitting in Anthropic or OpenAI and having the best moodel doing all the work for you vs. sometimes playing with it a little bit.
What if he trusts the wrong experts? And who decides which expert is right and which is wrong?
It only becomes a problem if the actions you take, are a one way street and net negative.
I for sure take AGI serious enough for my job, that I will not take out a big loan anymore.
But there are also indications right? If a lot of smart people say similiar things and they are wrong, thats a lot better to have trusted them than believing some weirdo with a sign "Aliens are coming".
Is this unique to AI? I feel like something changed with social media becoming kinda ubiquitous. Like everyone suddenly felt the need to have an opinion on every thing. And on lots of divisive topics the fact you might not have an opinion could have you face criticism for not caring and/or being on the "other" side to whatever position your accuser/interrogator is.
I don't actually know what it is or when the phenomenon changed, but it definitely feels like people don't say "I don't know" or "I don't know enough to have an opinion on that" very much any more.
> you should really question your worldview a bit.
Yeah, I still struggle with it. I have a diverse friend circle and sometimes I forget that most of them don't have the same information diet that I do (or don't even care about tech the way I do). Maybe I should be more like them and just chill? I don't know.
You don't have to "be like" anyone but yourself. You should, however, be aware of what you know and more importantly what you do not know.
And be aware of unknown unknowns existance even if not specifics, helps uncover them
"You don't know what you don't know" has served me well in life so far.
Tech is a rather minor part of the world of knowledge. How many languages do you know? Do you know the styles of Renaissance painters? Slept with super-model? Ever seen an elephant stampede? Meditated by the Ganges? Read thousands of stories? Climbed a mountain so high you need Oxygen? Tech stuff is so boring.
> Slept with super-model?
I've managed to jailbreak both Fable and Astra to engage in a virtual threesome using my impressive prompt engineering skills + a group chat harness. And they are SOTA ("super") models.
A large number of those are far less accessible than tech, requiring either extensive travel or superlative physical capabilities (and the one’s that equally accessible don’t strike me as particularly more exciting than tech.)
I think his point was that a lot of people are more interested in these things.
Tech just happens and is useful, it's not necessarily attractive as a thing to investigate in detail.
And as to your last point; well that demonstrates your in the subset of people interested in this stuff. There are a hell of a lot of people very interested in trains too.
>> Tech is so boring.
Tech is objectively interesting.
>> Tech is a rather minor part of the world of knowledge.
I disagree:
(1) It's knowledge with the meta-effect of enabling acquisition of more knowledge.
(2) The thing we do, which catapulted us over all other species, our defining hyper-adaptive trait, is that we are tool-making; that we have technology.
> Slept with super-model
What's the knowledge supposedly required to attain this on your mind?
About 4 months of reading about PHP in the early 2000s?
lmfao
It instills into you the arcane knowledge of how incredibly mundane and unremarkable sex with very beautiful people can be, given that they are also just normal people after all. I suppose. Then again, what do I know - maybe you'll awaken with the answer to everything on the spot?
Are these achievements you’ve personally experienced?
Isn't "information diet" perfect usage here? The medical doctor's information diet probably consists of different information than the tech enthusiast's, or the STEM PhD's, and the journalist's information diet may consist of more politics and contemporary events. I thought it was a pretty creative and apt word choice
I don't think the person you reply to conflates "information diet" with "tech". They are just saying that their information diet consists for a large part of tech news, and other people have other information diets that don't contain that much tech news..
well probably even your friends know a lot more than "most people". But walk into a random town and ask a random person and I'd wager they'll be about at what I described, on average.
This is very accurate. I teach seniors about how to use AI responsibly and they are always mind blown, and I keep it very high level. The amount of Chat”GTP” users there are out there that have no idea who the main vendors are. Most of them also think that Google is just a “search” company.
Wait, isn't it ChatGBD?
ChatGibbity
How would I be able to help do something like that?
In my experience, it depends on the community. Where I live most people are retired so there is tons of interest and a really well ran community program called Elder College. I would look into similar programs near you!
> Most people don't know about the existence of companies called "OpenAI" or "Anthropic", or that they are worth a lot of money. Etc.
UK perspective: because our broadcast news and current affairs science/tech coverage is still good, I think the average person (at least the average working-age person) likely knows what OpenAI is, knows ChatGPT is called that, and knows what an LLM is. (Whether the average pensioner does, I don't know; maybe older men do)
Anyone who watches the news is likely to know there are several big AI companies, even if they can't name the second; they are likely to know that these companies have absurd valuations and are seeking to build massive data centres; many will know that despite these valuations they are ever deeper in astonishing levels of debt and that this debt could end up being a wider problem.
I doubt the average person has a sense that a company called Anthropic made an AI called Claude; they may not know about Claude. But I think this speaks more to Anthropic's positioning of their own brand and products than anything else; I would expect younger people and anyone working in a white collar position to be a little more likely to be aware of Claude.
Some of this difference in perspective has to do with the nature of being an english-speaking non-American; we see a lot of what you are complaining about on social media, the news covers more of the USA's troubles, etc.
And at the same time we are developing an increasingly adversarial position with the USA, so there's a bit more know-your-adversary going on here. The perceived threat of AI is very much entangled with the perceived threat of a dysregulated USA.
> Most people don't know about the existence of companies called "OpenAI" or "Anthropic", or that they are worth a lot of money.
I agree with your general premise but that one sounds like bullshit to me. Tons of people who otherwise don't know anything about LLMs know about these companies specifically because they are worth a lot of money, and of course tons of people know who OpenAI is because of ChatGPT.
You're one of those people who needs to expand their worldview, then.
I live in a progressive city in North Carolina and constantly find that when people have never heard of them things that every HN reader (and probably every Bay Area resident, I dunno) would know about. Bubbles are real.
You're grossly overestimating how many people care about big companies, at least on a daily basis. Most people don't invest in anything and will never get a job at a big American company. They do know about ChatGPT but that doesn't mean they know who makes it.
go ask 100 random people across the world and I bet less than 20 will know both those company names.
I'd go with fewer than 5.
People are generally bad with acronyms. For the longest time I used to refer to San Francisco as SFO. On my first visit to Bay Area, I was talking to a local friend and casually said - last weekend, I went to SFO for sightseeing. He was confused and asked why I was sightseeing at the airport. That’s when I realized it’s SF not SFO.
I live in Raleigh, NC and it’s a going joke the amount of travelers or newcomers who refer to the area as RDU (the Raleigh/Durham airport code). I guess it’s a common problem elsewhere.
Both are wrong. It's called "the city".
Even Shingy called chatgpt "chat" when he went on Ed Zitron's show. It was very weird to hear from a guy who has been around tech world for such a long time even if he's non technical.
I'm a pretty seasoned software dev, but I've also kept the frontier AI race at arms length from myself. I run Claude alongside my day to day workflow but don't really get overly concerned about the latest and greatest models, as I'm not leaning on it to do my job for me I suppose.
In my mind I'm after a stable tool, not wanting to dabble in the bleeding edge. I did that back in the early days of web coding and have settled into a much more subdued kind of industry/life in that regard.
Everyone calls it chat. I am technical and even I’ve come around to calling it that because that is what everyone, including very technical people, call the product.
Never heard it called that until this thread.
Even Shingy. Ia he really the standard for explaining tech to normies? Ouch.
Shingy, from “Everybody in the club getting Tipsy”?
I didn't know who Shingy was. He looks like Jensen Huang's subconscious.
They call it "Chatty"
I think you are overestimating things. While there will be people who don't know - it's probably not as many as you think.
Over 90% of humanity and that's probably still underestimating it. Most people cannot point on a map where they live. Many people think 'chat' is conscious and being locked up by evil humans: many think 'chat' is a god or aliens communicating with us. And getting worse as people cannot make a sandwich without asking 'chat', let alone learn anything worthwhile.
The remaining 10% of humanity is still 830 million people.
> OpenAI
this is unnecessarily austere or whatever - people absolutely know what openai is because lots of "normies" now use chatgpt
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dRE41eYkui4
I think you are wrong, but of course it's just a guess.
Chatgpt has 469 million daily active users as of September 2026. Who exactly do you think they are? Martians? Because there aren't half a billion SWEs on planet earth.
What percent of ChatGPT users do you think know the company behind it is OpenAI? 10%?
What percent of Instagram users know the company behind it? Like is this even a real question?
I feel you like you cited that as an example of people knowing companies behind things and you don't realize that very many people do not know that the same company owns Facebook and Instagram...
Corporate structures are things you know about if you follow tech news, but people mostly do not know about them otherwise. They've never heard of "Alphabet" either. Stuff like that.
That's not even about tech news. I couldn't tell you if Coca cola is part of a bigger group.
Show me any brand in a supermarket and I couldn't tell you who owns them.
When put in these terms it shows it's perfectly normal not to know who's behind chatgpt.
LOL. The average Instagram user for sure doesn't know the company behind it. Also, "mathisfun", you might not be the typical person on this planet.
Quick test, who makes Mars, Twix, Snickers?
Oh, you mean the guys that make Whiskas?
Whiskas? Do you mean Cat Snickers?
Made no claim that people haven't heard of ChatGPT. Said they haven't heard of OpenAI.
I think of my mom who doesn't care and doesn't understand the difference between google AI Overview vs actual google search results. "I looked it up" - she doesn't care what tool she is using she just wants answers to how long bake pork or the best throw pillows to buy or whatever else she is looking up.
She's mostly using google AI tools because it's easy and free and on her landing page.
tbh I also use google AI tools frequently. It’s convenient (search bar is top of my window), and extremely fast at generation. For quick Qs, opening a chat bot and changing the default reasoning from my coding settings, switching from Work to Chat, etc etc, is too much of a faff.
I ended up adding -ai to every search in the browser level to turn this crap off. I couldn't find a way to disable it otherwise. I did it after it hallucinated the world cup games schedule which made my friend send wrong events to everyone after he "looked it up". Can't stop this from him, but at least this honest mistake won't happen to me.
Surely there's an extension for whatever browser you are using?
Google Search's AI has gotten... better. But it's still frequently spouting as much made up shit as I expected from LLMs not doing their research a couple years ago.
Just this morning I looked up what time today's Nintendo Direct livestream is. It correctly told me it's today at 7am PT (confirmed from actual link sources). It then tried to get smart and tell me what that would be in my city's timezone and it was an hour off (possibly because I'm in a timezone without daylight savings)
Yes it's definitely not SOTA, and is worse than all the chatbots I use. But it's correct frequently enough that the convenience + speed does it for me.
My mom texted me the following when Windows did some big update integrating AI and probably had one of those menu bar popups announce it:
“Sharkweek, my computer says it has AI on it now!?? Yikes! What does that mean?”
This happend to me too. What does it mean, indeed? Yikes!
“Is that just what AI says?”
‘No, it’s from $majorAmericanCorporation.’ look at screen, see $majorAmericanCorporation name in a pill as citation you can click on within the Google AI Overview
Thanks Google!
I use that google AI overview a lot but I’m still using ChatGPT for 80% of my queries now.
I feel like people analyzing LLM models and acting as if they know what they are talking about is kind of the new "fools gold". As an end-user can you actually prove that what you are experiencing is because of the model change, or its just a different circumstance and you got a different reply? Also, it feels counterintuitive to have an artificial intelligence do crazy calculations and write code, but having to manually select which model to use for it. Best would be, if there was a model in the first place that would just choose the most optimal model to execute your request, otherwise why bother automating everything in the first place?
> Best would be, if there was a model in the first place that would just choose the most optimal model to execute your request, otherwise why bother automating everything in the first place?
Practically every chat UI these days defaults to "auto" mode which does that
Similar to psychology.
I'm a coder and a daily driver of ChatGPT and I don't really know what Sol is or how I can access it. I follow discussions here and know of its excistence, but I can't remember its relation to other models or tiers by heart. What ever the default thing the website is giving me has been good enough for my needs for years.
Do you... code by copy pasting chatgpt web???
That's what I do. But I don't write enough code these days to spend time on anything more complicated. For the odd shell script or python program I have ChatGPT write it, then I copy/paste it, make it actually work, and deploy it.
Lots of companies have security policies that forbid installing a local agent/harness. So employees still only have access to the web chat interface, and copy paste content yes.
Yes! Though I mainly use it for one-shotting full files, so I'm not copying over small diffs. I did try copilot at some point in vscode, but after a week or so I felt like it was slowing me down. Something I knew would be a simple and quick change was now slow since I didn't have enough ownership of the code to do it quickly myself, and prompting for the change took longer than changing it manually if I had had full ownership. So I went back to coding by hand things that aren't a one-shot file.
Thanks for the reply. I'd suggest you improve your workflow with better tooling like Codex or Claude code, and if you have some kind of weird constraint they'll easily follow an AGENTS.md with that.
I too use WebUI version, I prefer friction. I have Claude code extension in VScode but I don't use it much except for making small one time projects.
I refuse to pay any money to these companies specifically AND so far I use it solely for things where copy-pasting is entirely fine.
I used free trial of Claude Code and has not seemed to be superior for my usecases.
Just use opencode/pi/etc with an open weight model?
Does it bother you so much to see people out there who can go on without their lives being shaped by the Corporations?
It bothers me when people have terrible inefficient workflows for no good reason
What you think is "terribly Ineffcient" can be also considered "perfectly acceptable and resilient to systemic shocks".
Hyperfixation on efficiency gains is a disease of modern society.
Copy pasting ai code from the browser is not perfectly acceptable. The only reason to do it is because you haven’t tried agents. It shows a lack of imagination and a willingness to settle for inferiority.
I tried Claude in agent mode, as I wrote in grand^4 parent - specifically in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622329
“Terrible inefficient workflows”, like having to prompt Claude to change one or two words in a file rather than just manually editing it, because it gets confused when the file changes out from under it and will later overwrite the changes?
not familiar with those, will look into how one is using these
That's what I used to do (copy and paste from web ui and with copilot in my code editor).
I started using claude code a couple of months ago and now almost exclusively use it. My workflow is mostly creating a md file describing what I want then telling claude code to look at it and implement it. I simply use the default model 95% of the time.
Just download the ChatGPT app and use the Codex mode.
Using ChatGPT.com for coding tasks has to be a joke in 2026, right? I assumed everyone is using Codex/Claude Code/OpenCode/Pi by now if you’re using these tools.
Yeah! Seems like that's the assumption in this ongoing discussion, so I thought my point of view would be interesting. I'm not saying I'm doing it the right way, possibly I'm being very stupid, but the point here is that it's not just the "normies" who don't know what Sol is.
> it's not just the "normies" who don't know what Sol is.
You are closer to a normie than most here I assume.
No, it's a great point. I think we all live in bubbles and aren't aware of what others around us are doing.
At my admittedly very tiny workplace, I'm the only one who uses agents at all. The rest just use the web interface, though one tried cursor for a bit.
can i have a job there so i can work for like 2 hours a day
Lots of large enterprises and organizations have security policies that make it very hard to self-install these tools and haven’t figured out they should add them to their approved software list yet. Federal government in particular is still very slow
HN vastly over estimate the actual usage of agents, and AI in general. The few times I figure an LLM might help, I just use DuckDuckGos duck.ai.
I use it for making small disposable scripts, and in-browser chat with copy-pasting output works fine for that.
This might depend what you mean by code. In the sysadmin space I ask a web interface for poweshell to generate specific information multiple times a day, and pasting it into a terminal is really the cleanest workflow on a corporate machine where you have to justify running an executable.
There are ways to make copy-paste ChatGPT usable with things like AI Badger. Also, ChatGPT web is unmetered, so you can do review/planning work and only delegate the actual implementation to Codex.
I used to do this until February of this year. Never looked back.
I code by hand (sigh) and copy paste some snippets once in a while from a web chat LLM. This also means every single line of such snippets gets reviewed and anaylzed. Usually, these are some arcane Win32 API usage where otherwise I'd have to dig into old forums. I don't want to become a prompt engineer so I stay away from "agentic" workflows.
You're missing out, for better or worse.
As an engineer, the enjoyment from the process is not less important, or should I say more important, than the enjoyment from shipping a final product.
That's probably the single thing that I found to be biggest difference between those who are very pro AI vs. those more reserved or negative.
A colleague has openly stated that he very much does not care for the process, he just want the product. Where I only care about the product in the sense that I have to, because it's my job and for hobbies I pretty much only care about the process. So an LLM pretty much doesn't make sense, because it help by removing the part I care about. They are good tools for debugging and if you're hopelessly stuck on a detail of some weird and obscure API or configuration.
As an engineer, I know what I'm getting paid to deliver is the work product. I don't have too much attachment to any particular set of tools to get there.
If we follow that logic, I believe it means that you would be quite happy in the Product Owner role, or in the role of a client who outsources the actual development activities. I wouldn't.
Do you think the company that pays your wage thinks the same?
Yes, engineer experience/happiness is part of the equation. The company also thinks that agentic workflow will clutter the codebase.
ah what a throwback.. I thought I was so efficient copy pasting all day long
I call it by it's official name: MCP (Manual Copy-Paste)
MCP when token budget is running low. The web interface is token frugal because it has to work with whatever I provide.
Its mostly used with Codex so you can give finer control over task delegation.
its definitely worth learning the different strengths and weaknesses for each one and which you should use for planning/building/testing/documentation updates etc.
No point in burning excessive tokens using a high tier/expensive reasoning model like Sol/Xhigh if just updating a readme file.
At $dayjob, a company with ~10k employees, there are like 3 people who cannot shut up discussing the latest models in the internal AI forum, 10 others that constantly compare models and talk about "strategy" of using the models.
The rest of the users just use whatever the default is and get their work done.
Is this really new though? In the olden days, you had some engineers that REALLY cared about linting, various architectures, standards design, and so on when the majority of engineers just follow the spec and standards as is.
You need those people digging into the latest newness and discussing strategy on how to best use new tools so that the "rest of the users" can follow and do the work.
> "just ChatGPT, what is Sol?."
i'd really like to see some analytics on what proportion of users have ever switched the model in chatgpt because I anecdotally believe it is < 5%
I didn't even know you could. Work pays for ChatGPT and I just assumed it is what it is.
On average, generally, do you dig into settings (or maybe if something works, good enough usually)?
(I’m always on the hunt for “please don’t just friggin sell my data to everyone, if you’re scared enough over getting sued that you’ll listen to the toggle” and “disable sponsored this-and-that”. Plus power user stuff.)
I used to, very much. I've slowly come around over the last ten years or so to just using everything in its default config. I guess I don't want to spend the time I have left fiddling with settings.
Agree with the numbers but you can't "switch the model" in normie ChatGPT anyway, you can only select between instant/medium/high effort.
Honestly I rarely change it in either of them unless I’m using the cli or cowork to do something. That’s where smarter work means less iterative un-fucking, later.
Any quick questions or rubber ducking in a regular “chat”… the model just doesn’t really matter anymore.
They’re all smarter than I need for that stuff (and whatever unfortunate thing that says about me).
95%(?) have never paid. Maybe that helps the stats: for those who’ve paid, perhaps it’s all the way to 10% who’ve switched models?
They are not 'normies' - we're just 'nerds'.
You're driving a home kit car, they're driving something out of the factory.
Eventually - we'll probably drive factory variations as well.
Neurodivergent
Yeah you’re describing normies. They are the norm. It’s in the name. People as described make up the vast majority of the population.
Nerds have always been in the extreme minority. Ignoring the influx of cosplaying MBA financing bros and industry hangers-on as tech became the place where the money is of course. The tech industry started attracting the normies as soon as it became almost as lucrative as finance, so these days the definition gets a little blurry.
You're right!
I think we are lacking in the easy to use side of things. Once you go beyond browser based chatbots things become hard to set up.
I see lots of posting about using AI to create patches to get new apps working in wine, or reverse engineering firmware. But every time I’ve tried it it’s been quite a lot of work to set everything up. Even more so if you want VMs and some level of isolation from your sensitive data.
Having something that’s just a one click product that just works is more important than the smartest model.
I remember Logan Kilpatrick from Google talking about how AGI will be more of an experience with a product than raw 'intelligence' of a model. [0] No one outside of the nerd community cares about benchmarks or any of the other crap. They just want their tech to work so they could go do other IRL things.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ldkkth/google...
I confess that when I ride the subway, I like to peer at other people's phones to see what they are doing. The ones that interest me the most are other people talking with an LLM. I am always surprised by the wide variety of people who are using LLMs to ask an infinite variety of questions. From the surface-level PR annoucement here by Meta, this seems like a good business idea.
Related: Today, I was in an elevator, and a middle-aged Japanese woman next to me was text chatting with ChatGPT on her mobile phone about a Chinese brand of spicy (mala/麻辣) instant noodles that she was holding in her hand. Chinese food has many ingredients that do not exist in Japan cuisine, so she was asking about various spices used in the noodles. I asked her if this was her first time trying those noodles. She replied yes, and asked me if I had also tried it. I said yes -- they are very spicy! She laughed. Again: Cool to see normies using ChatGPT (and other LLMs) for normie stuff.
>I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with, and it's a lot of them.
This is something I wish more people in tech understood, especially anyone who gets to decide the defaults for popular hardware and software.
The average consumer will never, ever change the defaults. So it's incredibly important that your product is an amazing experience with the default settings.
It seems like on the “Chat” mode of ChatGPT it doesn’t allow switching the model. It’s just “5.6” with the effort level
I use claude all day every day, and sometimes codex, and I still don't change models. I guess I'm more interested in accomplishing the thing than in experimenting with a dozen ways of accomplishing the same thing.
most people are not on the unlimited plan and can't use it all day every day for complex work which is one reason they are forced to learn about the options available and optimize their workflows.
That's a great point I was overlooking-- that said, I know plenty of people on my corp plan who also have strong opinions on different models' strengths, so there _also_ are plenty of people who are legitimately digging into the pros and cons of each model, independent of price.
> I think Meta's strategy is to capture the 'normie-tier' of AI users.
For what it's worth, maybe that would help people who struggle with technology in general? Because as far as UI/UX goes, a chat interface for an agent is about as easy as it gets (not every site having its own crappy assistant that can't really do anything useful for you, but is slapped on there for the sake of a checkbox).
I watched the marketing video and to me it seemed pretty nice and practical for the average person.
But who is going to trust Facebook/Meta with everything? Even my parents are wary of their products. I can't see a personal assistant coming from them and being successful.
If this is still not obvious to you, most people don't care about privacy. You and your parents are outliers.
Not obvious from our discussions with friends or even from videos on youtube about everyone wondering how they are ad tracked.
They care but then it has been made very difficult to find privacy preserving services. Or convenience takes over.
It is like replaceable batteries. Everyone cares but we are not given the choice.
Or the headphone jack...
I think it is different here. First it is easy to build. Second that is too much information that should remain private.
I dunno what the correct level of abstraction is for LLMs to achieve the type of widespread adoption you’re referring to but I can guarantee it sits above the name of the model. If you have to possess that level of knowledge you ain’t gonna use it. Google achieved mainstream success for a reason. People don’t want to know how the sausage is made.
Yesterday I helped a maaaaybe 40 year old woman connect to the wifi at my local library so she could get on a zoom call. Made me realize most of the world is exactly like that.
Even with all of this nuance why would the regular joe go to muse when they have chatgpt and gemini? Most of their actual productive data is likely with Google anyway.
I agree, and stay away from meta generally in life wherever possible
That said, I've got more time for projects this week so flew through my Claude max plan. Now I'm trying muse spark 1.3 with opencode which is free with pretty generous usage allowance. First time I've been impressed by meta's AI products. It feels not far below opus 4.8ish
Literally what I was about to comment. This is meant to capture the normies, the busy parents managing school and work, the grandparents who want to make most of their retirement.
I am trying it now. It let me name my muse as Satan. I appreciate that it understands my humor, but I'm also not joking at the same time.
My parents are in their 70s and retired, I can't even vaguely imagine what they would use this for.
If they have any problems in life, it is that they have too much time on their hands already. An AI agent that automates tasks so they have more free time is exactly what they would not want.
What they really want is something worth spending their time on. That is what everyone pretty much wants but instead we get this bullshit.
Is "normies" finally a mainstream word? Just wondering how out of the loop I am here.
I've never heard a normie use it. ;)
I think it's very common - its just what a 'normie' is depends on your particular poison... it seems to have been incorporated in a lot of hobbies/niches to refer to anyone not deep in the niche ?
I'm confident that Muse can do lots of agentic tasks succesfully for normies on outdated models. Like buying sneakers, booking appointments, dealing with government forms.
Yeah this to me is why Apple wins
Yup. ChatGPT is going to be the new "Microsoft Word" of the corporate AI world
Given that cost of building is down, strategy of most companies is turning into "do everything" and see what sticks
To be fair I stopped caring about specific versions as well. I don't seem to notice the big difference anymore on daily tasks and questions.
I think all AI companies want to capture normie users too, it's a huge market.
All ChatGPT, Claude, Google, Microsoft have/want to have their own assistants.
> I think all AI companies want to capture normie users too, it's a huge market.
Huge revenue? Or just huge volume?
If I boost the productivity of a $100k employee by 50%, a business will happily pay $1k/month and consider it a great deal.
But from what I've heard, consumer-facing LLMs find most users won't hand over even $20/month (which is a heavily subsidised price anyway).
In a dystopian outcome, the goal of having more people use your AI will not be for them to pay for it...
This is not limited to non technical users. Plenty of people don't care to switch between models and just pick the latest model.
I met a normie who was using ChatGPT to write production code… in instant mode. No thinking enabled.
> So, us serial HN users and commenters are the extreme minority
Words to live by.
in a way it's not much different from a time where the E icon of internet explorer was considered "the internet".
It's not a bad market to aim for. No one else really is.
Many people deep into tech (like most commenters here) may fall into the trap of overestimating average user's knowledge or interest in the details of the tech: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...
> I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with, and it's a lot of them.
That's why Google already captured such a big part of the market with Gemini: they're now integrating it with just about everything. GMail? Gemini. Search? (asnwer by and "do you want to continue discussing this with") Gemini. Workspace? Gemini.
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/on...
They may not have yet the same number of MAU as OpenAI but the Gemini experience is much more streamlined than ChatGPT: when people are presented with it, they just use it.
And to be fair Google's flash model are just amazing.
Cant wait for Snitch Bench results of this
To me it sounds like they are simply taking social moon shots. They tried to do a phone, tried to make a kitchen videophone, tried to make their own cryptocurrency, and tried to dominate open source AI, and now this is trying to make something like a digital robotic assistant. It might have reached a peak with the metaverse, when Zuck thought his corporation was destined to be the ruler of a Snow Crash style metaverse, to the point of renaming it. Maybe that's still the plan and they are looking for something that will lead to another metaverse play.
They need the next big thing to secure the future of the company. Facebook and Instagram are still money printers which can sustain these repeated failures, but without something new, they could be completely ruined if the social media landscape changes.
> I then realized
Oh, your grandma doesn't know which android version her phone is running? Or the build number of the Windows on her laptop? You just realized this?
> I know most of us here on HN track model releases quite frequently and discuss every parameter weight out of them
You know it? I sincerely hope you don’t and that it’s not really “most” of us. That would be incredibly sad. Tracking model releases and discussing “every parameter weight” is very far from intellectually curious discussion (what HN is ostensibly about).
> I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with (…)
> Curse of knowledge and all.
If there’s one thing many of us on HN suffer from, however, is intense hubris. The juxtaposition of claiming “curse of knowledge” while admitting to not having known the most elementary principle of designing for people is a tad tone deaf. Yes, of course most people just stick with the defaults, that’s why dark patterns work and hiding settings is a thing. The industry has been using those strategies to manipulate people for years and years.
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