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🏠 Meta Gets Sassy With It

🏠 Meta Gets Sassy With It

Sass bot summer

Stephen Flanders
September 25, 2023

Gm. Happy Monday everyone, and thanks for once again tuning in. I’m trying out a slightly different format today in an effort to get as much news to you as possible. Let me know what you think about it by replying to this email or voting in the feedback poll at the end of the letter!

— Stephen Flanders

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🏠 AI

Meta Makes A Push For Younger Users

It’s easy to forget now that Facebook is the boomer online hangout spot, but Meta originally made their name as a social network for young people. Unfortunately for Meta, that dominance with the youngins has firmly moved on to apps like TikTok.

Now they want them back, and they have a master plan to do so.

AI chatbots…with personalities.

They are planning to release dozens of these “Gen AI Personas”, with the personalities including:

Bob the Robot, who is supposedly wicked smart and not afraid to let you know in the sassiest way possible.
Alvin the Alien, who just wants to know every last detail of you life.
Gavin, who in the best case scenario has no rizz and in the worst case scenario is misogynistic.

So, will these chatbots get young people flocking back to Facebook and Instagram? As your resident Zoomer, I’m not so sure the prospect of spilling my business to Alvin or getting dating advice from Gavin will get me to dust off Facebook, but there is evidence people are attracted to chatbots with personalities:

People love messing with ChatGPT.
Snap’s My AI chatbot has been used by 150 million people to send 10 billion messages.
Character.ai has turned itself into a unicorn from this very idea.
People are literally attracted to their Replikas.

But even if the chatbots fail to drag young people off TikTok, it might not be a total L for Meta. As Snap has made clear, these chatbots can be used to help improve targeted advertising, which is the bread and butter of Meta’s business.

The Big Picture: There are few companies better than Meta at “iterating” on an idea. Let’s see if they can do it again here.

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🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

The Microsoft-Activision deal finally looks set to go through.
Elon’s plan to charge everyone for X is leading to record usage for Bluesky.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max isn’t the most durable phone Apple’s ever made, that’s for sure.
If you want to watch Prime Video free from ads, you better be ready to cough up another $2.99 a month.

AI

Microsoft Bing is getting a whole host of AI upgrades, including DALL-E 3, personalized answers, and watermarks.
We’ve found a new bug in the system, as LLMs trained on “A is B” are unable to say “B is A”.
If you like multimodality, you’ll like DreamLLM.
Microsoft’s Copilot looks, as the kids say these days, absolutely cracked.

SCIENCE

For just the second time ever, scientists have transferred the heart of a pig into a human.
Fusing photons is pretty damn powerful.
A NASA spacecraft has returned with samples from an asteroid.
Houston, we now have space-based 5G calls.

CRYPTO

Coinbase kicked around the idea of buying FTX Europe in order to expand its derivative business.
Ethereum is once again inflationary, a sign that network activity is significantly slowing.
Coinbase has not ruled out launching a token for their layer-2 blockchain Base.
Binance has had enough of the SEC, as they are filing to dismiss the lawsuit against them.