This kind of news should be a death-knell for OpenAI.

If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and you wouldn't even be considering it... unless you knew you weren't about to shortly offer AGI.

>One idea behind the OpenAI social prototype, we’ve heard, is to have AI help people share better content. “The Grok integration with X has made everyone jealous,” says someone working at another big AI lab. “Especially how people create viral tweets by getting it to say something stupid.”

This would be a decent PR stunt, but would such a platform offer anything of value?

It might be more valuable to set AI to the task of making the most human social platform out there. Right now, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, etc. are all rife with bots, spam, and generative AI junk. Finding good content in this sea of noise is becoming increasingly difficult. A social media platform that uses AI to filter out spam, bots, and other AI with the goal of making human content easy to access might really catch on. Set a thief to catch thieves.

Who are we kidding. It's going to be Will Smith eating spaghetti all the way down.

> “The Grok integration with X has made everyone jealous,” says someone working at another big AI lab. “Especially how people create viral tweets by getting it to say something stupid.”

It's awesome to see the amazing value for society being created by big tech these days.

I haven't been happier online in the last 10 years than after I stopped checking social media. And in that miserable time it wasn't even a naked beg for training data like this.

But I really don't see why anyone would even use an open ai "social network" in the first place.

It does allow one thing for open ai. Other than training data which admittedly will probably be pretty low quality. It is a natural venue for ad sales.

The analogy is with Iain Banks’ The Culture.

Anyone can be anything and do anything they want in an abundant, machine assisted world. The connections, cliques, friends and network you cultivate are more important than ever before if you want to be heard above the noise. Sheer talent has long fallen by the wayside as a differentiator.

…or alternatively it’s not The Culture at all. Is live performance the new, ahem, rock star career? In fifty years time all the lawyers and engineers and bankers will be working two jobs for minimum wage. The real high earners will be the ones who can deliver live, unassisted art that showcases their skills with instruments and their voice.

Those who are truly passionate about the law will only be able to pursue it as a barely-living-wage hobby while being advised to “not give up the night job” — their main, stable source of income — as a cabaret singer. They might be a journalist or a programmer in their twenties for fun before economics forces them to settle down and get a real, stable job: starting a rock band.