[HN Gopher] OpenAI is building a social network?
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OpenAI is building a social network?
Author : noleary
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-04-15 16:08 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| jsnider3 wrote:
| With all the other social networks trying to keep their data
| private because they all want to try their own AIs, it makes
| sense that OpenAI would want to have its own social network that
| wouldn't charge them for the data. I still doubt they actually
| launch it.
| bhouston wrote:
| I've always thought that the social networks like X and BlueSky
| are sort of like the distributed consciousness of society. It is
| what society, as a whole / in aggregate, is currently thinking
| about and knowing its ebbs and flows and what it responds to are
| important if you want to have up to date AI.
|
| So yeah, AI integrated with a popular social network is valuable.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Social networks tend to reflect the character of their
| founders. Do you _really_ want to see what Sam Altman can do?
| bhouston wrote:
| > Social networks tend to reflect the character of their
| founders.
|
| I would say "owners" rather than "founders", but I agree with
| you. I think Sam Altman's couldn't be worse than Elon Musk's
| X, no?
| daqhris wrote:
| Both are founders of a so-called non-profit and are suing
| each other. Their legal arguments are public at this point.
| By reading them, one may understand that it's hard to
| choose between 'yes' and 'no' as an answer. Maybe, we could
| request and take into account the opinion of what they
| 'created' that might outlast them and their conflict,
| namely AI.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I don't use X neither. Looks like it won't be around for
| much longer anyway, except as American Pravda (even though
| "Truth" Social already exists).
| newaccountlol wrote:
| Make sure to hide your little sisters from it.
| beloch wrote:
| >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.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| No, nothing of value. If you ever want to lose faith in the
| future of humanity search "@grok" on Twitter and look at all
| the interactions people have with it. Just total infantilism,
| people needing tl;drs spoon-fed to them, needing summarization
| and one-word answers because they don't want to read, arguing
| with it or whining to Musk if they don't get the answer they
| want to confirm what they already believe.
| Centigonal wrote:
| the worst is like a dozen people in the replies to a post
| asking Grok the exact same obvious follow-up question.
| Somehow, having access to an LLM has completely annihilated
| these commenters' ability to scroll down 50 pixels.
| rudedogg wrote:
| I bookmarked this example where it is confidently incorrect
| about a movie frame/screenshot:
|
| https://x.com/Pee159604/status/1909445730697462080
| numpad0 wrote:
| A 4chan but images can be prompt generated? Makes sense.
| Everything's going back to early 2000s, it seems.
| kittikitti wrote:
| I would try to make a platform like Deviantart or Tumblr except
| OpenAI pays you to make good content that the AI is trained on.
| malux85 wrote:
| Nice in theory but don't know how practical it is to actually
| do.
|
| How do you define "good"? Theres obvious examples at the
| extremes but a chasm of ambiguity between them.
|
| How do you compute value? If an AI takes 200 million images to
| train, wait let me write that out to get a better sense of the
| number:
|
| 200,000,000
|
| Then what is the value of 1 image to it? Is it worth the 3
| hours of human labour time put into creating it? Is it worth 1
| hour of human labour time? Even at minimum wage? No, right?
| blitzar wrote:
| This is just part of the ongoing feud between Sama and Musk.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| They should use their resources to make OpenAI good at coding.
| siva7 wrote:
| Sam got a jawline lift, anyone noticed?
| dlivingston wrote:
| Did he? Flipping back and forth between old vs. new photos of
| him, his facial structure seems roughly the same.
| labrador wrote:
| It'd be cool to see Google+ resurrected with OpenAI branding.
| Google+ was actually a pretty well designed social network
| WJW wrote:
| Not well designed enough to live, though.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Not well designed to live under Google*
|
| Tumblr is still alive. LiveJournal is still alive. Newgrounds
| is still alive and Flash doesn't even exist anymore.
| bluetux01 wrote:
| that would be cool, google+ was very unique and i was kinda sad
| google killed it off
| swyx wrote:
| what did you like about it?
| labrador wrote:
| I liked the UX. I liked Circles. There were other nice
| options that I can't remember but I thought Google+ was a big
| improvement over Facebook.
| piva00 wrote:
| I don't believe it was well designed, it felt clunky to use,
| concepts weren't intuitive enough to understand after a few
| uses.
|
| I tried to use it for a few months after release, always got
| frustrated to the point I didn't feel like reaching out to
| friends to be part of it.
|
| The absurd annoyance of its marketing, pushing it into every
| nook and cranny of Google's products was the nail in the
| coffin. I'm starting to feel as annoyed by the push with
| Gemini, it just keeps popping up at annoying times when I want
| to do my work.
| chazeon wrote:
| I think a social network is not necessarily a timeline-based
| product, but an LLM-native/enabled group chat can probably be a
| very interesting product. Remember, ChatGPT itself is already a
| chat.
| sho_hn wrote:
| What's a "LLM-native/enabled group chat"?
| simple10 wrote:
| Telegram and slack bots are probably the best example so far.
| Bot gets added to a chat and can respond when mentioned in
| the group chat.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Gotcha, the NLP-enabled version of the good old IRC
| weatherbot.
|
| For a moment I had a funnier mental image of a chat app
| with an input field that treats every input as a prompt,
| and everyone's chatting through the veil of an LLM
| verbosity filter.
|
| There might be something chat RPG-like there worth trying
| though ...
| simple10 wrote:
| Yes, this. That's my bet if OpenAI follows through with social
| features.
|
| Extend ChatGPT to allow multiple people / friends to interact
| with the bot and each other. Would be interesting UX challenge
| if they're able to pull it off. I frequently share chats from
| other platforms, but typically those platforms don't allow
| actual collaboration and instead clone the chat for the people
| I shared.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What else are they going to spend billions on to turn a profit?
| swyx wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250415160251/https://www.theve...
| outside1234 wrote:
| Aren't they unprofitable enough already?
| pedalpete wrote:
| https://archive.is/qU4am
| pontus wrote:
| Is this just a data play? Need more data. Start a social network.
| Own said data.
| sva_ wrote:
| I think its more likely that they're desperate to find a
| profitable business model.
| prvc wrote:
| Is making yet another twitter clone really the way to build a
| path towards super-intelligence? A worthy use of the
| organization's talent?
| arcatech wrote:
| Collecting millions of people's thoughts and interactions with
| each other IS probably on the path to better LLMs at least.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I'd love for my agents to be created in the image of
| humanity's best side, its interactions on social media.
|
| Perhaps then we can all let LLMs take care of tweeting
| outrage for us, and go outside to find each other rolling
| around on the grass.
| philipov wrote:
| Imagine that, a social network where _all_ of the participants
| are bots.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| My guess ... it's probably less of a "social network" and more of
| a "they are trying to build a destination (portal) where users go
| to daily".
|
| E.g. old days of Yahoo (portal)
| sho_hn wrote:
| They just want the next wave of Ghibli meme clicks to go to
| them, really.
|
| This will be built on the existing thread+share infra ChatGPT
| already has, and just allow profiles to cross-post into
| conversations, with UI and features more geared toward remixing
| each other's images.
| beepbopboopp wrote:
| The answer seems more obvious to me. They dont even care if its
| competitive or scales too much. xAI has a crazy data advantage
| firehousing Twitter, llama FB/IG and CGPT just has, well, the
| internet.
|
| Id hope they have some clever scheme to acquire users, but
| ultimately they want the data/
| mushufasa wrote:
| Sounds like they are thinking about instagram, which originated
| as a phone app to apply filters to a camera and share with
| friends (like texting or emailing them or sending them a link to
| a hosted page), and evolved into a social network. Their new
| image generation feature has enough people organically sharing
| content that they probably are thinking about hosting that
| content on pages, then adding permissions + follow features to
| all of their existing users' accounts.
|
| honestly it's not a terrible idea. it may be a distraction from
| their core purpose, but it's probably something they can test and
| learn from within a ~90 day cycle.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Sounds like some crossover with Civit.ai
| clonedhuman wrote:
| AI bots already make up a significant percentage of users on most
| social networks. Might as well just take the mask off completely
| --soon, we'll all be having conversations (arguments, most
| likely) with 'users' with no real human anywhere near them.
| api wrote:
| I've been saying for a while that the next innovation beyond
| TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube is to get rid of human creators
| entirely. Just have a 100% AI-generated slop-feed tailor made
| for the user.
|
| There's already a ton of AI slop on those platforms, so we're
| like half way there, but what I mean is eliminating the entire
| idea of humans submitting content. Just never-ending hypnotic
| slop guided by engagement maximizing algorithms.
| janalsncm wrote:
| An idea which sounds horrifying but would probably be pretty
| popular: a Facebook like feed where all of your "friends" are
| bots and give you instant gratification, praise, and support no
| matter what you post. Solves the network effect because it scales
| from zero.
| samcgraw wrote:
| I'm sorry to say this exists: https://socialai.co
| einrealist wrote:
| This is Altman increasing the mass of the investment black hole
| that OpenAI is.
| paulvnickerson wrote:
| Sam Altman is retaliating against Musk for Grok and Musk's
| lawsuit against OpenAI, trying to ride the wave of anti-Musk
| political heat, and figure out a way to pull in more training
| data due to copyright troubles.
|
| If they launch, expect a big splash with many claiming it is the
| X-killer (i.e. the same people that claimed the same of Mastadon,
| Threads, and Bluesky), especially around here at HN, and then
| nobody will talk about it anymore after a few months.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Here's how to kill Twitter and Bluesky AND Mastodon:
|
| 1: use an LLM to extract the text from memes and relatable
| comics.
|
| 2: use an LLM to extract the transcriptions of videos.
|
| 3: use an LLM to censor all political speech.
|
| OpenAI, I believe in you. You can do it. Save the Internet.
|
| If you can clean my FYP of current events I'll join your social
| media before you can ask a GPT how to get more users.
| frabona wrote:
| Feels like a natural next step, honestly. If they already have
| users generating tons of content via ChatGPT, hosting it natively
| and adding light social features might just be a way to keep
| people engaged and coming back. Not sure if it's meant to compete
| with Twitter/Instagram, or just quietly become another daily
| habit for users
| Nijikokun wrote:
| ngl building a social network isn't hard, getting people to use a
| social network is the hard part
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