<story><title>Meta AI releases CoTracker, a model for tracking any points (pixels) on a video</title><url>https://co-tracker.github.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thethimble</author><text>Does anyone understand the business angle for meta here with these models? I still don’t understand why their research division exists and how it relates to their core business. I’m a huge admirer of their work but don’t understand the why.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gmerc</author><text>- It degrades Googles and OpenAis ability to monetize.
That alone is worth gold because tech is not a blue ocean anymore - neither from a market opportunity nor from an investor perspective. Your competitors loss is your gain. They can’t use money they don’t make to mount attacks to dislodge customers, investors, mindshare from you. Yes, Meta is weaponizing &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; to hurt their competitors, but we&amp;#x27;re in a capitalism world, that&amp;#x27;s about as good as it gets unless you want purity of motives.&lt;p&gt;- Secondly it commoditizes AI. Zuck believes that his platforms ultimately will benefit if there is more content. Because his platforms sell the ability to show YOUR content over the rest, for coin. Just as with news&amp;#x2F;mobile games, driving the value of your content lower and lower by fostering the creation&amp;#x2F;supply of more of it is good for FB and bad for you. You have to advertise to rise above the noise. (See commoditize your complements)&lt;p&gt;- Thirdly it reinforces the investor narrative that the company has a future because AI.  That&amp;#x27;s important, because by now consensus is that ads future is under pressure of market saturation, regulation, competition (Apple&amp;#x27;s ability to hurt Meta at will, Amazon&amp;#x27;s increasing ads monetisation, etc.). There&amp;#x27;s more than one company that needs that narrative to land, but combined with hurting google, this is pretty good for a company that didn&amp;#x27;t have a generative AI strategy and was betting on the metaverse a year ago.&lt;p&gt;- Fourth, it captures open source momentum behind your limited internal efforts. Llama, when it was first released, was not competitive - easily a year behind Google&amp;#x27;s and more behind OpenAI&amp;#x27;s efforts - but by being first to capture thousands of capable contributors, just a few months later it is one of the most efficient and scalable LLM systems out there and incorporating many innovations days after their paper releases. Open models alone, without their foundational model, would have tugged along for a while before reaching this state.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s fascinating about this situation is how it shuffles the big tech positioning. Meta and Apple, purely on a personal leadership bases, are hating each other&amp;#x27;s guts, but both Apple and Meta need Google&amp;#x2F;OpenAI to fail, for different reasons</text></comment>
<story><title>Meta AI releases CoTracker, a model for tracking any points (pixels) on a video</title><url>https://co-tracker.github.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thethimble</author><text>Does anyone understand the business angle for meta here with these models? I still don’t understand why their research division exists and how it relates to their core business. I’m a huge admirer of their work but don’t understand the why.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bg24</author><text>My hypothesis is that they want to get the absolute mindshare and adoption and decide the right product&amp;#x2F;solutions along the way. Note that there are trends (web 1, web 2, mobile etc.) and the leaders tend to grow significantly.&lt;p&gt;It is a mad rush time with the new generation of AI, and future products are going to be amazing. Meta cannot afford to have just 1 cash cow. Metaverse failed, but they have a real shot here.&lt;p&gt;A few things I can think of (beyond social networks).&lt;p&gt;- Enterprise push, starting with very high-end enterprises. Their license structure (free below X million users) allows it nicely. They can afford to have a small team and yet win big. Note that typically 80% of any enterprise products revenue comes from say, 10-20% of top customers.&lt;p&gt;- Build a platform. Meta learned from Google, and then Apple debacle on how dependent the world is on platform. What would the new OS look like?&lt;p&gt;- Weaken Google and Apple. Some indications on why they partnered with Microsoft - this also ties to the point above.</text></comment>