Why is an AI company pretending that we’re living in 2022 and working on a new social media platform? OpenAI has money, everyone’s attention, and its iOS app is still the number one download on Apple’s App Store. It doesn’t really need to get into the social media business for cash (most platforms struggle to turn a profit) or prestige. Sure Sam Altman has beefed with both Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and cockily threatened to make a social media platform, but why divert the company’s resources to that when its in a fight for AI supremacy with xAI, Google, and Anthropic. Altman’s X clone is all about getting a steady stream of content that it can train its models on for free.
There’s a shortage of data right now that is limiting how quickly and effectively AI models can be trained. Google has a steady stream of content thanks to running the most-used search engine on the planet and YouTube. Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has managed to impress plenty of people with its model Grok because it trains on the social media platform. The same goes for Meta and its Llama model.
OpenAI has been very focused on this problem for a while, and even has AI create new content to train AI models on. But as you can guess, AI-created content isn’t necessarily high enough in quality to be good training content. Which isn’t a surprise! AI is effectively just the best pattern recognizer and generator around. So if the pattern is “really bad AI schlock,” then yeah, what it generates would likely also be just as terrible. A social network of human users would give OpenAI that same steady stream of new training data that some of its biggest competitors enjoy. A nice big diverse (hopefully) training data set.
But that social network will still have to be used by people, and that’s where I’m baffled by OpenAI’s plans. Just because you build a social media network doesn’t mean people will actually use it! Just look at the half dozen promising Twitter clones that sprouted up after Elon Musk beat the original into submission with a kitchen sink and grotesque management practices.
Social media is not a Field of Dreams baseball field. In it’s report on Tuesday, The Verge suggests the new platform might be integrated into the ChatGPT app itself—effectively getting it in front of millions of users with a single software update. That plan sort of worked for Meta when it used Instagram to push users to Threads. Millions signed up as the platform broke records and spawned think pieces. Then it had a huge drop in users. Then it slowly climbed back up, and now Meta claims it has about 245 million monthly users. That sounds like a lot until you log in and it appears that half are clout chasing, a quarter are bots, and the other quarter are all those people who first signed up back in 2023. It’s a bit of a trash platform at this point. A joke for its users and people on other platforms, as well.
And that’s Meta, the company that is arguably the best at making engaging social media platforms. If Meta can’t bootstrap a monster hit into existence, then what hope does an AI company with little social media experience have?
There’s a small built-in user base. OpenAI fans are already thinking about moving to the new platform, and there’s a possibility of AI developers all still lingering on X to migrate over. Theoretically, it could become a hangout spot for the AI crowd. But that would be a small and insular user base that’s not exactly primed to produce the content needed to make a clever AI more clever. That’s gonna require the rest of us, and the tradeoffs might be too much for some. Plenty of people happily exchange their privacy and browsing data for the ability to use social media for free. But a lot of people (hey, Gizmodo readers!) have much stronger feelings about their data and content being used to train AI. For many, it feels like theft. Which means OpenAI’s social media platform could look less like a place to connect people and more like a place to rob them blind.