Welcome to edition #11 of The Upgrade. The Upgrade is a weekly column where I deep-dive into one topic and curate ideas, progress and curiosities than interest me.
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In this edition:
š§µThreads is unspooling: App is losing active users rapidly. It may have a āboringā problem and all the missing features donāt help.
š¦¾ In AI news: AI CEOās doom call for Indiaās coders, Llama 2 and Indian ITās heavy AI investments
š¬ Is ChatGPT getting dumber? Many think so and thereās also some solid evidence. OpenAI isnāt saying much.
š¬ Chart on share of movie going audience in India by language
The Big Social
Threads has a āboringā problem
Meta launched the Twitter competitor Threads on July 6. 24 hours later, Zuckerberg claimed 70 million downloads of the app. Similarweb estimated that there were close to 50 million DAUs on Threads by July 7.
Cut to a week later, the DAUs have halved to 23.6 million. Turns out, Threads may have a boring problem.
Why is threads a snooze fest?
Threads looked a lot like Twitter, the app it was trying to compete with but missing many features.
More importantly, the social graph was unformed (and different). The feed has devolved into a mess of brands, influencers, photos and what feels likeā¦random junk. Within a week, predictably, user engagement fell drastically on Threads from 20 minutes to 6 minutes (per user).
Twitter is an angry place that can be toxic. But, it is also a place for ideas and movements to rise (#blacklivesmatter #metoo). Twitter impacted the world in its own small way.
Adam Mosseri, who heads Threads, wants the vibe to be different: āThe goal is to create a public square for communities on Instagram that never really embraced Twitter and for communities on Twitterā¦.that are interested in a less angry place for conversationsā
But is Threads throwing out the baby with the bathwater?
ā¦and missing features
Threads is truly V1. Itās missing several critical features that are must-haves, like search, a timeline of people you follow, web app, hashtags, etc. Clearly Zuck and team had taken a call to release early to capitalize on some of Twitter chaos (rate limiting) and free cage match PR.
Mosseri has promised that some of these (including a possible edit button!) are coming this week.
Will Twitter remain undefeated?
Threads has about ~20% of Twitterās DAUs currently (not terribly bad for an app that launched two weeks back)
Twitter, while being the more fun and engaging platform currently, still has a owner whoās decisions lack coherence. The fact that Twitter now gets endorsed by Taliban leaders reflects more on the direction it is heading. Advertisers have left the platform (50% drop in ad revenue).
ā¦..and Twitter is cashflow negative.
Twitter hasnāt been building all that much loyalty either. Twitterās 30-day user retention has dropped from 19% to 16% since 2022. On the other hand, Meta has cracked the retention problem in Instagram (40%). Can it replicate this with Threads?
Real question is, can Threads solve its boring problem before Twitter solves its cash flow problem?
A Quote
I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying 'flee at once - all is discovered.' They all left town immediately.
ā Mark Twain
Some AI newsā¦
š©š»āš» Unstable thoughts: In a call with UBS, Stability.ai CEO was quoted as saying āoutsourced coders from India up to level three programmers will be gone in the next year or two, whereas in France, you'll never fire a developer." Heās also claimed AI will replace all engineers in five years. So Indian coders are probably not shaking in their boots.
š¦ Hey, yet another oneās out: Metaās new open sourced (purists would disagree) LLM, Llama 2 is out (largest of the lot has 70B parameters). It outperforms all other open sourced models currently. Meta has partnered with Amazon and Microsoft to make this available in both AWS and Azure. Enemyās enemy is my friend?
šš»āāļø Un-benching AI: Infosys revealed that I had signed a $2 billion AI deal with an unnamed client to provide AI and automation services. Some days back Wipro announced that it was going to spend $1 billion training its workforce on āAIā and integrate it in product offerings.
Check this outā¦
š¤ ChatGPT may be getting dumber
While we are afraid of sentient AI taking over humanity, many users are reporting that the answers from ChatGPT4 are actually more dumber with time.
The GPT train is slowing?
Looks like, users are finding ChatGPT less and less interesting. Monthly visits dropped by 10% in June (first time since the hype cycle started in November).
Over the last month, users have gotten increasingly annoyed in community forum on OpenAI and are complaining about downgrade in logic, loss of reasoning, not listening to prompts, etc. One user puts it as being like ādriving a Ferrari for a month then suddenly it turns into a beaten up old pickupā
Is it actually getting dumber though?
Lots of people are complaining. But the hardest evidence yet is from a recent paper measuring GPT 4 performance and it seems to have degraded across a bunch of parameters.
Itās quite possible this is the result of some tweaking for safe answers as it appears to stay away form controversial topics that discriminate.
ClosedAIā¦.
The bigger concern is that OpenAI hasnāt spoken about it at all. OpenAI has been notoriously closed about GPT4 from day one. Quite a departure from open sourcing days of before.
Thereās also increasing speculation that GPT-4 may not be a single large LLM but actually 8 different models trained and then āhackedā together.
Itās hard to build on something when you donāt know how its changing.
Possible reasons
Since Open AI hasnāt spoken, hereās some speculations trawled from multiple forums from the most boring to the most interesting:
Perceived dumbness: But maybe, this is all just perception. After the initial novelty wore off, people are looking more keenly at the misses?
Compromises: Guardrails to achieve speed, safety, lower costs could have made the model feel less smart.
Intentional Lobotomy: An uncontested OpenAI with a superior product, may not want to give it all for a couple of dozen dollars to every customer.
AI cannibalism: AI learning from AI generated data and getting progressively dumber. This is the funniest option (so god let it be true).
In Other Newsā¦
š±Xiaomi wants more offline : Xiaomi plans to win back its dominance in India (it lost its place to Samsung) by opening more retail stores and hiring up to 12,000 sales people. Currently only 34% of Xiaomiās retail sales is offline in contrast to 57% for Samsung.
š Itās raining Apples: India became Appleās fifth biggest market for the first time and now stands behind US, UK, China and Japan. And thatās off a 5% market share for Apple in India
āļø A painful message from the skies: An errant meteorite apparently attacked a woman in France while she was peacefully having her morning coffee. What are the odds, eh? Well, apparently, its 1 in 250,000 according to this calculation (more likely that being attacked by a shark).
š š£ Barbenheimer: Itās Barbenheimer mania this weekend as Barbie and Oppenheimer both launch on July 21 to some insane hype and even more insane fan wars online.
A Chart
I know the chart is pink but after all its the weekend of Barbie. India has 122 million theatre going audiences (this has fallen by 16% from pre-pandemic). Of this, 58 million watch Hindi movies. Tamil and Telugu follow with around 28 million movie goers. Hollywood is at number 4 position and has increased audience number post pandemic. Source: Oremax Media
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