AI: New with the Old

... Meta Threads show the way

Wow, how fast things change in Tech. AI super-app ChatGPT’s historic momentum from just last November, may have been surpassed.  As the New York Times highlights:

“In less than a day, Threads — which is aimed as a rival to Twitter — appears to have taken the crown as the most rapidly downloaded app ever. It easily outstripped ChatGPT, the chatbot, which was downloaded one million times within its first five days, according to OpenAI, ChatGPT’s maker. And Threads is on a pace to exceed 100 million users within two months, a feat achieved only by ChatGPT, according to the analytics firm Similarweb.”

“Some of Twitter’s most-followed users — such as Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Gates, Shakira and Oprah Winfrey — immediately joined Threads and began posting.”

And it happened by blending in the old with the new. In a post dated June 29, titled “AI: Beyond the Search Keyhole”, I had highlighted:

“New technologies generally are introduced via familiar old services via earlier technologies.

Expect other services like Meta, TikTok, Google YouTube, and many others to do the same as AI drives what billions see and use online very soon. And for many before they type in their first ChatGPT ‘Prompt’. 

So AI is already far beyond ChatGPT and there’s a need to expand thinking beyond the Search keyhole. Even though it captures our attention first by first challenging one of the most successful, businesses created online.”

The point was that AI driven services were likely to come in forms way beyond a ChatGPT like Search prompt, and companies like Meta, with over three billion daily’s users for its services like Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp, were in a ‘Pole Position’ to offer new AI services at scale. 

And Boy, did Meta move fast. In an effort to offer a mainstream alternative to Twitter, and before any cage matches with Elon Musk, Meta Founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg has an incipient new AI driven hit in Threads on his hands. A ‘Twitter-like’ messaging app that leverages Instagram accounts to get going, and to build momentum that rivals ChatGPT from last November. Zuckerberg even tweaked Elon Musk with a first in over a decade tweet on Twitter no less.

And of course Elon is reacting already with legal threats. 

Although a lot of features are yet to come, the core feature seems to be an algorithmic driven feed that relies less on who one knows and follows, but rather generates a never ending feed based on the user’s consumption of the feed in real time. Just like TikTok did before it. And it’s working relative to more traditional “Follow” based social media feed architectures of services like Twitter itself. 

So a “Bug” (doesn’t show you items from just people you follow), becomes an AI driven Feature. Already new Threads users are seeing hundreds or thousands of ‘Follows’ based just on the creativity of their content, regardless of who they know, and/or are, from a ‘celebrity’ perspective. Free of legacy social graphs. Driven by AI social graphs.

Reviewers are already commenting on the “addictive” nature of this approach in the early days. It remains to be seen if Threads has the mainstream legs to continue its momentum vs ChatGPT, but the die is cast. It’s also building momentum in DC. 

Expect others, incumbents and startups, to try more AI driven feeds going forward, expanding way beyond the Search keyhole. And all this is before we even get to stuff like ‘smart, personal AI Agents’. Stay tuned.