What this project created was something sophisticated and powerful, but not something people wanted, and they got (rightfully) pilloried for it. Instead of shaking ones fist at the world for rejecting your brilliance, maybe the really smart ones are making the things that others actually desire, and not merely developing techs that give themselves leverage over others and expecting the world to defer to this demonstration of intellectual prowess.
This whole incident was a case study for product management and startup school 101. I've made this exact same category of error in developing products, where I said, "hey, look at this thing I built that may mean you don't have to do what you do anymore!" and then was surprised when people picked it apart for "dumb" reasons that ignored the elegance of having automated some problem away.
If this model were really good, they would have used it to advance a bunch of new ideas in different disciplines before exposing it to the internet. Reality is, working at Meta/Facebook means they are too disconnected from the world they have influenced so heavily to be able to interpret real desire from people who live in it anymore. When you are making products to respond to data and no actual physical customer muse, you're pushing on a rope. I'd suggest the company has reached a stage of being post-product, where all that is left are "solutions," to the institutional customers who want some kind of leverage over their userbase, but no true source of human desire.
This whole incident was a case study for product management and startup school 101. I've made this exact same category of error in developing products, where I said, "hey, look at this thing I built that may mean you don't have to do what you do anymore!" and then was surprised when people picked it apart for "dumb" reasons that ignored the elegance of having automated some problem away.
If this model were really good, they would have used it to advance a bunch of new ideas in different disciplines before exposing it to the internet. Reality is, working at Meta/Facebook means they are too disconnected from the world they have influenced so heavily to be able to interpret real desire from people who live in it anymore. When you are making products to respond to data and no actual physical customer muse, you're pushing on a rope. I'd suggest the company has reached a stage of being post-product, where all that is left are "solutions," to the institutional customers who want some kind of leverage over their userbase, but no true source of human desire.