OpenAI is building a social network?
116 comments
·April 15, 2025lukev
Nuzzerino
> If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and you wouldn't even be considering it... unless you knew you weren't about to shortly offer AGI.
I’m not a big fan of OpenAI but this seems a little unfair. They have (or at least had) a pretty kick ass product. Great brand value too.
Death-knell? Maybe… but I wouldn’t read into it. I’d be looking more at their key employees leaving. That’s what kills companies.
pyfon
It is a Threads. How is that doing?
gorgoiler
The analogy is with Iain Banks’ The Culture.
Anyone can be anything and do anything they want in an abundant, machine assisted world. The connections, cliques, friends and network you cultivate are more important than ever before if you want to be heard above the noise. Sheer talent has long fallen by the wayside as a differentiator.
…or alternatively it’s not The Culture at all. Is live performance the new, ahem, rock star career? In fifty years time all the lawyers and engineers and bankers will be working two jobs for minimum wage. The real high earners will be the ones who can deliver live, unassisted art that showcases their skills with instruments and their voice.
Those who are truly passionate about the law will only be able to pursue it as a barely-living-wage hobby while being advised to “not give up the night job” — their main, stable source of income — as a cabaret singer. They might be a journalist or a programmer in their twenties for fun before economics forces them to settle down and get a real, stable job: starting a rock band.
idiotsecant
The culture presents such a tempting world view for the type of people who populate HN.
I've transitioned from strongly actually believing that such a thing was possible to strongly believing that we will destroy ourselves with AI long before we get there.
I don't even think it'll be from terminators and nuclear wars and that sort of thing. I think it will come wrapped in a hyper-specific personalized emotional intelligence, tuned to find the chinks in our memetic firewalls just so. It'll sell us supplements and personalized media and politicians and we'll feel enormously emotionally satisfied the whole time.
retransmitfrom
The Culture is about a post-capitalist utopia. You’re describing yet another cyberpunk-esque world where people have still have to do wage-labor to not starve.
gorgoiler
You’re right so I made a slight edit to separate my two ideas. Thanks for even reading them at all! I try to contribute positively to this site when I can, and riffing on the overlap between fiction and real-life — a la Doctorow — seems like a good way to be curious.
comrade1234
Naah… in the culture you could change your sex at will, something soon to be illegal.
Duanemclemore
I haven't been happier online in the last 10 years than after I stopped checking social media. And in that miserable time it wasn't even a naked beg for training data like this.
But I really don't see why anyone would even use an open ai "social network" in the first place.
It does allow one thing for open ai. Other than training data which admittedly will probably be pretty low quality. It is a natural venue for ad sales.
Duanemclemore
Oh I get one thing - other than ads. So the idea of an LLM filter to algorithmically tailor your own consumption has some utility.
The logical application would be an existing social network -using- chat gpt to do this.
But all the existing ones have their own models, so if they can't plug in to an existing one like goooooogle did to yahoo in the olden days, they have to start their own.
That makes a certain amount of (backward) sense for them. I don't think it'll work. But there's some logic if you're looking from -their- worldview.
8n4vidtmkvmk
Isn't the selling point behind Blue sky is that you can customize your feed your way? I don't know the tech behind that but the feed is "open" isn't it? Can they plug into that?
SecretDreams
Social media is a plague, including LinkedIn. Anything that lets you follow others and/or erodes your anonymity is just different degrees of cancer waiting to happen.
The best I ever enjoyed the internet was the sweet spot between dial up and DSL where I was gaming in text based/turn based games, talking on forums, and chatting using IRC.
Duanemclemore
Agreed. I wasn't particularly hooked, didn't use it very much already. As an architect, designer, and professor I had ig, and for the last five years basically only for work. But the feeling of freedom in its absence these past few months has been palpable.
Early fb reconnecting with people I hadn't seen since high school was okay. The blog / Google Reader era happening at the same time was the real golden age for me. And it's been all downhill since.
beloch
>One idea behind the OpenAI social prototype, we’ve heard, is to have AI help people share better content. “The Grok integration with X has made everyone jealous,” says someone working at another big AI lab. “Especially how people create viral tweets by getting it to say something stupid.”
This would be a decent PR stunt, but would such a platform offer anything of value?
It might be more valuable to set AI to the task of making the most human social platform out there. Right now, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, etc. are all rife with bots, spam, and generative AI junk. Finding good content in this sea of noise is becoming increasingly difficult. A social media platform that uses AI to filter out spam, bots, and other AI with the goal of making human content easy to access might really catch on. Set a thief to catch thieves.
Who are we kidding. It's going to be Will Smith eating spaghetti all the way down.
TheOtherHobbes
An interesting use for AI right now would be using it as a gatekeeping filter, selecting social media for quality based on customisable definitions of quality.
Using it as a filter instead of a generator would provide information about which content has real social value, which content doesn't, and what the many dimensions of "value" are.
The current maximalist "Use AI to generate as much as possible" trend is the opposite of social intelligence.
falcor84
It's a nice idea in principle, but would probably immediately become a way by the admins to promote some views and discourage others with the excuse of some opinions being of lower quality.
petesergeant
I think that's right. Twitter without ads, showing you content you _do_ want to see using some embeddings magic, with decent blocking mechanisms, and not being run as a personal mouthpiece by the world's most unpopular man ... certainly not the worst idea.
dom96
Why would AI be any better at filtering out spam than developers have so far been with ML?
The only way to avoid spam is to actually make a social network for humans, and the only way to do so is to verify each account belongs to a single human. The only way I've found that this can be done is by using passports[0].
edaemon
That's interesting. Is there a social network where you can only connect with people you meet in real life?
kikoreis
(Stretching a definition of social network.)
Not strictly but Debian, where member inclusion is done through an in person chain of trust process so you have clusters of people who know each other offline as a basis.
Also, most WhatsApp contacts have been exchanged IRL, I presume.
dayvigo
So you have to just trust them to permanently delete the data after verifying you?
omneity
How do you handle binationals who might not have the same details (or even name) on each of their passports?
sampullman
You can always get around identification requirements, for example by purchasing a fake passport in this case. The idea is to increase the cost/friction of doing so as much as possible.
A fake ID is a lot harder to get your hands on than a new email, burner phone, etc.
add-sub-mul-div
No, nothing of value. If you ever want to lose faith in the future of humanity search "@grok" on Twitter and look at all the interactions people have with it. Just total infantilism, people needing tl;drs spoon-fed to them, needing summarization and one-word answers because they don't want to read, arguing with it or whining to Musk if they don't get the answer they want to confirm what they already believe.
rudedogg
I bookmarked this example where it is confidently incorrect about a movie frame/screenshot:
Centigonal
the worst is like a dozen people in the replies to a post asking Grok the exact same obvious follow-up question. Somehow, having access to an LLM has completely annihilated these commenters' ability to scroll down 50 pixels.
golergka
> people needing tl;drs spoon-fed to them, needing summarization and one-word answers because they don't want to read
It's bad that this need exists. However, introducing this feature did not create the need. And if this need exists, fulfilling it is still better, because otherwise these kind of people wouldn't get this information at all.
ein0p
You also can get Grok to fact check bullshit by tagging @grok and asking it a question about a post. Unfortunately this is not realtime as it can sometimes take up to an hour to respond, but I've found it to be pretty level headed in its responses. I use this feature often.
tiffanyh
My guess ... it's probably less of a "social network" and more of a "they are trying to build a destination (portal) where users go to daily".
E.g. old days of Yahoo (portal)
sho_hn
They just want the next wave of Ghibli meme clicks to go to them, really.
This will be built on the existing thread+share infra ChatGPT already has, and just allow profiles to cross-post into conversations, with UI and features more geared toward remixing each other's images.
herpdyderp
That was my thought: a meme-sharing platform.
beepbopboopp
The answer seems more obvious to me. They dont even care if its competitive or scales too much. xAI has a crazy data advantage firehousing Twitter, llama FB/IG and CGPT just has, well, the internet.
Id hope they have some clever scheme to acquire users, but ultimately they want the data/
randomor
Controversial opinion: it's not about the generator of the content, human or not, but about the originality of the content itself. Human with the help of AI will generate more good quality as a result.
Humans are just as good as bots in generating rubbish content, if not more so.
Twitter reduced content production cost significantly, AI can take it another step down.
At minimum, a social network where people share good prompt engineering techniques will be valuable to people who are on the hunt for prompts. Just like the Midjourney website, except creating a high quality image is no longer a trip to the beach, but a thought experiment. This will also significantly cut down the cold start friction and in combination with some free credits, people may have more reasons to stay, as the current chat based business model may reach it's limit for revenue generation and retention, as it's just single player mode.
godelski
> but about the originality of the content itself
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frabona
Feels like a natural next step, honestly. If they already have users generating tons of content via ChatGPT, hosting it natively and adding light social features might just be a way to keep people engaged and coming back. Not sure if it's meant to compete with Twitter/Instagram, or just quietly become another daily habit for users
pclmulqdq
This would be a natural step if it were 2010. In 2025, it sounds like a lack of imagination to me.
chazeon
I think a social network is not necessarily a timeline-based product, but an LLM-native/enabled group chat can probably be a very interesting product. Remember, ChatGPT itself is already a chat.
simple10
Yes, this. That's my bet if OpenAI follows through with social features.
Extend ChatGPT to allow multiple people / friends to interact with the bot and each other. Would be interesting UX challenge if they're able to pull it off. I frequently share chats from other platforms, but typically those platforms don't allow actual collaboration and instead clone the chat for the people I shared.
thomasfromcdnjs
I am building this with a team currently and we are launching in a couple days.
Would love an alpha tester or two if anyone wants to test it.
My email/twitter is in my profile, shoot me a message and I will be in touch.
sdwr
Yeah, the dream is the AI facilitating "organic" human connection
sho_hn
What's a "LLM-native/enabled group chat"?
simple10
Telegram and slack bots are probably the best example so far. Bot gets added to a chat and can respond when mentioned in the group chat.
sho_hn
Gotcha, the NLP-enabled version of the good old IRC weatherbot.
For a moment I had a funnier mental image of a chat app with an input field that treats every input as a prompt, and everyone's chatting through the veil of an LLM verbosity filter.
There might be something chat RPG-like there worth trying though ...
mushufasa
Sounds like they are thinking about instagram, which originated as a phone app to apply filters to a camera and share with friends (like texting or emailing them or sending them a link to a hosted page), and evolved into a social network. Their new image generation feature has enough people organically sharing content that they probably are thinking about hosting that content on pages, then adding permissions + follow features to all of their existing users' accounts.
honestly it's not a terrible idea. it may be a distraction from their core purpose, but it's probably something they can test and learn from within a ~90 day cycle.
CharlieDigital
Sounds like some crossover with Civit.ai
Nevermark
A social network that faithfully and intelligently curated posts according to my own continuously updated (explicit) direction would be most excellent.
But it would also juice echo chamber depth and further amplify extremist "engagement".
And the monetary incentives for OpenAI to generate most of the content, the "people", and the ads, including creative hallucinations and novel extremisms, so they directly match each of our curation directions, would enshittify the whole thing within a short minute.
--
The time has come to outlaw conflict of interest businesses that scale (the conflict).
If a startup plan includes "sales" and "customers": Green light go.
If it talks about ways to "monetize": Red trash can.
If only.
jsnider3
With all the other social networks trying to keep their data private because they all want to try their own AIs, it makes sense that OpenAI would want to have its own social network that wouldn't charge them for the data. I still doubt they actually launch it.
This kind of news should be a death-knell for OpenAI.
If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and you wouldn't even be considering it... unless you knew you weren't about to shortly offer AGI.