Why users will tolerate Meta taking their data
The argument: personal agents can't be free forever, only cash-rich giants with distribution like Google, Apple and ByteDance can sustain them, so users will swallow their privacy concerns.
Yes meta has a terrible reputation in terms of user trust. But it doesn’t matter. Users will still give away all their data to meta. Here is why: Not a single startup can afford to make personal agent AI free forever. They don’t have $10B+ free cash to burn and also don’t have that many chips. OpenAI and Anthropic can’t do this either. Only Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple and Bytedance have the cash and chips. Unless we have free on-device LLM (which could be possible if Apple behaves), we are talking about tens of billions in inference cost for 100M+ users per year. Then of those with free cash, Only Google, Apple, Amazon, Bytedance have existing distribution that makes CAC free. If Apple can make local LLM great, they might kill meta muse, but only for iphone users. Google, amazon, bytedance aren’t that trustworthy either with user data. Hence, users would just deal with it. People are too lazy and cheap to worry about their privacy. Unfortunate but true.