Farcaster

What does an AI-first social network look like? Some thoughts.

First, you can prototype it with Farcaster. You don’t need to reinvent users, wallets, the feed, any of that. So that alone speeds you up.

Second, open source models are now cheap enough to run that you can just put them behind a normal button. X’s Grok integration is a good example.

Third, there is tremendous room for an AI which is prompted not just on immediate context (your post) but on social context (your past posts and those of your friends). It could autogenerate prompts it thinks you’d like.

Fourth, AI improvements on seemingly simple things like image upload widgets could be profound. You could automatically search for similar images, upscale them, auto-annotate them, or do something else.

Fifth, AI could enforce a certain style in a community. As heavy-handed example, every post could be rewritten in Olde English. If you opted into this kind of moderation, it could produce unique communities. Like filters, but for text.

The real challenge of AI-first social network is that a large platform like Meta is going to turn it into an "ad" network. Present IG and FB are mostly AI, mostly ads (or ads-adjacent) and very little social "network." In other words, we will get a AI-first Social Media Platform, with faux-network dynamics.

Investor, Writer & Photographer. Partner emeritus @ True Ventures. Past life: Started GigaOm. I have written about tech for 3+ decades. Visit: Om.co