So, I don’t have a comment on specifically doing Zuckerberg, but a practice adopted by a number of companies that make a product that can reasonably be used by employees is to try to have employees actually use the thing, because that makes them aware of things that need to be changed or other issues or improvements and more-interested in doing so. That is, in general, as a company, you’re likely better-off in terms of filling user needs if employees actually use whatever they make, especially if they’re in a position to make decisions about how it works.
Eating your own dog food or “dogfooding” is the practice of using one’s own products or services.[1] This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage using product management techniques. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually a kind of testimonial advertising. Once in the market, dogfooding can demonstrate developers’ confidence in their own products.[2][3]
Not everywhere I’ve worked has done that, but at places where it was applicable, they tried to do so, including one handing out free hardware if necessary to use the product, as well has having the company itself make use of the products if possible. I think that it’s generally a good idea; it makes people at the company in a position to improve things very aware of pain points.
If — and I have no idea if this is actually the case — Meta is trying to position AI models they make to act in a “contact the company” role, they might want to have their employees actually doing that themselves.
Meta’s in a strange business for that philosophy because, well… 99% of their income is ads. They model and engage users to sell ads.
It’s not great dogfood for employees to try.
And their “AI” situation is murky. They’ve actually use machine learning internally for a long, long time, but the recent rush to try and productize AI more directly is… mixed.
They had a really good open weights LLM division, and built an interesting ecosystem around those “Llama” models. Small/medium businesses helped expand them. Meta employees interacted with other open source projects, too, and posted their own experiments. It was great! And a prime example of “eating your own dog food.”
…But that lab had one failed experiment, so Zuckerberg killed the whole thing. As Zuck tends to do.
And now they have some new division which, from my perspective in the tinkerer community, I would bluntly describe as “a clash of Tech Bro egos.” It’s generous to call experiments like an “AI CEO” as an attempt to test their own product, but it more closely resembles Zuckerberg’s pattern of frantically, nervously engaging in something with the nebulous hope it goes viral like Facebook did.
So, I don’t have a comment on specifically doing Zuckerberg, but a practice adopted by a number of companies that make a product that can reasonably be used by employees is to try to have employees actually use the thing, because that makes them aware of things that need to be changed or other issues or improvements and more-interested in doing so. That is, in general, as a company, you’re likely better-off in terms of filling user needs if employees actually use whatever they make, especially if they’re in a position to make decisions about how it works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
Not everywhere I’ve worked has done that, but at places where it was applicable, they tried to do so, including one handing out free hardware if necessary to use the product, as well has having the company itself make use of the products if possible. I think that it’s generally a good idea; it makes people at the company in a position to improve things very aware of pain points.
If — and I have no idea if this is actually the case — Meta is trying to position AI models they make to act in a “contact the company” role, they might want to have their employees actually doing that themselves.
Meta’s in a strange business for that philosophy because, well… 99% of their income is ads. They model and engage users to sell ads.
It’s not great dogfood for employees to try.
And their “AI” situation is murky. They’ve actually use machine learning internally for a long, long time, but the recent rush to try and productize AI more directly is… mixed.
They had a really good open weights LLM division, and built an interesting ecosystem around those “Llama” models. Small/medium businesses helped expand them. Meta employees interacted with other open source projects, too, and posted their own experiments. It was great! And a prime example of “eating your own dog food.”
…But that lab had one failed experiment, so Zuckerberg killed the whole thing. As Zuck tends to do.
And now they have some new division which, from my perspective in the tinkerer community, I would bluntly describe as “a clash of Tech Bro egos.” It’s generous to call experiments like an “AI CEO” as an attempt to test their own product, but it more closely resembles Zuckerberg’s pattern of frantically, nervously engaging in something with the nebulous hope it goes viral like Facebook did.