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It can’t work because in the West the services you can access through super apps (food delivery, taxis, chat, online shopping, payments) already have extensively developed infrastructure and stickiness, and none of them are going to sign over their entire user data and control over their product and a percentage of their revenue to Musk in exchange for…access to the Twitter audience which they almost certainly already have.
Super Apps were a unique response to the fact that smartphone adoption in much of Asia represented the first time hundreds of millions of people got online. For various reasons texting and emails were less common and so were quickly swept away by messenger apps like QQ which ultimately became super apps at exactly the time that online shopping, food delivery, taxis, and mobile payments were becoming popular.
In the West everyone with any money (and therefore the entire lucrative market) is on iPhone where iOS serves most built-in super app functions (single sign on and near-universal payments locked to FaceID and fully integrated with all card issuers/providers, with seamless interchange fee distribution) and people are used to opening apps directly from their Home Screen or search. Even Android now has most of these features.
There’s simply no case for a super app. Why would I open Twitter/‘X’ and navigate a bloated and unwieldy app to get to the food delivery section when I could just open UberEats? Why do I need Twitter/X to pay my friends when I can open PayPal? Apple Cash actually already let’s you text people money through iMessage (by far the most popular messaging app in the US). In Europe, India and South America it seems unlikely people will drop the WhatsApp ecosystem, which itself already has full payments in India and Brazil where it’s most popular.
The Super App experience in China, Indonesia etc is actually worse than the regular smartphone experience in the US because super apps are bloated and slow and require lots of navigation. Why would Americans switch to it?
But I explicitly do not mean that pedestrian stuff. Copying WeChat is not a viable strategy because WeChat is a copy of what the West has. I mean aggregating social media/research services iPhone very much does not provide, and cannot, because they will only exist in that form thanks to a protocol leveraging Twitter data.
I think LLMs herald the complete devaluation of any public information. Anything in the training set will be free. Siri will have it, Google will have it, Bing will have it, public information will become entirely and absolutely commodified and thus worthless. Even Musk cannot keep the scrapers away. The models will be good enough for any normal person to use for information retrieval pretty universally.
So the only research that will have value will be privately commissioned stuff where access is carefully guarded (both legally and practically) to ensure it doesn’t become part of a training set.
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