Speaker 1: Hi everyone, I'm Emily Chang and this is the circuit.
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg has fired his latest salvo in the AI wars,
Speaker 1: and he thinks it's a big one. Of course, you
Speaker 1: all know him as the face of Facebook, in the
Speaker 1: spotlight and in the hot seat. For twenty years, he's
Speaker 1: been on the offensive, buying Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus, and
Speaker 1: the defensive, battling a never ending cascade of criticisms about
Speaker 1: the social, political, and business impacts of his expanding empire. Lately, though,
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg seems to be having something of a zuck Aissance
Speaker 1: or a zuck Renaissance. He's rocking a different vibe. Gold chains,
Speaker 1: fuzzy jackets, martial arts on a barge in Lake Tahoe.
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg appears to be reinventing himself and his company, Metta's
Speaker 1: latest push is a major play to open source AI
Speaker 1: in contrast to closed source competitors like open AI and Google.
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg just unveiled his company's newest class of AI models,
Speaker 1: LAMA three point one, by the way, that stands for
Speaker 1: large Language Model Meta AI, and he believes this approach
Speaker 1: to AI will have a profound impact on the progress
Speaker 1: of tech, business, and maybe the world. I took a
Speaker 1: trip to Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California to meet
Speaker 1: Zuck and hear about the AI future he says is
Speaker 1: the path forward. We also talked about what's next for
Speaker 1: social media, what's at stake in the US presidential election,
Speaker 1: and his famous side quests joining me now, Meta CEO
Speaker 1: and founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 2: Goodness, see you again.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having us.
Speaker 2: I'm excited to do this.
Speaker 4: I thought about sending my avatar to meet you, but
Speaker 4: I decided this was too good to pass up.
Speaker 3: So we're gonna walk slowly.
Speaker 2: Okay, you want to set the pace. I will set that.
Speaker 3: I will try it. Sometimes I walk too.
Speaker 2: Fast, so you will. This is your thing.
Speaker 4: So so in the future, will we be meeting as avatars?
Speaker 4: And will that feel totally normal?
Speaker 2: I think probably some of the time. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, I think you're going to be.
Speaker 5: You're gonna have meetings where instead of having to use
Speaker 5: zoom and look at a screen, you're gonna just have
Speaker 5: the people you're talking to as kind of three D avatars,
Speaker 5: just on your couch or around the table. And that's
Speaker 5: going to be pretty good. I mean we'll also be
Speaker 5: able to probably have AI coworkers who will be embodied
Speaker 5: as avatars sitting around the table with us too. So
Speaker 5: that's something that you're not gonna be able to do physically.
Speaker 2: But I don't know. I like it because I mean
Speaker 2: I'm a.
Speaker 5: Big believer in like kind of physical presence and interaction,
Speaker 5: and I mean I just think that like the ability
Speaker 5: to actually be in a physical space, like around a
Speaker 5: table or at a couch and kind of have the
Speaker 5: person there, even if they're not physically there is a
Speaker 5: lot better than just looking at a screen.
Speaker 4: How much of your day to day is meetings versus
Speaker 4: product reviews versus like big strategic thinking.
Speaker 5: It really depends on a day to day basis. I
Speaker 5: don't know that there's like a normal day, the ideal
Speaker 5: day I get to to work on all the long
Speaker 5: term stuff. But I mean, in this role, you sometimes
Speaker 5: get sucked into stuff that is not.
Speaker 2: What you want to be focused on within a given day. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So yeah, but I view and part of this is like,
Speaker 5: all right, how many days am I actually focused on
Speaker 5: the things that I want to be building stuff for
Speaker 5: the long term?
Speaker 3: How much are you still coding?
Speaker 2: Oh? I don't code for work at all anymore. I
Speaker 2: do it for fun.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean probably most of the coding that I
Speaker 5: do these days is with my daughters, teaching them.
Speaker 2: They love it.
Speaker 5: My daughter Aggie, she basically uses code as a medium
Speaker 5: for art and just to create somethings. She calls it
Speaker 5: code art, just like telling stories and different things by
Speaker 5: like making I don't know just's it's just coding in scratch.
Speaker 5: So I spent a bunch of time doing that with
Speaker 5: the kids, and that's my coding these days.
Speaker 4: So I found an article in the Harvard Crimson going
Speaker 4: back to two thousand and three where you were talking
Speaker 4: about open source.
Speaker 3: Okay, like over twenty years.
Speaker 4: Ago, really, so you've been thinking about this really long time.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, it's a big part of the tech industry.
Speaker 5: I mean you wouldn't have been able to build the
Speaker 5: early version of Facebook without that. I mean all the
Speaker 5: stuff that we used, just the early versions of my
Speaker 5: sequel and PHP and Apache and Linux, I mean all
Speaker 5: that stuff. It's like, there's just no way I would
Speaker 5: have been able to build the first version without that
Speaker 5: whole stack.
Speaker 3: So it's like super critical.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, I was a student.
Speaker 5: I didn't have access to a lot of capital I
Speaker 5: couldn't have gotten like a really expensive proprietary Unix system
Speaker 5: or something. So I mean there's the whole kind of
Speaker 5: hacker mentality. You just take the code, use it for
Speaker 5: the thing that you need to. It's more cost efficient,
Speaker 5: and I mean that's how you can start something like
Speaker 5: this in a dorm room.
Speaker 4: So speaking of that, some people see you as an
Speaker 4: unlikely champion of open source today you're laughing.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know why. I mean, I actually think, well,
Speaker 2: I get it, but yeah.
Speaker 3: You understand, you understand the word unlikely.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Well, we've actually Meta have been pretty big proponents
Speaker 5: of open source for a while, and it maybe is
Speaker 5: a little bit of an accident of history that you know,
Speaker 5: we got started after companies like Google and built up infrastructure,
Speaker 5: but it was never a proprietary advantage for us because
Speaker 5: we grew up after them. So instead of kind of
Speaker 5: hoarding it and saying, Okay, this is going to be
Speaker 5: something that we keep as an advantage, because it actually
Speaker 5: wasn't an advantage relative to Google and other companies.
Speaker 2: It was just we were just catching up, like all right,
Speaker 2: let's create.
Speaker 5: An open ecosystem and make it so we can benefit
Speaker 5: from the innovation that other people bring and.
Speaker 2: It's been a really good formula for us.
Speaker 5: So dating back to how we design servers, how we
Speaker 5: design our data centers, we have this whole open compute
Speaker 5: project that kind of standardized a lot of the infrastructure
Speaker 5: for the industry. It was really good for us because
Speaker 5: now that all these other companies are using the same
Speaker 5: stuff as us, the supply chains got more built out
Speaker 5: around it, which meant that it was cheaper for us.
Speaker 5: So we've saved billions of dollars by kind of having
Speaker 5: it out there. And that's going to how with AI too.
Speaker 5: So you can look at our history, there's all these
Speaker 5: different projects that we've open sourced, and I think that
Speaker 5: the positive experience that we've had is one of the
Speaker 5: reasons why we're just a little more willing to put
Speaker 5: ourselves out there and open source AI models and generally
Speaker 5: believe that we're going to get the positive benefits from
Speaker 5: the ecosystem on that too.
Speaker 4: You're really putting a stake in the ground by open
Speaker 4: sourcing your AI in this attempt to build the AI
Speaker 4: rails for the future. How much of this is a
Speaker 4: strategic way to control or own the next technology wave.
Speaker 2: It's a few things.
Speaker 5: One is, if you just think about, like our kind
Speaker 5: of psychology and strategy on this, A lot of how
Speaker 5: we've grown up over the last ten or fifteen years
Speaker 5: was building our apps through phone platforms that our competitors controlled.
Speaker 5: And you know, there's all these analyzes that we've done
Speaker 5: where we would be like a lot more profitable, our
Speaker 5: business would be bigger if we hadn't gotten all these
Speaker 5: random taxes or rules that the mobile platforms.
Speaker 2: Had put on us.
Speaker 5: But honestly, that's not the big thing that bothered me.
Speaker 5: It was how it limited our creativity to build the
Speaker 5: best things that we could imagine. It's somewhat soul crushing
Speaker 5: to like go build something that you think is going
Speaker 5: to be good and then just get told by Apple
Speaker 5: that you can't ship it because they want to put
Speaker 5: us in a box because they view us as competitive.
Speaker 5: So you know, we're a big enough company now that
Speaker 5: one of the things that I've resolved is that for
Speaker 5: the next generation of technology, I want us to build
Speaker 5: and have more control over the next set of platforms
Speaker 5: that we're going to build. So I think AI is
Speaker 5: a critical one, and I think augmented and virtual reality
Speaker 5: is another critical one. But the thing is is that
Speaker 5: these platforms are not just It's not such a thing
Speaker 5: that you can go build in a lab.
Speaker 2: It's an ecosystem.
Speaker 5: So we can build the best AI model, but over time,
Speaker 5: like Linux, the way that it becomes valuable is that
Speaker 5: there's going to be a whole ecosystem of companies that
Speaker 5: integrate with it and build out all these different capabilities,
Speaker 5: And if we were to keep that to ourselves, we
Speaker 5: actually wouldn't benefit.
Speaker 2: So it's kind of the way that we.
Speaker 5: Can control our own destiny on this and make sure
Speaker 5: that we have access to leading AI is by building
Speaker 5: it and having it become an industry standard. So it's
Speaker 5: somewhat counterintuitive, and I think a lot of people woul
Speaker 5: look at that and say, Okay, why don't you just
Speaker 5: if you build this thing, why don't you just keep
Speaker 5: it for yourselves? But it actually gets stronger by being
Speaker 5: able to share it and have the ecosystem around it.
Speaker 4: How much of an opportunity here do you see to
Speaker 4: take Apple out.
Speaker 3: Of the middle.
Speaker 5: Interestingly, Apple is not really the biggest player in AI,
Speaker 5: or at least major AI foundation models, so I'm sure
Speaker 5: that they'll do great stuff with their Apple Intelligence and
Speaker 5: the on device stuff, But I was more using that
Speaker 5: as an illustrative example that really kind of shaped me
Speaker 5: and I think has shaped the company over the last
Speaker 5: ten or fifteen years of one of the struggles that
Speaker 5: we've had building apps in their ecosystem. I mean, they're
Speaker 5: just not a neutral player in that right. I mean
Speaker 5: we're a competitor to them, and we have to deliver
Speaker 5: our services through a competitor, and that's a very difficult
Speaker 5: situation to be in. So going forward, I'm not sure
Speaker 5: that they are going to be the biggest challenge that
Speaker 5: we have, but I think the lessons from that If
Speaker 5: AI is going to be as important in the future
Speaker 5: as platforms are, then I just don't want to be
Speaker 5: in the position where we're accessing AI through I don't
Speaker 5: know whether it's Google or you know, whoever the other
Speaker 5: company is that also may be eventually down the road
Speaker 5: a competitive for us. It's just I think it's important
Speaker 5: if we want to build services that help people connect
Speaker 5: in all the ways that we want to do. It's
Speaker 5: just a thing where we're a technology company. We need
Speaker 5: to be able to build stuff not just at the
Speaker 5: app layer, but like all the way down, and it's
Speaker 5: worth it to us to make these massive investments to
Speaker 5: do that.
Speaker 4: You're continuing to improve meta AI across all of your products,
Speaker 4: but also as a standalone chatbot. Why should we use
Speaker 4: meta over chat GPT?
Speaker 5: Well, there's a bunch of things where it's better, And
Speaker 5: I mean one is there are all these tools for
Speaker 5: producing content.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: One of the things that we're rolling out soon is
Speaker 5: the ability to just like imagine stuff.
Speaker 2: You're typing something in real time. I do this with
Speaker 2: my daughters all the.
Speaker 5: Time, and as you're typing and entering the query, it's
Speaker 5: just generating the images as you enter the keystrokes.
Speaker 2: It's just really cool.
Speaker 5: The other is just that it's kind of in integrated
Speaker 5: into the experiences that people use. So you can add
Speaker 5: medai to your chats with your friends and WhatsApp or
Speaker 5: Messenger or Instagram, so it can be there in group threads.
Speaker 5: I think that's really neat. But look, at the end
Speaker 5: of the day, I think the most important product for
Speaker 5: an AI assistant is going to be how smart it is.
Speaker 5: And the LAMA models that we're building are some of
Speaker 5: the most advanced in the world, and I think that
Speaker 5: that's why people want to use them that and obviously
Speaker 5: it's you know, we try to build our services and
Speaker 5: make them free. So a lot of other companies they
Speaker 5: take their best models and they charge for them, and
Speaker 5: we're going to try to take our best models and
Speaker 5: make them free so that way as many people as
Speaker 5: possible around the world can use them. And it's early,
Speaker 5: but it's basically working. My goal for the Medai launch,
Speaker 5: which I mean it's only really a few months old
Speaker 5: at this point, was to by the end of the year,
Speaker 5: have Metai be the most used AI assistant in the world.
Speaker 2: And I think we're basically on track for that.
Speaker 5: I mean, there's hundreds of millions of people who are
Speaker 5: at the end of this year, yeah, and I think
Speaker 5: we're going to be there before the end of the year.
Speaker 5: But there are already hundreds of millions of people who
Speaker 5: are using it. We're not even rolled out in all
Speaker 5: the languages yet. We have the big launch coming this
Speaker 5: week that's just like much better models across the board,
Speaker 5: so people are using that AI. It's just going to
Speaker 5: get smarter this week automatically. You don't have to pay
Speaker 5: for it. It's just going to keep on getting better
Speaker 5: and better.
Speaker 4: So you're releasing LAMA three point one, this family of
Speaker 4: models big and small, including the biggest open source model
Speaker 4: ever four hundred and five billion primers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, what does that jump unlock?
Speaker 5: In Layman's term, the bigger the model, the more intelligence
Speaker 5: can be encoded in it, but also the more expensive
Speaker 5: it is to operate and run. Right, So you don't
Speaker 5: always just want to use the biggest model. You want
Speaker 5: to use the most sophisticated model for what.
Speaker 2: You're trying to do.
Speaker 5: So if you're trying to run it on a phone
Speaker 5: where there's limited compute, you actually want a much smaller model,
Speaker 5: maybe like a two billion parameter model or three or
Speaker 5: something like that.
Speaker 2: People want to run stuff on.
Speaker 5: Their own laptops, and you can run like a seventy
Speaker 5: billion parameter model on a laptop. The four hundred and
Speaker 5: five billion parameter model is a really big, very sophisticated
Speaker 5: models that we're shipping, is basically competitive with all the
Speaker 5: state of the art models. People can run it directly
Speaker 5: if they want, But I actually think the main thing
Speaker 5: that people are going to do, especially because it's open source,
Speaker 5: is use it as a teacher to train smaller models
Speaker 5: that they use in different applications. We've actually done this ourselves,
Speaker 5: so we have smaller models, which actually the main ones
Speaker 5: that we use in our products because again they're more
Speaker 5: cost effective to run. And as soon as we finish
Speaker 5: training the four hundred and five billion parameter model, we
Speaker 5: used it to now train a better version of the
Speaker 5: small models. And I think one of the really powerful
Speaker 5: things is that if you just think about like all
Speaker 5: the startups out there, or all the enterprises or even
Speaker 5: governments that are trying to do different things, they probably
Speaker 5: all need to at some level build custom models for
Speaker 5: what they're doing. And it's really hard to do that
Speaker 5: with closed systems out there, whether that's open AI or Gemini,
Speaker 5: Google's thing or whatever.
Speaker 2: But with open source.
Speaker 5: That's really easy because you have the weights, so you
Speaker 5: can basically use the model to distill and train whatever
Speaker 5: size model you want. Gets to a pretty core part
Speaker 5: of our philosophy is we don't believe there's gonna be
Speaker 5: like one AI to rule them all. Our vision is
Speaker 5: that there's going to be millions or just billions of
Speaker 5: different models out there, and I think that's really what
Speaker 5: the LAMA three point one, four or five billion is
Speaker 5: going to allow. It's just going to be this teacher
Speaker 5: that allows so many different organizations to create their own
Speaker 5: models rather than having to rely on the kind of
Speaker 5: off the shelf ones that the other guys are selling.
Speaker 3: So not one god, but many, Is that the way
Speaker 3: to think about it?
Speaker 5: Well, I don't think they're gonna be gods, but I
Speaker 5: mean I think I think there's this weird semi theological
Speaker 5: thing that I think. I think you're referring to this
Speaker 5: conversation that I had on Instagram recently, where I do
Speaker 5: think that to some degree, if you're like an organization,
Speaker 5: you think you're going to create like this one super
Speaker 5: intelligence that does have this feel to me of like
Speaker 5: people trying to create a god. And that's just I
Speaker 5: find that both the wrong way to look at it,
Speaker 5: but just also very unappealing. I would rather create a world,
Speaker 5: or help people create a world where there can just
Speaker 5: be like a lot of different diferent people and services
Speaker 5: that you interact with. So, you know, one of the
Speaker 5: things that I'm excited about is making it so that,
Speaker 5: like you know, there's almost two hundred million creators on
Speaker 5: our platforms, they all are trying to build their community.
Speaker 5: People want to interact with them, there aren't enough hours
Speaker 5: in the day, Like, I want to make it so
Speaker 5: that every single one of them can easily train like
Speaker 5: an AI version of themselves.
Speaker 2: That they can make it what they want.
Speaker 5: So it's almost like a kind of artistic artifact that
Speaker 5: they're putting out there for their community that allows their
Speaker 5: community and interact with them, but also gives them control
Speaker 5: over how that interaction happens.
Speaker 2: And I think that that's going to be great, and
Speaker 2: there's going to.
Speaker 5: Be millions there are, you know, eventually hundreds of millions
Speaker 5: of those simple businesses. There's hundreds of millions of small
Speaker 5: businesses on our platforms, and I want to make it
Speaker 5: so that any small business can just very easily pull
Speaker 5: in all their information from social media and their business
Speaker 5: catalog and get an agent that can help their customers
Speaker 5: with customer support and can help them with sales and
Speaker 5: can recommend new products. And I think that just like
Speaker 5: today every business has a web site and email address
Speaker 5: and social media accounts, I think in the future every
Speaker 5: business is going to have an AI business agent too,
Speaker 5: and I think that's going to be great. So I
Speaker 5: don't think that there's just like one AI use case,
Speaker 5: which is what we're trying to do. I think what
Speaker 5: we're trying to help enable the whole community to do
Speaker 5: is create all these different ais for all these things
Speaker 5: that people want to do. And that's kind of how
Speaker 5: I think the sense of being a good thing for
Speaker 5: the world.
Speaker 4: Some people don't see your AIS so open. So how
Speaker 4: open are we talking?
Speaker 2: Really?
Speaker 4: Will you show us how the model was built or
Speaker 4: what data you've trained on it?
Speaker 5: The model has open weights, so you can take the
Speaker 5: weights and you can modify them, and you can see
Speaker 5: how it's built, and you can see the architecture and
Speaker 5: all that. I'm not aware of anyone else doing more
Speaker 5: open work than this. The data question, I think is
Speaker 5: a kind of sensitive and important one. I mean, there
Speaker 5: is this question in science where people want to be
Speaker 5: able to reproduce science experiments, and I think some people
Speaker 5: would like to be able to do that here. The
Speaker 5: reality is, you know, it also costs for the LAMA
Speaker 5: three model at least hundreds of millions of dollars of compute,
Speaker 5: and going forward it's going to be billions and many
Speaker 5: billions of dollars of compute. So is it reason or
Speaker 5: is anyone actually going to be able to reproduce it.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure.
Speaker 5: I don't think that that's like as important of a
Speaker 5: thing to push on and for data, I think that
Speaker 5: even though it's open, but we are designing this also
Speaker 5: for ourselves and we want to make sure that this
Speaker 5: works well. And we do work with different organizations to
Speaker 5: license data in different ways, and some.
Speaker 2: Of those sources are proprietary.
Speaker 5: Even if the data is public, you know, you don't
Speaker 5: necessarily have the kind of right out of the gate
Speaker 5: to be able to train on it. You sometimes have
Speaker 5: to go make deals, and so we can't just go
Speaker 5: ship all the data even if it's public data that
Speaker 5: we've used to train on. And sometimes it's not even
Speaker 5: clear that it's the right thing to disclose or tell
Speaker 5: people what data we've trained on. So yeah, I mean
Speaker 5: I get the point on that. You know that you
Speaker 5: can always take what you're doing and make it more
Speaker 5: open and even more extreme way. But look, I mean,
Speaker 5: I think what we're doing is state of the art
Speaker 5: and kind of open source a eye models. I think
Speaker 5: for people who want to use this to build stuff,
Speaker 5: I think that they're pretty happy with.
Speaker 2: What we do.
Speaker 4: You are using Facebook and Instagram data right as a
Speaker 4: public data, public data as I understand it, and is
Speaker 4: that does that give you an advantage versus other models,
Speaker 4: and should those users get something in return for their
Speaker 4: data being used.
Speaker 5: I actually think I'm not sure how much it's an
Speaker 5: advantage because a lot of the public data on those
Speaker 5: services we allow to be indexed and search engines, So
Speaker 5: I think Google and others actually have the ability to
Speaker 5: use a lot of.
Speaker 2: That data too. In some way.
Speaker 5: If we didn't use the data, we might actually be
Speaker 5: at a disadvantage because if it were in like Google Search,
Speaker 5: and we somehow couldn't use it because we were saying, Okay,
Speaker 5: we're not going to use data from our services even
Speaker 5: if it's public, but Google can use it because it's
Speaker 5: not from their services.
Speaker 2: It like kind of doesn't make sense.
Speaker 5: But I do think that overall, there's code and technology
Speaker 5: that you develop, there's compute to train the models on,
Speaker 5: and there's what your data mix is, and those are
Speaker 5: probably some of the biggest pieces that contribute to the
Speaker 5: end quality of the model. So we try to innovate
Speaker 5: on all of those, and we want to build the
Speaker 5: best thing because it's the foundation that we use for
Speaker 5: our products. But we also want to build the best
Speaker 5: thing because we want it to become the open source
Speaker 5: standard that then other people adopt and then it makes
Speaker 5: it even better, which helps us serve the people that
Speaker 5: we're trying to build for as well.
Speaker 4: So let's get into the broader strategy and how this
Speaker 4: is all going to work, Like, will we have AI
Speaker 4: generated influencers with AI generated captions and avatars talking to avatars?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we'll have all of it.
Speaker 4: What and like, how do you want to create the
Speaker 4: first AI generated social network?
Speaker 5: Well, I think that that will be part of this,
Speaker 5: but it's not going to be the only thing. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's people come to our services because they want to
Speaker 5: connect with people. But you know, actually, one of the
Speaker 5: most interesting use cases that people have for medai today,
Speaker 5: it's like in the top four use cases is role
Speaker 5: playing difficult social interactions that they're going to have.
Speaker 2: So whether it's in a.
Speaker 5: Professional context like okay, you want to ask your manager
Speaker 5: for a raise, or like I'm having this hard conversation
Speaker 5: with my girlfriend or my friend, they.
Speaker 3: Could have role played this conversation with you today.
Speaker 5: I mean, like, hopefully it's not stressful for you, but
Speaker 5: it's But yeah, I mean I think that that's like
Speaker 5: it's a clear social tool where there's there's no judgment. Right,
Speaker 5: the AI isn't sitting there, there's no like social repercussion
Speaker 5: for what you ask it.
Speaker 4: But what evidence do you have that people want to
Speaker 4: live in this virtual world and socialize with avatars or
Speaker 4: that it's actually good for us?
Speaker 5: Well, I think that people want to connect with each other.
Speaker 5: I actually think like all the other stuff is generally noise,
Speaker 5: but all the technology allows you to do that in
Speaker 5: a better and better way. Right when I got started
Speaker 5: with Facebook, it was mostly text, and then this whole
Speaker 5: there's been this whole kind of like technological evolution where
Speaker 5: we got smartphones that we could primarily be taking photos,
Speaker 5: and then the mobile network's got good, so then you
Speaker 5: could be kind of sharing video and videos a lot
Speaker 5: richer and consuming videos a better experience. So I just
Speaker 5: don't think that's the end of the line. I think
Speaker 5: it gets more immersive. And that's one of the reasons
Speaker 5: why I'm so convinced that ar glasses by the time
Speaker 5: you just get to like normal stylish glasses where you
Speaker 5: can have a sense of presence.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think within.
Speaker 5: Five years we're going to be at a point where
Speaker 5: we could be having this conversation and like I could
Speaker 5: just be like a full kind of three D avatar here,
Speaker 5: and it would feel like a much more realistic sense
Speaker 5: of presence than just talking to each other over a
Speaker 5: zoom screen or.
Speaker 2: Something like that. That's what it's about, though.
Speaker 5: I think people want to connect, and we're basically building
Speaker 5: all the different technology that allows people to do that.
Speaker 4: You renamed your company meta, You're still pouring billions of
Speaker 4: dollars into the metaverse.
Speaker 3: Are we as far along as you thought we'd be
Speaker 3: a few years down the line? Are there any lessons
Speaker 3: in the urgency of the pivot?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 5: A lot of the reason why I did that is
Speaker 5: because I think we were getting pigeonholed as just this
Speaker 5: like social media app company, right, And that was like
Speaker 5: so ingrained, right.
Speaker 2: So we were called Facebook.
Speaker 5: Facebook is one of our apps, right, and the others
Speaker 5: are just as important now. And I've never thought about
Speaker 5: the company as a social media app company. I mean,
Speaker 5: we didn't start as that. We weren't you know, there
Speaker 5: weren't apps when we got started. We were a technology
Speaker 5: company that is to help people connect and kind of
Speaker 5: to build the future of human connection. And I thought
Speaker 5: that the rebrand around meta both was healthy because.
Speaker 2: We just have more products at this point than just
Speaker 2: Facebook and two.
Speaker 5: It kind of re anchored people's thinking about the company
Speaker 5: in terms of, oh, this is a company that's developing
Speaker 5: kind of longer term technology around people connecting, which is
Speaker 5: really how I think about what we should be doing.
Speaker 5: And when you're trying to push something in a direction,
Speaker 5: it's helpful for people both inside the company and outside
Speaker 5: to think about it in terms of what you're actually
Speaker 5: trying to do. So I've been very happy with how
Speaker 5: that's gone. The metaverse thing was always going to be
Speaker 5: a very long term thing. I think some things have
Speaker 5: gone better than I thought. Some have gone slower. The glasses,
Speaker 5: I think is probably the best example of something that
Speaker 5: is going better. I would have thought a few years
Speaker 5: ago that ar glasses wouldn't really be a mainstream thing
Speaker 5: until we got kind of these full holographic displays, like
Speaker 5: I think the type of stuff that you've been able
Speaker 5: to see. It's been one of the most positive surprises
Speaker 5: that the collaboration that we have with ray Band, it's
Speaker 5: going extremely well, and I think part of it is
Speaker 5: they're stylish, they're good glasses. Part of it is that
Speaker 5: it's a great form factor for AI. We didn't know
Speaker 5: that AI was going to be a thing when we
Speaker 5: started working on that project, or I mean, we thought
Speaker 5: it was going to be a thing like ten years
Speaker 5: from now. But if you asked me five years ago,
Speaker 5: I would have guessed that AR would come before AI,
Speaker 5: not the other direction. So some of this is just
Speaker 5: about kind of setting yourselves up to ride the different
Speaker 5: waves when they come in.
Speaker 4: I've gotten to try out a bunch of your future
Speaker 4: facing technology here with Quest with the ray band, metas
Speaker 4: with O Ryan. How big an opportunity do you see
Speaker 4: to own your own operating system? And down the line
Speaker 4: do you see your reshuffling of the power relationships in
Speaker 4: the tech industry Now.
Speaker 5: I don't always think about things primarily from a business perspective.
Speaker 5: I mean, I like building stuff. What I've found is
Speaker 5: that if you build good things, then eventually you were
Speaker 5: able to build successful products and businesses around it, even
Speaker 5: if it takes a while. And one of my lessons
Speaker 5: for the last ten years is just building apps that
Speaker 5: we ship through our competitors' mobile platforms. I just think
Speaker 5: we're going to be freed up to be more creative
Speaker 5: and build better stuff if we can control more of
Speaker 5: the core technology. So I mean, look, we're not going
Speaker 5: to be the only kind of operating system and augmented
Speaker 5: in virtual reality. There will be others. We're not going
Speaker 5: to be the only AI system. There will be others.
Speaker 5: But I don't necessarily think about it as trying to
Speaker 5: shuffle the industry. I just want to be able to
Speaker 5: build good things, and I think that like not being
Speaker 5: dependent on competitors that are trying to put you in
Speaker 5: a box, is an important part of doing that.
Speaker 2: But it's also a luxury, right.
Speaker 5: It's like when I was a startup, where we were
Speaker 5: a startup, like you don't necessarily have the resources to
Speaker 5: go invest tens of billions of dollars in building out
Speaker 5: these technologies. But you know, now we're here and we
Speaker 5: have a successful business and we can do this innovation.
Speaker 5: And it's just one of the things that I want
Speaker 5: to do. I don't want us to just like rest
Speaker 5: on our laurels and maximize our profits in the near term.
Speaker 5: I want to pour all the profits and success that
Speaker 5: we have into building the next generation of things, to
Speaker 5: do it in an open way. I think one analogy
Speaker 5: that people misread from history is there have always been
Speaker 5: multiple operating systems. Right with PC, it was Windows and Apple,
Speaker 5: and Windows was the open one back then, and it won,
Speaker 5: right So I think that a lot of people now
Speaker 5: have this massive recency bias and they think you just
Speaker 5: have the iPhone Android analogy in your head and you're like, oh, like,
Speaker 5: well Apple won that. It's like, yeah, they won this
Speaker 5: generation of computing. But it's not always that way. For PCs,
Speaker 5: the open one was actually the primary platform. And part
Speaker 5: of my goal is to make it so that for
Speaker 5: the next generation of platforms, whether it's AR glasses or
Speaker 5: mixed reality headsets or AI systems, it's not just that
Speaker 5: there should be an open platform. I think the open
Speaker 5: platform can actually be the best one, and I think
Speaker 5: that that's kind of a cool thing for the industry.
Speaker 4: Sakoya calls AI the six hundred billion dollar question. There's
Speaker 4: allays investment in chips and the infrastructure and the data centers,
Speaker 4: but when does it start paying off?
Speaker 3: Like is it a bubble? And well, if not, like,
Speaker 3: when do you start seeing the money.
Speaker 5: I think bubbles are interesting because a lot of the
Speaker 5: bubbles ended up being things that were very valuable over time,
Speaker 5: and it's just more of a question of timing, like
Speaker 5: you're asking, right. Even the dot com bubble, it's like
Speaker 5: there's all this fiber laid and it ended up being
Speaker 5: super valuable, but it just wasn't as valuable as quickly
Speaker 5: as people thought.
Speaker 2: So is that going to happen here? I don't know.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's hard to predict what's going to happen
Speaker 5: in the next few years. I think AI is going
Speaker 5: to be very fundamental. If the products were able to
Speaker 5: grow massively over the next few years, which I think
Speaker 5: there's a very good chance of, then I'd much rather
Speaker 5: over invest in play for that outcome then just try
Speaker 5: to say, Okay, maybe we'll save some money by developing
Speaker 5: it a little more slowly. I think that there's a
Speaker 5: meaningful chance that a lot of the companies are overbuilding
Speaker 5: now and that you look back and you're like, oh,
Speaker 5: we maybe all spent some number of billions of dollars
Speaker 5: more than we had to. But on the flip side,
Speaker 5: I actually think all the companies that are investing are
Speaker 5: making a rational decision, because the downside of being is
Speaker 5: that you're out of position for the most important technology
Speaker 5: for the next ten to fifteen years, whereas if you overinvest,
Speaker 5: then you're probably just losing some amount of money that's
Speaker 5: for these companies generally an affordable amount of money that
Speaker 5: they can lose for something that's just a really important prize.
Speaker 4: So with this economy, does the year of efficiency continue
Speaker 4: into the AI era? Are we talking years of efficiency
Speaker 4: or has it belt loosened?
Speaker 5: Well, I'm really glad that we did all the efficiency
Speaker 5: push because I think that that basically created enough capital
Speaker 5: for us to go invest in massive amounts of infrastructure.
Speaker 5: And I think going forward, I would guess that most
Speaker 5: of the investment that we make is going to be
Speaker 5: building out AI compute rather than massively growing the number of.
Speaker 2: People at the company.
Speaker 5: We are growing, We're going to hire more people, but
Speaker 5: I think at this point the biggest part of the
Speaker 5: new investment that we're making is in building these kind
Speaker 5: of giant AI superclusters to train the future AIS.
Speaker 2: So it was.
Speaker 5: An interesting thing for like the first almost twenty years
Speaker 5: of the company that it was just like growing quickly
Speaker 5: in people every year, and I think it's pretty healthy
Speaker 5: to focus on efficiency around that. But yeah, I'm definitely
Speaker 5: glad that we kind of gave ourselves the flexibility.
Speaker 2: To build this.
Speaker 4: You said your goal is getting to artificial general intelligence
Speaker 4: or AGI. How do you define AGI and do you
Speaker 4: get there first?
Speaker 2: That's a good question.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure we can answer the second question about
Speaker 5: who gets there first, but actually maybe maybe we'll start there.
Speaker 5: I do think open sources gaining ground pretty quickly. If
Speaker 5: you look at LAMA two last year, we were like
Speaker 5: a whole generation behind the frontier, and for LAMA three,
Speaker 5: we're basically competitive with the state of the art models
Speaker 5: LAMA three and the LAMA three.
Speaker 2: Point one release that we're putting out now.
Speaker 5: We're basically already starting to work on LAMA four, and
Speaker 5: our goal is to completely close the gap with all
Speaker 5: the others on that. So I don't know, I mean,
Speaker 5: do we get to AGI first? I mean, I think
Speaker 5: that there will probably be some breakthroughs between now and then.
Speaker 5: It's hard to just predict in a straight line, but
Speaker 5: we're certainly putting together a world class effort and we're
Speaker 5: focused on it.
Speaker 2: Then you get to the more complicated question, which is
Speaker 2: like what is it.
Speaker 5: I don't know that there's one specific definition for this
Speaker 5: because I think intelligence is multivariant, right, It's not like
Speaker 5: there's one number that is your intelligence. I think of
Speaker 5: AGI is intelligence has different kind of capabilities, Right, So
Speaker 5: the first set of models could reason over text, and
Speaker 5: then you added in the ability to do photos, and
Speaker 5: now you're adding in the ability to do videos, to
Speaker 5: understand videos and produce videos, and then you're making that
Speaker 5: it works well with audio. I think the ability to
Speaker 5: reason and be able to produce three D worlds and
Speaker 5: three D content is going to be really important. I
Speaker 5: care a lot, and our company cares a lot about
Speaker 5: people interacting with each other. So like when you think
Speaker 5: about the human brain, there's like whole parts of it
Speaker 5: that are just focused on basically like reading people's expressions.
Speaker 5: It's like if you move your eyebrow a millimeter, it
Speaker 5: means something. It's like I could pick that up, whereas
Speaker 5: if something moves over there in the corner a millimeter,
Speaker 5: I'm not going to notice it. There's probably a specific
Speaker 5: aspect of intelligence or modality which is like reading people's
Speaker 5: faces and emotions, and that's something that I care about,
Speaker 5: so I think we'll probably try to build that in
Speaker 5: at some point. So I don't know if it's just
Speaker 5: like increasing the amount of knowledge or some like IQ score.
Speaker 5: It's kind of layering in all these different things, which
Speaker 5: is why it's a little bit hard to say who
Speaker 5: gets their first because I actually think over time, different
Speaker 5: companies might optimize for different things.
Speaker 4: I know, you've always been fascinated by China and you
Speaker 4: learn to speak Mandarin, and what do you know about
Speaker 4: where China is on AI and AGI?
Speaker 5: I don't personally know a ton. I know on open
Speaker 5: source they're leading models. You know, LAMA three point one
Speaker 5: is well ahead of that. The kind of leading Chinese
Speaker 5: model before was right at the level of the previous
Speaker 5: seventy billion parameter model. But there's been no Chinese version
Speaker 5: that's anywhere near the frontier, like a four hundred billion
Speaker 5: parameter model, and the LAMA three point one seventy billion
Speaker 5: is ahead of where they are.
Speaker 2: So I feel good about that. I don't know.
Speaker 5: I think that's going to be one of the interesting
Speaker 5: questions over time. You know, geopolitically, when you think about
Speaker 5: the rivalry, there's this question which is how should the
Speaker 5: US approach kind of AI competition with China. And there's
Speaker 5: one strain of thought which is like, okay, well, we
Speaker 5: need to like lock it all down and I just
Speaker 5: happen to think that that's really wrong because the US
Speaker 5: thrives on open and decentralized innovation. I mean, that's the
Speaker 5: way our economy works. That's like how we build awesome stuff.
Speaker 5: So I think that locking everything down would hamstring us
Speaker 5: and make us more likely to not be the leaders.
Speaker 5: And the other question is if we do lead, what's
Speaker 5: the chance that we're actually going to prevent them from
Speaker 5: being able to steal it anyway.
Speaker 2: I mean, it fits on like a thumb.
Speaker 5: Drive or so it's I just think that that's not
Speaker 5: a realistic way to approach it. I personally think that
Speaker 5: the right configuration of this is open source.
Speaker 2: I think is going to be the leading ecosystem.
Speaker 5: It will be very robust, it will eventually be available
Speaker 5: to everyone in the world, including China. But I think
Speaker 5: the leading companies should work with the US government and
Speaker 5: make sure that our national defense and things like that
Speaker 5: have sort of a perpetual first mover advantage on the
Speaker 5: leading technology in the world.
Speaker 4: What do you say to the skeptics who think, you know,
Speaker 4: this could be exploited by our rivals, criminals could get
Speaker 4: their hands on it, Like, how do you think about
Speaker 4: those risks.
Speaker 5: Well, I think that there are different kinds of risks,
Speaker 5: so you have to take them one by one. The
Speaker 5: risk of China or a very large sophisticated state that
Speaker 5: has a lot of resources, I think is different from
Speaker 5: like an individual criminal who might just try to do
Speaker 5: something bad. I think to neutralize a criminal, I mean, look,
Speaker 5: you want to do a lot of testing up front.
Speaker 5: We do all this work before we release every single
Speaker 5: one of the models to make sure that we understand
Speaker 5: what the risks are and that we mitigate them as
Speaker 5: much as possible.
Speaker 2: At the end of the day.
Speaker 5: The way that we've approached this with social media, and
Speaker 5: the way that I think society approaches this overall is
Speaker 5: you have kind of better AIS or more resources to
Speaker 5: go fight people who have less resources. So there are
Speaker 5: all these sophisticated folks who try to do bad stuff
Speaker 5: on the social networks, but we invest like billions of
Speaker 5: dollars a year and have these various sophisticated systems.
Speaker 2: So I do think that will play out with AI.
Speaker 5: Too, which is that more sophisticated AIS with more compute
Speaker 5: will be able to generally check less sophisticated folks, whether
Speaker 5: they're just kind of everyday criminals or whatever trying to
Speaker 5: use something but they have less compute.
Speaker 3: So we win the AI wars this way.
Speaker 5: Well, I think we're checking less sophisticated actors with less
Speaker 5: compute that will work most of the time. Now that
Speaker 5: doesn't mean it automatically works for everything. I think a
Speaker 5: lot of attention needs to be paid to it. So
Speaker 5: it's a thing that we need to focus on. But
Speaker 5: I do think that that's how society has been stable
Speaker 5: for hundreds of years, is you have larger forces, whether
Speaker 5: it's polices or armies or whatever, checking kind of smaller
Speaker 5: groups that are trying to create harm. How you deal
Speaker 5: with the geopolitical rivals is a more complicated question, but
Speaker 5: I think there there's the question of what can you
Speaker 5: hope to achieve. If you're trying to say, okay, should
Speaker 5: the US try to be five or ten years ahead
Speaker 5: of China. I just don't know if that's a reasonable goal,
Speaker 5: because I think China has a lot of resources and
Speaker 5: a lot of great scientists, and they're great at espionage,
Speaker 5: right it's like all the stuff. So I'm not sure
Speaker 5: if you can maintain that. But what I do think
Speaker 5: is a reasonable goal is maintaining a perpetual six month
Speaker 5: to eight month lead by making sure that the American
Speaker 5: company is in the American folks working on this continue
Speaker 5: producing the best AI systems, and then having a direct
Speaker 5: effort to try to make it so that those efforts
Speaker 5: are integrating with the National Security establishment, so that way,
Speaker 5: the US government has a kind of perpetual six.
Speaker 2: Month eight month advantage on what everyone else in the
Speaker 2: world gets.
Speaker 5: And at some level six months may not seem like
Speaker 5: a lot, but part of how I think about it
Speaker 5: is like you're using an iPhone, you know all the competitors,
Speaker 5: and it's like, is the iPhone from three years ago
Speaker 5: better than the best Samsung phone today?
Speaker 2: No way.
Speaker 5: But you know, the fact that Apple has just generally,
Speaker 5: in the eyes of most consumers, been a little bit
Speaker 5: ahead at each point has meant that over fifteen years
Speaker 5: or however long, in almost twenty years, they've just had
Speaker 5: this big compounding lead, And I think if the US
Speaker 5: can maintain that advantage over time, that's just a very
Speaker 5: big advantage.
Speaker 2: So that's my philosophy.
Speaker 5: I think it's what I think is the most reasonable
Speaker 5: thing to shoot for, and that optimizes for making sure
Speaker 5: that Americans continue to lead in this.
Speaker 4: Well, look, you're not an AI dooomer, but some really
Speaker 4: influential people are like, how can you be so sure
Speaker 4: there won't be a roboc ellipse or THATAI will lead
Speaker 4: us to human extinction?
Speaker 5: Well, I don't think you can ever be one hundred
Speaker 5: percent sure. There are a lot of bad things that
Speaker 5: could happen. Climate change is terrible, nuclear war is terrible.
Speaker 5: But I generally think you can manage this in a
Speaker 5: responsible way where you just maximize the chance of the
Speaker 5: net prosperity that's created in society being really good, and where.
Speaker 2: You can manage the risk.
Speaker 5: And it's like I think that for the AI risks,
Speaker 5: especially like the existential type stuff that you're talking about.
Speaker 5: I just personally think that we will have more of
Speaker 5: a sense of the different capabilities of these systems with
Speaker 5: each model that we build, and they're getting better, right,
Speaker 5: So LAMA three is better than Lama too, Lama four
Speaker 5: will be better than LAMA three. And this is why
Speaker 5: we do all the safety testing up front. We study safety.
Speaker 5: We try to have as much of a sense of
Speaker 5: here are the different capabilities that would be bad. Right,
Speaker 5: It's like we don't want it to be able to
Speaker 5: lie or self replicate, or like, just is it intentionally
Speaker 5: deceiving people or stuff? And I just don't know that
Speaker 5: we're seeing those things yet. So I think there are
Speaker 5: different questions that happen once you start getting to a
Speaker 5: level of intelligence that's a lot greater than where we
Speaker 5: are now. But there is this myth that I think
Speaker 5: people kind of anthropomorphize and assume that intelligence is going
Speaker 5: to take the form of something that's conscious or sentient
Speaker 5: or physical.
Speaker 2: And I actually think in some ways.
Speaker 5: This has been one of the most surprising things over
Speaker 5: the last few years, is you can have something that
Speaker 5: is pretty reasonably intelligent that is actually completely separate from
Speaker 5: a consciousness. I do think that there's this thing through
Speaker 5: the history of science where people keep thinking that they're
Speaker 5: special or that they're like the center of the universe
Speaker 5: in different ways. And I think people are very special
Speaker 5: and like life and kind of our consciousness and the
Speaker 5: connections we make. I think all that stuff really matters
Speaker 5: in like a deep way. But I'm not sure if
Speaker 5: the specific like intelligence of productivity is actually the thing
Speaker 5: that makes our lives meaningful. It's obviously it's one of
Speaker 5: the defining characteristics of being a person.
Speaker 2: But I don't know.
Speaker 5: I think it's like as much of it as like
Speaker 5: the love and connection and camaraderie that you feel with
Speaker 5: other people. And I don't know, I think that that
Speaker 5: stuff exists, even if you could like completely separate out
Speaker 5: intelligence from kind of the rest of the human experience.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there are obviously a lot of players, you know,
Speaker 4: trying to do, you know, some similar things. What do
Speaker 4: you make of Sam Maltman's leadership. Do you trust him
Speaker 4: and Opening Eye to get to AGI responsibly.
Speaker 2: I know Sam pretty well.
Speaker 5: He's actually on the board of the Biohub with me
Speaker 5: at the chan Zuckerberg Initiative with me and Priscilla, So
Speaker 5: we kind of sit in there and we grill all
Speaker 5: the scientists and push them on using AI in more
Speaker 5: effective ways. And that's kind of a fun way that
Speaker 5: we get to work together. I mean, look, he caught
Speaker 5: a bunch of stuff early on what was going to
Speaker 5: scale with large language models that a lot of other
Speaker 5: people had written off, and I think he deserves a
Speaker 5: lot of credit for how that organization has developed, also
Speaker 5: having gotten a lot of public scrutiny. Myself, I think
Speaker 5: it's like, look, when you're going through it for the
Speaker 5: first time, you don't handle it as as perfectly as
Speaker 5: you would like. But I think he's handling it very
Speaker 5: gracefully and is generally doing I think he's doing better
Speaker 5: than I did, and I.
Speaker 2: Respect him for that.
Speaker 5: Over the long term, there's just the question of which
Speaker 5: model ends up being the right one. And it's somewhat
Speaker 5: ironic thing to have an organization that's named open AI
Speaker 5: but as sort of the leader in building closed AYE models.
Speaker 5: And it's not necessarily bad, but it's kind of a
Speaker 5: little funny. But I'm not like such an absolutist on
Speaker 5: open sources. I think anything closed is bad. I mean,
Speaker 5: at Meta we do a lot of open source stuff.
Speaker 5: We do a lot of closed source stuff, right, So
Speaker 5: it's like I do both. I think I get the
Speaker 5: value of it. I would imagine that open ai will
Speaker 5: continue being an important company for a while to come,
Speaker 5: But personally I am more optimistic about a more positive
Speaker 5: AI future where open source is the industry standard.
Speaker 2: And that's that's just my view.
Speaker 4: I want to talk about the twenty twenty four presidential election. Okay,
Speaker 4: Facebook has been a flashpoint in many elections around the world,
Speaker 4: and you personally have been called out, most recently by
Speaker 4: former President Trump.
Speaker 3: This is a big election. What do you think is
Speaker 3: at stake?
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, look, it's it's obviously a very important
Speaker 5: and it'll be a historic election. And look, I mean
Speaker 5: the main thing that I hear from people is that
Speaker 5: they actually want to see less political content on our
Speaker 5: services because they come to our services to connect with people.
Speaker 5: So you know, that's what we're going to do, where
Speaker 5: we give people control over this, but we're generally trying
Speaker 5: to recommend less political content. So I think you're going
Speaker 5: to see our services play less of a role in
Speaker 5: this election than they have in the past. And personally,
Speaker 5: I'm also planning on not playing a significant role in
Speaker 5: the election. I've done some stuff personally in the past.
Speaker 5: I'm not planning on doing that this time. And that includes,
Speaker 5: you know, not endorsing either of the candidates. Now, Like
Speaker 5: I mean, there's obviously a lot of crazy stuff going
Speaker 5: on in the world. I mean the historic events over
Speaker 5: the last like over the weekend, and I mean a
Speaker 5: personal note, it's you, I mean seeing Donald Trump get
Speaker 5: get up after getting shot in the face and pump
Speaker 5: is fist in the air with the American flag is
Speaker 5: one of the most badass things I've.
Speaker 2: Ever seen in my life.
Speaker 5: At some level as an American, it's like hard to
Speaker 5: not get kind of emotional about that spirit in that fight,
Speaker 5: and I think that that's why a lot of people
Speaker 5: like the guy. But look, I mean, we're living in
Speaker 5: a pretty crazy time, and I view our role here
Speaker 5: is to make it so everyone can express their views
Speaker 5: on this stuff, but we're going to try to manage
Speaker 5: it so that way the politics doesn't drown out the
Speaker 5: human connection and the community, which is I think the
Speaker 5: main thing that people come to our services for. And
Speaker 5: you know, we're not always going to get that right,
Speaker 5: but that's what we're going to try to do, and
Speaker 5: I think that that's probably the best role that.
Speaker 2: We can play.
Speaker 4: President Biden signed a bill to ban TikTok into law,
Speaker 4: but whether it happens is an open question. Former President
Speaker 4: Trump has given a reason to not ban TikTok is
Speaker 4: that he would see the market.
Speaker 3: To you, what do you make of that logic.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 5: The national security questions around whether TikTok should be allowed
Speaker 5: is obviously you know, above my pay grid as something
Speaker 5: that the folks in our government and Congress need to
Speaker 5: go figure out.
Speaker 2: From what I see on a day to day basis,
Speaker 2: I think the competition is focusing.
Speaker 5: It's good. I like competing with different companies. I think
Speaker 5: we're doing pretty well here. We're gaining market share. So
Speaker 5: I don't know they'll go do what they need to do,
Speaker 5: but I think you know where we're going to be
Speaker 5: fine and we're going to continue doing well in this
Speaker 5: space either, right, So.
Speaker 3: Any thoughts on whether or not it should be.
Speaker 2: Banned, I really think that's that's above my BIY grade.
Speaker 4: So between looking at the broader social media ecosystem, these
Speaker 4: little apps, between TikTok and Snap and Instagram and threads
Speaker 4: and Facebook, how do you see the social media ecosystem
Speaker 4: changing in an AI world?
Speaker 3: Do new players emerge? Is their consolidation? How do you
Speaker 3: win the battle for the young people?
Speaker 2: And I think it's going to be all of this stuff.
Speaker 5: There's definitely going to be an opportunity for people to
Speaker 5: build new apps. I mean, I think we've seen that
Speaker 5: it's very competitive TikTok guru from being very small to
Speaker 5: now having more than a billion people.
Speaker 2: I'm sure there will be more more apps. There are
Speaker 2: also part of.
Speaker 5: The reason why we want to innovate and push on
Speaker 5: that is that we also want to integrate that stuff
Speaker 5: into our experiences, right. We want to make it so
Speaker 5: that creators can create more interesting contents, that there are
Speaker 5: new ways for people to interact with the.
Speaker 2: People that they care about.
Speaker 5: AI has already been so important for just recommending people
Speaker 5: great content in these platforms. I think that will continue,
Speaker 5: but also there will be another wave where AI now
Speaker 5: is helping people not just get good recommendations, but also
Speaker 5: create new content. So I'm pretty optimistic about that. I
Speaker 5: hope it's not just going to be like one new
Speaker 5: format like video or photos. I think that there's going
Speaker 5: to be I would guess dozens or hundreds of new
Speaker 5: types of content formats, and some will be made by startups,
Speaker 5: and there'll be new apps built around them. Some hopefully
Speaker 5: will pioneer and popularize. But it's going to be a
Speaker 5: very dynamic space.
Speaker 4: We're facing a crisis in mental health, especially a teenagers.
Speaker 3: The Surgeon General is now calling for a warning.
Speaker 4: Label on social media, saying that it's partially to blame
Speaker 4: with everything that you know?
Speaker 3: Now, does you have point? How are you thinking about this?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So I guess I come at this from a
Speaker 2: few directions.
Speaker 5: One is that there's clearly an issue with mental health
Speaker 5: in the country, So I think that's like a really
Speaker 5: important thing, and for kids and teens it's especially important.
Speaker 2: And I think the focus on that is right.
Speaker 5: You know, I have three young girls and being a
Speaker 5: parent is hard, and you just want to make sure
Speaker 5: that they have like good lives. And from that perspective,
Speaker 5: what I aim for us to do is build our
Speaker 5: services in a way that's aligned with parents, giving them
Speaker 5: the controls that they need to basically oversee how the
Speaker 5: services work for their kids. I mean, I think different
Speaker 5: families are going to have different rules for how they
Speaker 5: want this stuff to work, and there's probably not a
Speaker 5: one size fits all thing that's right. But I think
Speaker 5: we have a role in making sure that we study
Speaker 5: the stuff, understand what's good what's not broadly, but then
Speaker 5: for individual families, giving the parents the.
Speaker 2: Controls that they need.
Speaker 5: What the data says today is a little bit different
Speaker 5: from what the basic meme is that's out there. I
Speaker 5: think a lot of people kind of act as if
Speaker 5: there's been this proven connection between these and I just
Speaker 5: don't think that the science supports that. Today It's obviously
Speaker 5: something that will continue to be studied over time. There's nuances.
Speaker 5: I think social media is different from phones overall. It
Speaker 5: might be that phones have an issue, right if you're
Speaker 5: getting notified for something or it's buzzing you and it's
Speaker 5: like preventing you from sleeping. I mean that is different
Speaker 5: from social media. But I think there's all these other
Speaker 5: issues too. But I just haven't seen of all the
Speaker 5: most rigorous studies that have been published, including in the
Speaker 5: most prestigious scientific journals, the link between this on kind
Speaker 5: of a causal basis has not been well established. Now
Speaker 5: that doesn't mean that there isn't work for us to do.
Speaker 5: I mean, we want to make sure we do a
Speaker 5: good job on this, but I think for whether it's
Speaker 5: the Surgeon General or other folks, kind of jumping to
Speaker 5: a conclusion that the science doesn't yet support is not
Speaker 5: the most helpful thing. But look, I mean there are
Speaker 5: clearly issues here across society, and want to make sure
Speaker 5: we're part of the solution to that.
Speaker 4: Facebook, and you have been blamed for a lot of things,
Speaker 4: whether you like it or not, whether you agree or not,
Speaker 4: why should we trust you with AI?
Speaker 5: Well, the loaded question we have gotten blamed for a
Speaker 5: lot of things, and I mean, look, I take our
Speaker 5: role in all this stuff seriously, and I think we've
Speaker 5: tried to handle all this as well as possible. I'm
Speaker 5: not sure that it's all been fair, but look, I
Speaker 5: mean we're in I'd like to think that we're an
Speaker 5: important and relevant company. So I think the scrutiny is
Speaker 5: generally healthy. I mean for AI, I mean look compared
Speaker 5: to the other companies. I think doing this in an
Speaker 5: open way actually increases the chance that it ends up
Speaker 5: being done safely. If you look at the history of
Speaker 5: open source, open source software counterintuitively ends up being more secure.
Speaker 2: At the beginning of the open source movement, a.
Speaker 5: Lot of people thought, hey, it's not going to be
Speaker 5: secure because anyone can just see who the bugs are.
Speaker 5: It's like, yeah, well, anyone can see where the bugs
Speaker 5: are is then you fix them. Whereas in closed systems
Speaker 5: you have these holes that are just out there that
Speaker 5: like governments or hackers or whatever exploiting for a long
Speaker 5: time because there's less transparency on them.
Speaker 2: So I think that that's.
Speaker 5: Going to be one of the defining things around open
Speaker 5: source is that anyone can scrutinize the work, and because
Speaker 5: of that, I think it just puts a lot of
Speaker 5: pressure to make sure that the quality of the work
Speaker 5: that you're doing gets better really quickly.
Speaker 2: And so I guess that's just a big difference.
Speaker 5: In our approach here compared to the approach that others
Speaker 5: are taking, and I think that people should take confidence
Speaker 5: in that, and look, when we get stuff wrong, then
Speaker 5: we're going to get called out on it, and I
Speaker 5: think it'll just generally create these systems that are more
Speaker 5: hardened and more secure and safer. But I know that
Speaker 5: there's the whole debate around isn't going to be safe
Speaker 5: to do open source AI. My personal view is that
Speaker 5: open source AI is going to be safer than closed
Speaker 5: for the exact same reasons that open source historically has
Speaker 5: been safer and more secure than closed source software.
Speaker 4: Let's talk about regulation, because in the shape of AI,
Speaker 4: regulation is going to be an issue around the world
Speaker 4: for the next several years. What should this regulation look like?
Speaker 4: Do you support something like an independent agency that would
Speaker 4: oversee AI like we have for nuclear energy.
Speaker 5: I think it's pretty early and thinking through this stuff,
Speaker 5: and I haven't seen any proposal yet that I look
Speaker 5: at and I'm like, oh, that's exactly what we should do.
Speaker 5: I think there's a time question for this, right. I
Speaker 5: think in a lot of things, if you regulate it
Speaker 5: too late, there could be too much harm. If you
Speaker 5: regulate it too early, you could stop innovation. I do
Speaker 5: think we're seeing this issue in Europe now, where they
Speaker 5: just like put in place a ton of regulations and
Speaker 5: a lot of companies are just not launching stuff there.
Speaker 5: So I mean that's an issue. So I think there's
Speaker 5: clearly going to need to be this interaction between governments
Speaker 5: and companies to go oversee the work.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure what the right model is.
Speaker 5: The thing that I've focused on most is the viability
Speaker 5: of open source, because I obviously believe in this deeply
Speaker 5: and it's both kind of our strategy and approach.
Speaker 2: But I think it's the best.
Speaker 5: Chance for creating an AI future that is positive, where
Speaker 5: the prosperity that is created can be shared by the
Speaker 5: most people, and that we end up with the safest outcome.
Speaker 2: I think that open source will do that.
Speaker 5: But there's a big intellectual debate around this, and I
Speaker 5: think that there's a bunch of people who think, okay, well,
Speaker 5: open sources inherently maybe like a little less controllable because
Speaker 5: there aren't just like a small number of companies that
Speaker 5: you can go choke when you want to, like go
Speaker 5: get them to do something right. So it is like
Speaker 5: a little more forward leaning on. Okay, we're going to
Speaker 5: try to enable this kind of decentralized innovation, and that's
Speaker 5: what is typically worked on the Internet, and I think
Speaker 5: it's what gives the best shot and the scrutiny around
Speaker 5: that I think is the thing that will be the
Speaker 5: most likely to produce a safe outcome. But you know,
Speaker 5: there's a real debate around this today or is like
Speaker 5: should that be the way that it goes now? I
Speaker 5: think that open sources gaining popularity with every day, and
Speaker 5: I think the LAMA three point one release, with the
Speaker 5: four or five billion model that is basically going to
Speaker 5: be kind of this teacher model where like all these
Speaker 5: different companies or institutions, universities, academics are going to use
Speaker 5: it to train different models. I think it's just going
Speaker 5: to keep on gaining more and more popularity and I
Speaker 5: would guess will eventually become sort of the industry's standard
Speaker 5: for how this stuff works. But I just think we
Speaker 5: need to be careful about not doing things that are
Speaker 5: going to prevent what is actually the best outcome over time,
Speaker 5: just because it's maybe like a little less deterministic or
Speaker 5: something like that.
Speaker 3: You've been at this now for twenty years years. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's been a journey.
Speaker 4: How would you describe your leadership style before versus now?
Speaker 2: I don't know, I probably need to think more about that.
Speaker 2: I mean, the roles have changed so much at the company.
Speaker 5: And when I started early on, I really knew nothing
Speaker 5: about building a company. I was a kid, and I
Speaker 5: was an engineer, and I like coded the first version
Speaker 5: myself and did most of the coding for maybe like
Speaker 5: the first couple of the years of the company. And
Speaker 5: then we got all these amazing people, right. So, I mean, Cheryl,
Speaker 5: I often joke that she raised me as a manager
Speaker 5: like a parent, and I think that that's like really true, right,
Speaker 5: It's like, I mean, I literally I think it's hard
Speaker 5: to overstate how little I knew about running a company.
Speaker 5: And she's just like a really special person has played
Speaker 5: this hugely important role in the history of the company
Speaker 5: and like training me and so many of the other
Speaker 5: leaders of the company. And then you know this funny
Speaker 5: thing happened over the last fifteen years where there were
Speaker 5: all these kids who just kind of grew up and
Speaker 5: have had this context and these relationships with each other,
Speaker 5: and you know, now I think we're all a little
Speaker 5: bit more sophisticated, hopefully about managing something like this well
Speaker 5: and building stuff for the longer term and doing it
Speaker 5: more responsibly. And I don't know, there's like a lot
Speaker 5: of lessons that you learn along the way, you know,
Speaker 5: when I talk to other founders or CEOs and ask
Speaker 5: how I built the team here, that I think is
Speaker 5: really kind of like the key to how we get
Speaker 5: everything done. I mean, there's always a lot of attention
Speaker 5: placed on like the CEO or the top person, but
Speaker 5: it's never one person, right, It's always a group of people,
Speaker 5: and I don't know, it's hard to replace some of that.
Speaker 2: I think a lot of this is like you.
Speaker 5: Just grow up and you learn together, and you bond together,
Speaker 5: and it's like a really kind of interesting and special group.
Speaker 4: Looking forward, will the next Mark Zuckerberg start the next
Speaker 4: Facebook or will Ai do it for him?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Well, I think we use technology tools for stuff. I
Speaker 5: think one of the things that's going to be interesting
Speaker 5: in the future is you know, now to build meta
Speaker 5: and the services that we have. We have tens of
Speaker 5: thousands of people working at this company. And one of
Speaker 5: the things that I think is going to be really
Speaker 5: powerful in the future is the next entrepreneur, you know,
Speaker 5: sitting in their dorm room or high school or whatever
Speaker 5: it is, is going to now have all these tools
Speaker 5: to be able to have the productivity of like a
Speaker 5: large company, but maybe it's just them doing it, or
Speaker 5: them and like a small.
Speaker 2: Group of friends working together.
Speaker 5: Part of why I was able to start this is
Speaker 5: because there's the saying in science that you stand on
Speaker 5: the shoulders of giants, and I think that's true with
Speaker 5: open source and technology too. And you know, like I
Speaker 5: couldn't build this myself, I was able to build it
Speaker 5: because there's all this other technology that I can build on,
Speaker 5: and I just think that that's going to keep getting
Speaker 5: better and better.
Speaker 2: So, you know, it's like I watch my kids.
Speaker 5: Be creative and the stuff that they can do today,
Speaker 5: like I wouldn't have been able to do when I
Speaker 5: was a kid because it just didn't exist. So I
Speaker 5: think we're going to live in a profoundly more creative
Speaker 5: future where more people can have the capacity to do
Speaker 5: like pretty amazing things than has been the case in
Speaker 5: the past.
Speaker 3: What about Elon? You're kind of like the anti Elon
Speaker 3: now and it's working for you. Where do you see
Speaker 3: your differences?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I know him less well, to be honest, I think
Speaker 5: he's obviously an amazing entrepreneur and has done a lot
Speaker 5: of really great stuff, you know. I mean, it takes
Speaker 5: some courage to go out there and speak your mind
Speaker 5: as much as he does. I don't think like I
Speaker 5: would be comfortable doing that as much. Maybe I'm just
Speaker 5: like a somewhat more reserved person, but I feel like
Speaker 5: all my career people are just telling me like, oh,
Speaker 5: go out like be more yourself. And so there is
Speaker 5: something that I think you have to admire about someone
Speaker 5: who does that and maybe even takes it to an extreme.
Speaker 2: But I don't know what that version of me would be.
Speaker 3: Like, We're going to go.
Speaker 4: Visit you in Tahoe and follow you on your side quests.
Speaker 2: And you're going to surf too, well, I'm going to try.
Speaker 3: I'm going to try.
Speaker 5: You're going to teach me, right, I think that was
Speaker 5: what I was told, but I'm not really I don't
Speaker 5: know if a good teacher.
Speaker 4: But either way, you're always one upping yourself. And I'm
Speaker 4: sure there's a metaphor in there for the company. You also,
Speaker 4: you know, you're doing all these things to make us
Speaker 4: more virtual, but you also love so many things about
Speaker 4: the whole world. How do you wrestle with those two ambitions.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know that there are odds.
Speaker 5: I just think that people are very physical beings, and
Speaker 5: I think that we sort of mythologize intelligence. I don't know,
Speaker 5: there's like a bunch of people in the tech community
Speaker 5: you think like, oh, we'll just like separate out our
Speaker 5: consciousness and intelligence and like upload it to the cloud.
Speaker 5: And I'm like, that just sounds ridiculous to me. I
Speaker 5: mean to me, it's like part of what makes you
Speaker 5: a person is you like are active and you have energy.
Speaker 2: We're not just minds.
Speaker 5: Like I think the energy and like the love and
Speaker 5: all those things are probably as foundational to what makes
Speaker 5: you a person. And so I don't know, I think
Speaker 5: my life has gotten a lot better. You know, in
Speaker 5: the early days of the company, I just didn't have
Speaker 5: time to do anything else. We were like always about
Speaker 5: to die, and you know, just and it's like being
Speaker 5: a startup is really stressful, right, and obviously there's stress
Speaker 5: now too, but it's just it's a little more managed
Speaker 5: and we have like more good leaders at the company
Speaker 5: and all that. And my life has just gotten so
Speaker 5: much better since I took the time to go make
Speaker 5: sure that I can go do physical things all the time,
Speaker 5: and I think it's made me a better person. I
Speaker 5: injured my knee last year fighting, and I thought, you know,
Speaker 5: Priscilla was gonna give me a hard time about it.
Speaker 5: Like I kind of thought like she was just gonna like,
Speaker 5: you're an idiot. Why are you fighting. You're like running
Speaker 5: this company. It's like you shouldn't be doing this. But
Speaker 5: she actually was like, you know, I know it's a
Speaker 5: long recovery, but when you're done, you better go fight again.
Speaker 5: It's like just because you're like a much better person
Speaker 5: when you're like going and and doing all this physical stuff.
Speaker 5: And it's like it's just kind of like a family value.
Speaker 5: I mean, we do it. I mean I do it.
Speaker 2: Priscilla does it with me. She actually she hits pads.
Speaker 2: That's what I was referring to, tell us, serve with you.
Speaker 5: But you know when when she's sitting pads. You can
Speaker 5: hear it from like down the streets. So I mean she,
Speaker 5: I mean, she's like I think maybe one day we'll
Speaker 5: talk her into fighting. But but she's quite good at surfing.
Speaker 5: And we teach the kids too, and it's just like
Speaker 5: a fun thing that we do together. And I don't know,
Speaker 5: I really believe in that. I think that that, like,
Speaker 5: it just makes you like a better person.
Speaker 3: Tell me about the necklace.
Speaker 5: Oh, this this is something that I worked with a
Speaker 5: designer to make that has engraved on it. The prayer
Speaker 5: that I sing to my daughters every night when I
Speaker 5: put them to bed. It's a Jewish prayer called mesche
Speaker 5: Birach and it's basically a prayer for health and courage,
Speaker 5: and it says, may we have the courage to make
Speaker 5: our lives a blessing. And I just think that's like
Speaker 5: and I've sung it to them basically every night of
Speaker 5: their lives since.
Speaker 2: They were born.
Speaker 5: And I unless I'm out of traveling or something, but
Speaker 5: I try to be around for bedtime. That's kind of
Speaker 5: my thing and when I hang out with the kids,
Speaker 5: and yeah, I don't know, it's just it's meaningful for me.
Speaker 2: In our family.
Speaker 3: That's beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your time
Speaker 3: with us.
Speaker 4: Thank you for letting us into your home, and you know,
Speaker 4: taking the time to explain all of.
Speaker 3: This, like I think it's really important. It helps us
Speaker 3: to get to know you cool.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening to this edition of the Circuit,
Speaker 1: and please watch our video episode with Mark Zuckerberg on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Originals. I visit his retreat in Tahoe, we hang
Speaker 1: with his wife Priscilla, and yes we go wait surfing.
Speaker 3: You'll see how that works out. I'm Emily Chang.
Speaker 1: You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Emily
Speaker 1: Chang tv and watch new episodes of the Circuit on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Television, streaming on the Bloomberg app or on YouTube.
Speaker 1: And check out other Bloomberg podcasts on Apple podcast, the
Speaker 1: iHeartMedia app, or wherever. You listen to your shows and
Speaker 1: let us know what you think by leaving a review.
Speaker 1: Those extra reviews make a big difference. I'm your host
Speaker 1: and executive producer. Our showrunner is Lauren Ellis, our editor
Speaker 1: is Alis and Casey.
Speaker 3: Catch you next time.