Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word essay this week in which he declares that “the future belongs to everyone” and paints an optimistic picture of the future, powered by AI. There, “everyone will have a highly effective personal agent who understands you, your goals, and everything you care about.”
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Kolosek, Rebecca Beran, and I discussed why not everyone supports Zuckerberg’s vision. This includes our colleague Russell Brandom, who wrote that the manifesto is exactly why people don’t like AI.
Rebecca compared Zuckerberg to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who spent the weekend pushing back against the idea that he is an AI destroyer, and said Meta’s CEO seems to be “almost anti-Dario-ish” himself. But the problem is Zuckerberg’s history with meta.
“If you look back at the age of social media,[Zuckerberg]said he wanted everyone to have a way to talk to their friends and have a social network,” Rebecca said. “So what’s the alternative? There’s outrage and advertising and no connection.”
Continue reading for a preview of the conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Rebecca Beran: Ironically, I think this is an attempt by the meta to win in a different way. They are not winning in the closed model realm of the frontier. They don’t necessarily even outperform in open space. But when it comes to personal empowerment, as Mark Zuckerberg says in his letter, “The Future Is for Everyone,” that’s what he’s trying to win. He’s trying to provide a model for people to use for personal AI on their personal devices.
I think when he released his (similar) “Future for All” letter last year, (the promise was) that a lot of that AI would be in glasses and wearables, it’s not very clear what the final hardware form factor of this will be, and I think he’s probably leaving it up to individual choice.
So his idea is that he’s using Glimmer (Meta’s new AI model) to manage his schedule, draft messages, and organize his files, and that it’s always on and can work anytime, anywhere, with or without an internet connection.
But Muse Spark still exists, so it maintains some way to control its most capable models, providing a revenue stream for people who want to scale their computing, do bigger projects, or companies that want to do bigger projects.
Anthony Ha: I imagine part of the context here is: Meta is investing very seriously in AI, and there was (and has been) a lot of talk last year about how much money they were willing to pay their AI scientists, but when it comes to Frontier Labs, which we think of as a leader company, Meta doesn’t tend to come up in the conversation.
Another reason it’s not coming up in the conversation: What are the popular consumer AI chatbots? Sure, people are working with meta AI tools on Instagram and Facebook, but they’re not the companies you think of when you think, “Let’s use a personal assistant.” The meta hasn’t done that yet, so to some extent this feels like an attempt to reposition them and claim a space that hasn’t been all that successful thus far. is that fair?
Rebecca: I think that’s really fair. Mark Zuckerberg loves announcing his vision for what his company will do for people and how it will empower them, so I take that with a grain of salt. And so far, that’s what it’s all about for Meta — which, of course, means Llama is great. It’s a great tool and it’s open source, but on a consumer level, how are people using meta AI? Well, there are a lot of creepy chatbots out there.
My TLDR is: I think[Zuckerberg’s]letter and his ideas about personal empowerment have a negative impact on a lot of people’s mouths. Because he’s the one saying it. AI editor Russell Brandom wrote about this this week. Looking back at the age of social media, he said he wanted to make sure everyone had a way to talk to friends and have a social network. What can I do instead? We have anger-mongering, advertising, and no connection.
Kirsten Kolosek: Well, I think this manifesto didn’t resonate with a lot of people. And Russell’s argument in this column is that maybe that’s why people hate AI and hate AI. Because to your point, it comes from Zuckerberg, which I also think is very Polian-ish in a way. He has put forward these ideas in the past, but it doesn’t offer anything that I think is more realistic, instead positioning AI as a great tool for humanity. That may be true, but it also comes at a huge cost, and I think that’s why there’s been such widespread negative reaction.
Rebecca: I feel like he’s putting himself in a sort of anti-Dario position. I don’t know. There’s a lot of talk among frontier labs: “We’re leading the frontier, we’re going backwards, we’re focusing on safety. We need to slow down development.” Of course, they haven’t done that, but because of the recent cybersecurity incident, they’re talking about it.
Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, said, “No, no, we’re not going to slow down. We can’t give an inch to China. Slowing down only hurts individuals. Individuals are empowered by this technology.”
But, I mean, I thought, “Oh, I guess I’ll just download Muse Glimmer and see what it can do.” Can I download it to my MacBook? No. Requires specific hardware. I forget what the hardware is, but it’s actually not that accessible to the average person.
Kirsten: It’s not for everyone. still.
Anthony: One positive I can say about this very long manifesto (6,500 words, longer than most published on TechCrunch) is that there’s a line that says, “If you’re an AI destroyer and you believe this is the future, why are you building this?”
I think that’s fair. My big takeaway from that is not that the future of AI is great, but that I wonder about the people who make these predictions and move forward anyway.
I also wanted to talk a little bit about Russell’s point. I think that’s a completely fair point, about part of it being the messenger. I think people have doubts about Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg for a variety of reasons, and perhaps the release of this new Facebook movie could amplify those doubts in the coming months.
But it’s also about the future that’s being promised by these AI companies, and why is it that every time Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or somebody makes a prediction about this AI future and people essentially say, “Who wants this?”, we see this kind of viral overlap. One of the more famous recent examples is when Sam Altman talked about the idea of using ChatGPT to create podcasts about your child’s interests that you could listen to on your drive to school. And of course, everyone thinks, “What if I tried talking to my kids?”
Parts of the manifesto are very abstract, half of which are just “unleash all your creativity and invention.” If you are skeptical about AI, nothing will convince you because it is unrealistic. And, more specifically, while some aspects of these personal coaches and assistants are appealing, many are not.
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