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0:05Have you heard the term Zuckaissance? Uh.
0:12No, what is-
Zuckaissance! You haven't heard that?
No, no. It's Zuck's renaissance. Huh. What is this?
0:21You know, you've got this new look, the chains, the shearling jacket. Everything you do seems to become a meme.
0:26At least make them good memes. Right, well, it seems
like you're leaning in on the joke more. And I think as I've gotten older,
0:32I've just like, "All right, whatever. It doesn't matter," right? It's like, just kind of try to be myself as much as I feel comfortable being.
0:38Woohoo!
0:44Mark Zuckerberg, the face of Facebook, has been under the bright
lights for 20 years, on the offensive, buying
Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus,
0:53and the defensive, battling a never-ending
cascade of criticisms about the social, political,
and business impacts
0:59of his expanding empire. Lately, though, Zuckerberg
appears to be reinventing himself
1:06and his company. Meta's latest push is a
major play to open-source AI in contrast to closed-source competitors
1:12like OpenAI and Google. Zuckerberg predicts his
company's newest AI models will have a profound impact
1:18on the progress of technology, business, and maybe the world. I've come to Meta HQ to get
a glimpse of the real Zuck
1:26and the AI future he
believes is the path forward. So, I found an article
in "The Harvard Crimson"
1:33going back to 2003 where you were talking about open source. Okay.
Like over 20 years ago.
1:39Really? So, you've been thinking
about this a really long time. Well, yeah. It's a big
part of the tech industry.
1:46I mean, you wouldn't have been able to build the early version
of Facebook without that.
1:51You know, I was a student. I didn't have access to a lot of capital. There's the whole kind of hacker mentality of you, like, just take the code,
1:59use it for the thing that you need to. It's more cost efficient. And I mean, that's how you
can start something like this
2:06in a dorm room. Some people see you as
an unlikely champion of open source today.
2:11You're laughing. Well, I don't know why. I mean, I actually think,
well, I get it, but, yeah.
2:17You understand the word unlikely. Yeah. We've actually, at Meta, have
been pretty big proponents
2:23of open source for a while and it's been a really
good formula for us. So, dating back to how
we designed servers,
2:30how we design our data centers, we have this whole Open Compute Project that kinda standardized a lot of the infrastructure
for the industry.
2:37And that's gonna happen with AI too. You're really putting
a stake in the ground by open sourcing your AI
2:43in this attempt to build
the AI rails for the future. How much of this is a strategic way
2:50to control or own the
next technology wave? A lot of how we've grown up over the last 10 or 15 years
2:57was building our apps
through phone platforms that our competitors controlled.
3:02So, it's somewhat soul crushing to, like, go and build something that you think is gonna be good
3:08and then just get told by
Apple that you can't ship it because they want to,
like, put us in a box because they view us as competitive.
3:13You know, we're a big enough company now that one of the things that I've resolved is that for the next
generation of technology,
3:21I want us to build and have more control over the next set of platforms
that we're gonna build.
3:26So, I think AI is a critical one, and I think augmented and virtual reality is another critical one.
3:32It's kind of the way that we can control
our own destiny on this and make sure that we
have access to leading AI
3:37is by building it and having
it become an industry standard, but it actually gets stronger
by being able to share it
3:45and have the ecosystem around it. You're continuing to improve Meta AI across all of your products,
3:50but also as a standalone chatbot. Why should we use Meta over ChatGPT?
3:56Well, there's a bunch of
things where it's better. You know, one of the things
that we're rolling out soon is the ability to just,
like, imagine stuff.
4:03You're typing something in real time, I do this with my daughters all the time, and as you're kind of typing
4:10and entering the query, it's just generating the images
as you enter the keystrokes.
4:16It's just really cool. My goal for the Meta AI launch, which, I mean, it's only really,
you know, a few months old
4:23at this point, was to, by the end of the year, have Meta AI be the most used
AI assistant in the world,
4:29and I think we're basically
on track for that. I mean, there's hundreds
of millions of people who are using it.
By the end of this year? Yeah, and I think we're gonna be there
4:35before the end of the year. So, you're releasing Llama 3.1, this family of models big and small, including the biggest
open-source model ever,
4:42405 billion parameters.
Yeah, yeah. What does that jump unlock? I actually think the main
thing that people are gonna do,
4:48especially because it's open source, is use it as a teacher
to train smaller models that they use in different applications.
4:55If you just think about, like,
all the startups out there or all the enterprises or even governments that are
trying to do different things,
5:01they probably all need to, at some level, build custom models
for what they're doing. And it's really hard to do that
5:07with closed systems out there, whether that's Open AI or Gemini, Google's thing or whatever.
5:12And this is like, gets
to a pretty core part of our philosophy is we don't believe there's
gonna be, like, one AI
5:19to rule them all. Our vision is that there's
going to be millions or just billions of
different models out there.
5:26So, not one God, but many, is that the way to think about it? Well, I don't think they're gonna be Gods, but I do think that to some degree,
5:33if you're like an organization, you think you're gonna create, like, this one super intelligence, it does have this feel to me
5:38of, like, people trying to create a God. And that's just, I find that
5:45both the wrong way to look at it, but just also very unappealing. You know, there's almost
200 million creators on our platforms.
5:52They all are trying to
build their community. People wanna interact with them. There aren't enough hours in the day. Like, I wanna make it so
that every single one of them
5:58can easily train, like, an
AI version of themselves that they can, like, they
can make it what they want.
6:05So, it's almost like a
kind of artistic artifact that they're putting out
there for their community
6:10that allows their community
to interact with them, but also gives them control over how that interaction happens.
6:16And I think that that's gonna be great and there's gonna be millions or, you know, eventually
hundreds of millions of those. So, let's get into the broader strategy
6:23and how this is all going to work. Like, will we have
AI-generated influencers with AI-generated captions and
avatars talking to avatars?
6:32Like-
Yeah, I think we'll have all of it. Do you wanna create the first
AI-generated social network?
6:37Well, I think that that
will be part of this, but, you know, actually one of the most interesting use cases that people have for Meta AI today,
6:44it's like in the top four use cases, is role playing difficult
social interactions
6:49that they're gonna have. So, whether it's in a
professional context, like, okay, you wanna ask
your manager for a raise,
6:55or, like, I'm having
this hard conversation with my girlfriend or my friend. Like-
I could have roleplayed this conversation with you today.
7:01I mean, hopefully it's not- No, it's fine.
I mean, like, hopefully it's not stressful for you, but-
It's super fine. But, like, it's a clear social tool
7:07where there's no judgment, right? The AI isn't sitting there, there's no, like, social
repercussion for what you ask it.
7:13But what evidence do you have that people wanna live
in this virtual world and socialize with avatars,
7:19or that it's actually good for us? Well, I think that people wanna connect with each other, right? I actually think, like,
all the other stuff
7:25is generally noise. But all the technology
allows you to do that in a better and better way.
7:31When I got started with
Facebook, it was mostly text. And then this whole, there's been this whole kind of, like, technological evolution
7:38where we got smartphones that we could primarily be taking photos
7:43and then the mobile networks got good, so then you could be kinda sharing videos and video's a lot richer
7:49and consuming video is
a better experience. I just don't think that's
the end of the line. I think it gets more immersive. You renamed your company Meta.
7:55You're still pouring billions
of dollars into the Metaverse. Are we as far along as
you thought we'd be,
8:01you know, a few years down the line? Are there any lessons in
the urgency of the pivot?
8:07Well, a lot of the reason why I did that is because I think we were
getting kind of pigeonholed
8:13as just this, like,
social media app company. The Metaverse thing
8:19was always gonna be a
very long-term thing. I think some things have
gone better than I thought. Some have gone slower.
8:26The glasses I think is
probably the best example of something that is going better. They're stylish. They're good glasses.
8:32It's a great form factor for AI. We didn't know that AI
was gonna be a thing when we started working on that project, or I mean, we thought
it was gonna be a thing,
8:38like, 10 years from now, but if you asked me five years ago, I would've guessed that
AR would come before AI,
8:43not the other direction. So, some of this is just about
kind of setting yourselves up to ride the different
waves when they come in.
8:50Sequoia calls AI the
$600-billion question. There's all this investment in chips and the infrastructure
and the data centers,
8:57but when does it start paying off? Like, is it a bubble? And if not, like, when do
you start seeing the money?
9:08I think bubbles are interesting because a lot of the bubbles
ended up being things
9:13that were very valuable over time and it's just more of
a question of timing, like you're asking, right? Even the dot com bubble,
9:18you know, it's like
there's all this fiber laid and it ended up being super valuable, but it just wasn't as valuable
as quickly as people thought.
9:24So, is that gonna happen
here? I don't know. I mean, it's hard to
predict what's gonna happen
9:30in the next few years. I think AI is gonna be very fundamental. I think that there's a meaningful chance that a lot of the companies
are overbuilding now
9:36and that you look back and you're like, "Oh, we maybe all spent some number of billions of
dollars more than we had to."
9:42But on the flip side, I actually think all the
companies that are investing are making a rational decision
9:47because the downside of being behind is that you're out of position for, like, the most important technology
9:53for the next 10 to 15 years. You said your goal is getting to artificial
general intelligence?
9:58Yeah.
Or AGI. How do you define AGI, and do you get there first?
Yeah, no,
10:03well, it's a good question. We're basically already
starting to work on Llama 4 and our goal is to
completely close the gap
10:11with all the others on that. So, I don't know. I mean, do we get to AGI first? I mean, I think that there'll
probably be some breakthroughs
10:17between now and then. It's hard to just predict
in a straight line. Then you get to the more
complicated question, which is like, what is it?
10:23I don't know that there's, like, one
specific definition for this,
10:29'cause I think intelligence is, it's multi-variate, right? It's not like there's one number
that is your intelligence.
10:37So, there's probably a specific aspect of intelligence or modality which is like reading
people's faces and emotions
10:43and that's something that I care about. So, I think we'll probably try to build that in at some point. You know, what we're trying to help enable
10:49the whole community to do is create all these different AIs for all these things
that people want to do. And I don't know, that's
kind of how I think
10:55this ends up being a
good thing for the world.
11:02This place is so peaceful. Yeah, I mean, we just
love being out in nature.
11:07Is this like your escape, your
oasis from the real world, from your virtual world-
From the real world.
11:13And your virtual world? I don't know. I like being in Palo
Alto and out there too,
11:19but it's just kind of nice to spend time up here over the summer and, you know, get the
kids out on the lake
11:24and teach them some different sports and I think that that's all nice. What should kids be studying these days?
11:33I think the most important thing is just, like, learning
how to think critically and learning values when you're young.
11:39Now, one of our daughters
is super creative. I mean, she wrote this outline
11:45for a novel that she wanted to write and now it's like 40 pages in and, you know, we sit and, you know, when we hang out with her,
11:51we'll use Meta AI to generate the images. Like, it's about mermaid
crystals is her novel
11:56and it's, yeah.
I know a few kids who would like to read that. Yeah, no, I think it's, you know, it's probably gonna be a banger.
12:01I mean, this is somewhat
of a hiring philosophy that I have too. You know, if people have
shown that they can go deep
12:07and do one thing really well, then they've probably gained experience in, like, the art of learning something
12:13and taking it to an excellent level, which is generally pretty
applicable to other things.
12:19You go all in on everything
you do, it seems like. How do you make time for it all, the sports, the side quest,
12:25the super engaged CEO, to being a dad? I actually think having balance
12:31between the different things that you do helps make you do all the things better. I think I'm a pretty intense person and-
12:38Just kind of. I try to have some mercy
on the people I work with and not focus too much energy
on any one project, you know,
12:45'cause, you know, I wanna make sure that people have the flexibility and space to go do their thing.
12:51So, yeah, no, I think that
that's part of, like, being, you know, an interesting
and well-rounded person and learning, is like you want to have
different experiences.
12:59Got it? Nice, Mark.
13:06I know you've always
been fascinated by China and you learned to speak Mandarin and what do you know about
where China is on AI and AGI?
13:18I don't personally know a ton. There's this question which
is how should the US approach
13:24kind of AI competition with China? And there's one strain
of thought which is like, "Okay, well, we need to,
like, lock it all down."
13:30And I just happen to think
that that's really wrong because the US thrives
on just kind of open
13:38and decentralized innovation. I mean, that's the way our economy works. That's, like, how we build awesome stuff.
13:43But I think the leading companies should work with the US government and make sure that our
kind of national defense
13:51and things like that have sort of a perpetual
first mover advantage on the leading technology in the world.
13:57So, we win the AI wars this way. I think there, there's the question of what can you hope to achieve?
14:02If you're trying to say,
"Okay, should the US try to be five or 10 years ahead of China?" I just don't know if
that's a reasonable goal.
14:11So, I'm not sure if you can maintain that. But what I do think is a reasonable goal is maintaining a perpetual,
you know, six-month
14:19to, you know, eight-month lead by making sure that the American companies and the American folks working on this
14:26continue producing the best AI systems. And I think if the US can
maintain that advantage over time,
14:33that's just a very big advantage. There are obviously a lot of players. What do you make of Sam
Altman's leadership?
14:38He deserves a lot of credit for how that organization has developed.
14:45Also, having gotten a lot
of public scrutiny myself, I think it's like, look,
when you're going through it
14:50for the first time, you don't handle it, you know, as perfectly as you would like. But I think he's handling
it very gracefully.
14:57I think he's doing better than I did. And it's a somewhat ironic thing to have an organization
that's named OpenAI
15:04but is sort of the leader in
building closed AI models. And it's not necessarily bad, but it's kind of a little funny.
15:10Facebook and you have been
blamed for a lot of things. Whether you agree or not, why
should we trust you with AI?
15:16Well, it's a loaded question. We have gotten blamed for a lot of things.
15:21And I mean, look, I take our role in all this stuff seriously and I think we've tried to handle all this as well as possible.
15:27I'm not sure that it's all been fair, but, like, I'd like to think that we're an important
and relevant company. So, I think the scrutiny
is generally healthy.
15:34One of the defining
things around open source is that anyone can scrutinize the work. And because of that, I think
it just puts a lot of pressure
15:42to make sure that the quality of the work that you're doing
gets better really quickly. I wanna talk about the
2024 presidential election.
15:49Okay. Facebook has been a flashpoint in many elections around the world
15:54and you personally have been called out most recently by former President Trump.
16:00This is a big election. What do you think is at stake?
16:05Well, I mean, look, it's
obviously a very important and it'll be a historic election.
16:11The main thing that I hear from people is that they actually wanna
see less political content
16:16on our services because they come to our
services to connect with people. So, you know, that's what we're gonna do.
16:24We give people control over this, but we're generally trying to recommend less political content.
16:30So, I think you're gonna see our services play less of a role in this election than they have in the past. I've done some stuff
personally in the past.
16:35I'm not planning on doing that this time, and that includes, you know, not endorsing
16:41either of the candidates. Now, look, I mean, there's obviously a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world. I mean, seeing Donald Trump get up
16:48after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the
air with the American flag
16:54is one of the most badass things
I've ever seen in my life. But, look, I mean, it's, you know, as,
17:02and I think, look, at some
level, as an American, it's, like, hard to not
get kind of emotional
17:07about that spirit and that fight and I think that's why a
lot of people like the guy.
17:14But I view our role here is to make it so that everyone
can express their views
17:21on this stuff and I think that that's
probably the best role that we can play. We're facing a crisis in mental health,
17:27especially among teenagers. The Surgeon General is now calling for a warning label on social media,
17:33saying that it's partially to blame. With everything that you know now, does he have a point?
17:40There's clearly an issue with mental health in the country. So, I think that's like
a really important thing.
17:46And for kids and teens,
it's especially important and I think the focus on that is right.
17:53You know, I have three young girls and being a parent is hard
17:58and, like, you care, like, you just wanna make sure that they have, like, good lives.
18:03And so, like, from that perspective, what I aim for us to do
18:10is build our services in a way
that's aligned with parents, giving them the controls that they need
18:16to basically oversee how the
services work for their kids. What the data says today
is a little bit different
18:23from what the basic meme
is that's out there. I think a lot of people kind of act as if there's been this proven
connection between these
18:30and I just don't think that the
science supports that today. It might be that kind of
phones have an issue, right? If you're getting kind of,
18:36if you're getting notified for
something or it's buzzing you and it's, like, preventing
you from sleeping.
18:41I mean, that is different
from social media. But, look, I mean,
there are clearly issues here across society
18:46and we want to make sure we're
part of the solution to that. Mm-hm. You're doing all these things
to make us more virtual,
18:51but you also love so many things about the real world.
Yeah, yeah. How do you wrestle with
those two ambitions?
18:57Well, I don't know that
they're at odds. I don't know. There's, like, a bunch of
people in the tech community who think, like, "Oh, we'll
just, like, separate out
19:02our consciousness and intelligence and, like, upload it to the cloud," and I'm like, "That just
sounds ridiculous to me."
19:07I mean, to me it's like, like, I think part of
what makes you a person is you, like, are active
and you have energy, right?
19:14Like, we're not just minds, right? Like, I think the kind of the energy
19:20and, like, the love and all those things are, like, probably as foundational to what makes you a person.
19:33You're gonna teach me how to wake surf. I heard you're a surfer
and you're from Hawaii. No, no, no, I'm from Hawaii
and I have surfed before.
19:39Great.
But I'm not a surfer. Okay.
I hear you're a surfer. Yeah, Priscilla's quite good.
19:46I'm really glad Priscilla's here because I hear she puts you in your place. Yeah. Oh, yeah, a little, a little. Look, it's good. It's good.
19:52What's Mark's best dad joke? So, like, sometimes when Mark
has a fail with the kids,
19:57he'll just say like, "Not my best work. Yeah.
"Not my best work." That's just like a thing he says. No, when I'm braiding
Max's hair every day.
20:04You braid hair?
Yeah, I braid Max's hair and I'm like, "Oh, you know," it's like, "I think I did well tonight,"
20:10or it's like, "Oh, this
is not my best work." But now the kids will grade him and go- Yeah, so it's like-
"Dad, not your best work."
20:15What's it been like for you being in a relationship with
all of this, like, for so long? I think being in nature
20:22and, like, doing sports
is, like, so important, especially for Mark.
20:27Mark has so much energy. He needs to burn off
energy every single day. How do you keep up? I mean,
how does anyone keep up?
20:34Well, I don't. It's fine. He can do his own thing. Well, Mark's supposed to teach me,
20:40so I said that-
Let's do it. How successful I am depends on how good of a teacher he is.
Exactly.
20:47So, a surf wave, the waves
come from behind you. This is coming a little bit from the side. So, the force, it kind of
pushes you in that direction.
20:53Okay.
So, you can lean in to the wave more than you
would on a normal surf. Don't worry about that part.
20:59Yeah, it'll actually,
it'll be pretty easy. Your body will know what to do once you get up. That's our coaching.
That's our family
21:04sports motto. Your body knows what to do.
Your body knows what to do. All right, I'm ready to rip.
21:11Ready to rock.
Ready, Alohi? Let the board flip. Yeah, oh, she's so close!
21:17She'll get there. This is the part when people are like,
21:24"Are you sure this sport is fun?" I mean, she's managing that. She's fine.
21:29That's 30 seconds. I mean, Alohi, are you doing
this differently for her
21:35than you are for us?
Uh, no. Your body knows what to do, Mark.
21:42Yeah, my body does know what to do. All right, go for it.
21:47Makes it look so easy. Woohoo!
22:03Woo! Yeah, there you go. What do I do now? Now point the nose in here.
22:11Oh.
22:16You've been at this for 20 years. How long do you wanna keep doing this? Like, you have all this.
22:21Surfing is fun. Fighting is fun. Building things is really fun. At this point, you know, I kind of think
22:27about what I'm building in terms of like, you know,
like, in 10 or 15-year chapters.
22:32I think, like, AI is
gonna take 10 or 15 years to fully materialize as will all the work in the next computing
platforms that we're doing.
22:41And then my guess is that
over that period of time, the next set of things will emerge. With tech in general, bigger picture,
22:47it almost seems like we're running this massive experiment on ourselves. Like, how does it all end?
22:54I mean, I'm not sure that
there's, like, an end point. I just think that there's
a broader arc here.
22:59So, you know, I know that
there's a lot of people who are concerned, like, is AI going to, you
know, like, prevent us
23:05from being creative or things like that? I think it's gonna be the opposite. You know, when I was getting
started with my company,
23:12you know, I needed to know
all this stuff about coding in order to be able to
build the idea that I had. And in the future, you
may not even need to.
23:19You might just be able to,
like, you know, express what you're trying to build and an AI system will be able
to help you with the code
23:25and all of that. Obviously there's all these challenges that we'll need to navigate along the way. You know, stuff changes
23:30and that raises new challenges. But I'm pretty optimistic about
that kind of grand arc here.
23:44So, I have an idea
about how to protect us. I brought you some sunscreen.
23:50This is, like, about the amount
of sunscreen that I need.
23:55So, I appreciate that.