We have a very special episode of Decoder today. It’s become a tradition every fall to have Verge deputy editor Alex Heath interview Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the show at Meta Connect. This year, before his interview with Mark, Alex got to try a new pair of experimental AR glasses the company is calling Orion. Alex talked to Mark about a whole lot more, including why the company is investing so heavily in AR, why he's shifted away from politics, Mark's thoughts on the link between teen mental health and social media, and why the Meta chief executive is done apologizing for corporate scandals like Cambridge Analytica that he feels were overblown and misrepresented. Links: Hands-on with Orion, Meta’s first pair of AR glasses | The Verge The biggest news from Meta Connect 2024 | The Verge Mark Zuckerberg: publishers ‘overestimate the value’ of their work for training AI | The Verge Meta extends its Ray-Ban smart glasses deal beyond 2030 | The Verge The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses actually make the future look cool | The Verge Meta has a major opportunity to win the AI hardware race | The Verge Instagram is putting every teen into more private and restrictive new account | The Verge Threads isn’t for news and politics, says Instagram’s boss | The Verge Facebook puts news on the back burner | The Verge Meta is losing a billion dollars on VR and AR every single month | The Verge Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24017522 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt; our editor is Callie Wright. This episode was additionally produced by Brett Putman and Vjeran Pavic. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Amgen, a leading biotechnology company, needed a global financial company to facilitate funding and acquisition to broaden Amgen's therapeutic reach, expand its pipeline, and accelerate bringing new and innovative medicines to patients in need globally.
They found that partner in Citi, whose seamlessly connected banking, markets, and services businesses can advise, finance, and close deals around the world. Learn more at citi.com slash client stories.
Do you want to be a more empowered citizen but don't know where to start? It's time to sharpen your civic vision and ignite the spark for a brighter future. I'm Mila Atmos, and on my weekly podcast, Future Hindsight, I bring you conversations to translate today's most urgent issues into clear, actionable ways to make impact.
With so much at stake in our democracy, join us at futurehindsight.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Eli Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. We have a very special episode today. It's become a Decoder tradition every fall to have Verge Deputy Editor Alex Heath interview Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the show at MetaConnect. And there's a lot to talk about this year.
The company announced new developments in AR, VR, and the fast-growing world of consumer smart glasses. alex it's good to have you thanks for having me good to be back you got to try on some prototype ar glasses you got to sit down with zuck tell us what's going on here
Yeah, so the big headline this year out of Connect is Orion, which are AR glasses that Meta has been building for a really, really long time. Some important context up front is right before we started this interview, we had literally just demoed Orion together. I think I'm the first journalist, the first outsider to do that with Zuckerberg on camera. That's on The Verge's YouTube.
But yeah, we had just come fresh off that demo and literally walked in the podcast studio and sat down and hit record. So- It was fresh on our minds, and that's where we started. Orion is very much the story of AR as a category. It's something that Meta hoped would be a consumer product and decided towards the end of its development that it wouldn't be because of how expensive it is to make.
So instead, they've turned it into a fancy demo that people like me are getting around Connect this year. And it's really meant to signify that, hey, we have been building something the whole time. We finally have something that works. It's just not something that we can ship at commercial scale.
And it's, in my mind, a marker of where we are actually in the development of Aeroglasses and led me, honestly, to feel like it's finally getting really close to being commercial and being mainstream.
This is the first thing that struck me listening to the interview is that Zuckerberg feels like he has control of the next platform shift. That platform shift is going to be glasses and that he can actually take the fight to Apple and Google in a way that he probably couldn't when Meta was a younger company when it was just Facebook.
Yeah, and they're seeing a lot of early traction with the MetaRay bands. We talked a lot about that, their expanded partnership with Ellesore Luxottica, why he thinks this really storied eyewear conglomerate out of Europe could do to smart glasses what Samsung did to smartphones and for Korea. He sees this as becoming a huge, you know, millions of units a year market.
And I think everyone here at The Verge can see that the Ray-Bans are an early hit and that Meta has tapped onto something here that may end up being pretty big in the long run, which is just not overpacking tech into glasses that look good, that do a handful of things really well. And Meta is expanding on that rapidly this year with some other AI features that we also talked about.
You guys got into that in depth. But the other thing that really struck me about this interview... Zuck just seems loose. He seems confident. He seems almost defiant in a way.
Yeah, he's done a lot of self-reflection, you can tell. And in the back half of this interview, we get into a lot of the brand stuff around Meta, how he's worked through the last few years, where he sees the company going now, which is, in his own words, nonpartisan.
And even admitting kind of in that that he may be naive in thinking that a company like Meta can be nonpartisan, but he's going to try to play a backseat role to all of the discourse that really engulfed the company for the last 10 years. And we get into all of the dicey stuff. We get into social media's link to teen mental health.
We get into Cambridge Analytica and how he thinks the company was unfairly blamed for it in hindsight. Yeah, I would say this is a new Zuckerberg, and it was fascinating to hear him talk about all of this in retrospect.
Yeah. The one thing I'll say is he was in a very talkative mood with you, and you let him talk. There's some answers in there, particularly around the harms to teens from social media, where he says the data isn't there. I'm very curious how parents are going to react to his comments in this episode. Me too. All right, let's just get into it. Here's Alex interviewing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark, we just tried Orion together. Yeah, what'd you think? Refresh off of it. It feels like true AR glasses are finally getting closer. Orion is a product that you all have been working on for five plus years.
Yeah, almost 10.
Almost 10?
Yeah.
So take me back to the beginning when you started the project, when it started in research. What were you thinking about? What was the goal for it?
I think a lot of it goes all the way back to our relationship with mobile platforms and all that. We have lived through one major platform transition already because we started on web, not on mobile. Mobile phones and smartphones kind of got started around the same time. as Facebook and kind of early social media was getting started.
So it didn't really get to play any role in that platform transition, but going through it where we weren't born on mobile, we kind of had this awareness that, okay, web was a thing. Mobile is a thing. It is different. There are strengths and weaknesses of it.
There's this continuum of computing where now you have a mobile device that you can take with you all the time, and that's amazing, but it's small. kind of pulls you away from other interactions. Those things are not great, but there was sort of this recognition that just like there was the transition from computers to mobile, mobile was not going to be the end of the line.
So as soon as we started becoming like a more, I don't know, I guess I'd say stable company, like once we found our footing on mobile and
we weren't like clearly going to go out of business or something like that i was like okay let's start planting some seeds for what we think could be the future right it's like mobile is already kind of getting defined you know by 2012 2014-ish it was generally too late to to really shape that platform in a meaningful way i mean we had some experiments i mean they didn't succeed or go anywhere
So pretty quickly I was like, okay, we should focus on the future because just like there's the shift from desktop to mobile, new things are going to be possible in the future. So what is that? I think the kind of simplest version of it is basically what you started seeing with Orion, right? It's like the vision is a normal pair of glasses. that can do two really fundamental things.
One is put holograms in the world to deliver this realistic sense of presence, like you were there with another person or in another place, or maybe you're physically with a person, but just like we did, you can pull up a virtual pong game or whatever. You can work on things together. You can sit at a coffee shop, pull up your whole workstation of different monitors.
You can be on a flight or in the backseat of a car and pull up a full-screen movie theater and like, okay, all these things. Great computing, full sense of presence, like you're there with people no matter where they are. Thing two is it's the ideal device for AI. And the reason for that is because glasses are sort of uniquely positioned
For you to be able to let them see what you see and hear what you hear and give you very subtle feedback back to you where they can speak in your ear or they can have silent input that kind of shows up on the glasses that other people can't see and doesn't take you away from the world around you. And I think that that is all going to be really profound.
When we got started with this, I had thought that kind of the hologram part of this was going to be possible before AI. So it's sort of an interesting twist of fate that the AI part is actually possible before the holograms are really able to be mass produced at kind of an affordable price. But that was sort of the vision. I think that it's pretty easy to wrap your head around
And there's already a billion to two billion people who wear glasses on a daily basis. Just like everyone who didn't have smartphones were kind of the first people to upgrade to smartphones. I think everyone who has glasses is pretty quickly going to upgrade to smart glasses over the next decade. And then I think it's going to start being really valuable.
And a lot of other people who aren't wearing glasses today are going to end up wearing them too. That's kind of the simple version. And then I think as we've developed this out, there are all these sort of more nuanced directions that have emerged too.
So we've started, you know, while that was kind of the full version of what we wanted to build, there were all these things that we said, okay, well, maybe it's really hard to build normal looking glasses that can do holograms at an affordable price point. So what parts of that can we take on? And that's where we did the partnership with SLR Luxottica. So it's like, okay, before you have a display,
You can get normal looking glasses that can have a camera, that can have a microphone, great audio, can capture content. You can stream video at this point, but the most important feature at this point is the ability to access meta AI and just kind of have kind of a full AI there, multimodal because it has camera. And I mean, that product is starting at $300.
And, you know, initially I kind of thought, hey, this is sort of on the technology path to building full holographic glasses. At this point, I actually just think both are going to exist long-term, right?
I think that there are going to be people who want the full holographic glasses, and I think that there are going to be people who prefer kind of the superior form factor or lower price of a device where they are primarily optimizing for getting AI. I also think there's going to be a range of things in between, right? So there's the full kind of field of view that you just saw, right? 70 degrees.
really wide field of view for glasses. But I think that there are other products in between that too. There's like a heads-up display version. You know, for that, you probably just need, you know, 20, 30 degrees. You can't do kind of the full kind of world holograms where you're interacting with things.
Like you're not going to play ping pong in 30-degree field of view, but you can communicate with AI. You can text your friends. You can get directions. You can... see the content that you're capturing. So I know there's a lot there that's going to be compelling. And that's, I think, going to be
At each step along this continuum, from displayless to small display to kind of full holographic, you're packing more technology in. So each step up is going to be a little more expensive, is going to have a little more constraints on the form factor, even though I think we'll get them all to be attractive. You'll be able to do the kind of simpler ones and much smaller form factors permanently.
And then, of course, there's the mixed reality headsets, which kind of took a different direction, which is going towards the same vision, but... On that, we said, okay, well, we're not going to try to fit it into a glasses form factor. For that one, we're going to say, okay, we're going to really go for all the compute that we want.
And we're going to say, okay, this is going to be more of like a headset or goggles form factor. And my guess is that that's going to be a thing long-term too, because there are a bunch of uses where people want the full immersion. And if you're sitting at your desk and working for a long period of time, you might want the more computing power than you're going to be able to get.
But I think that there's no doubt that Kind of what you saw with Orion is the, I think, kind of quintessential vision of what people, what at least kind of I thought and continue to think is going to be the next multi-billion person major computing platform. And then kind of all these other things are going to get built out around it.
It's my understanding that you originally hoped Orion would be a consumer product when you first set out to build it.
Yeah, yeah. Orion was meant to be our first consumer product. And we weren't sure if we were going to be able to pull it off. I mean, in general, it's probably turned out significantly better than our kind of 50-50 estimates of what it would be. But we didn't get there on everything that we wanted to.
I think we still want it to be a little smaller, a little brighter, like a little bit higher resolution, and a lot more affordable. Before we kind of put it out there as a product. And look, we have line of sight to all those things. So I think we'll probably have the thing that was going to be the V2 end up being the consumer product.
And we're going to use Orion with developers to basically cultivate the software experience. That way, by the time we're ready to ship something, it's going to be much more dialed in.
But to be clear, you're not selling Orion at all. When you made the call, I think it was around 2022, to say Orion is going to just be internal kind of dev kit. How did you feel about making that call? Was there any part of you that was like, man, I really wish this could have just been the consumer product we had built for years?
I always want to ship stuff quickly and all that. But I think it was the right thing. On this product, there's a pretty clear set of constraints that I think you want to hit.
Mm-hmm.
especially around the form factor, right? I mean, it is very helpful for us that sort of chunkier glasses are kind of ascendant in the fashion world because that allows us to build glasses that are gonna be fashionable, but also tech forward. But even so, I'd say, you know, these are unmistakably glasses They're reasonably comfortable. They're, you know, under 100 grams.
I wore them for two hours and I couldn't really tell.
Yeah, but I mean, I think we aspire to building things that like look really good, right? And I think this is like good glasses, but I want it to be a little smaller so it can fit within like really fashionable, right? When people see the Ray-Bans, there's no compromise on fashion. It's like part of why I think people like them
is, yeah, you get all this functionality, but even when you're not using it, they're great glasses. And I think for the future version of Orion, that's the target too. We want to make it so that, you know, most of the time you're going through your day, you're not computing, right? Or something is happening in the background or something.
So it just needs to be good in order for you to kind of want to keep it on your face. And I feel like we're almost there. I think we've made more progress than anyone else in the world that I'm aware of, but it didn't quite hit my bar. And similarly... On price, these are going to be more expensive than the Ray-Bans, right? I mean, there's just a lot more tech that's going in them.
But, you know, we do want to have it be within a consumer price point. This was outside that range. So I wanted to wait until we could get to that range in order to have something that we ship.
Are you imagining that the first commercial version, whenever it is in the next couple few years, will it be a developer-focused product that you're selling publicly? You want it to be a consumer-ready product? That's why I'm asking about the strategy because Apple, Snap, others have decided to do developer-focused plays and get the hardware kind of going with developers early. Yeah.
But you're kind of... Are you saying you're skipping that and you just want to go straight to consumer?
We are using this as a developer kit, just primarily internally and maybe with a handful of partners. Okay. But, I mean, I think at this point, meta is by far the... kind of premier developer of augmented reality and virtual and mixed reality software and hardware in the world. So you can think about it as a developer kit, but we just have a lot of that talent in-house.
And then we also have well-developed partnerships with a lot of folks externally who we can go to and work with them as well. So I don't think we need to go announce a dev kit that kind of arbitrary developers can go buy to get access to the talent that we need to go build out the platform. I think we're kind of in a place where we can work with partners and do that.
But that's absolutely what we're going to do over the next few years. hone the experience and figure out what we need to do to really nail it when it's ready to ship.
A lot has been written about how much you're spending on Reality Labs. And you probably can't have an exact number, but if you were to guesstimate the cost of just building Orion over the last 10 years, are we talking five plus billion more than that?
Yeah, probably. Yeah. But I mean, overall... for reality labs. For a while, a lot of people thought of all of that budget is going towards virtual and mixed reality. And I actually think we've said publicly that our glasses programs are a bigger budget than our virtual and mixed reality programs. But that goes across all of them, right?
So that's the kind of full AR, that's the display-less glasses, like all the work we're gonna do on Ray-Ban. And we just announced the expanded partnership with Luxottica. Essilor Luxottica, great company. We've had a great experience working with them. They designed so many great glasses. And I think working with them to do even more is going to be really exciting.
So there's a lot more to do there on all of these things.
How does this partnership work? And this renew that you just did with them, how is it structured? What does this deal look like?
I think it was more of just a kind of commitment from the companies that...
we're feeling pretty good about how this is going and we're going to build a lot more glasses together part of the way it works is um you know rather than having sort of doing one generation and then designing the next generation i think by having a longer term partnership it allows the teams to not just have to worry about one thing at a time then like okay is this one going to be good and then how do we build on that for the next one now we can start
like a multi-year roadmap of many different devices, knowing that we're going to be working together for a long time. So I'm optimistic about that. That's sort of how we work internally, right? We don't just, I mean, sometimes when you're early on, you definitely want to learn from each device launch.
But when there are things that you're committed to, I don't think you want the team to feel like, okay, if we don't get the short-term milestone, then like we're going to cancel the whole thing, right? So... Are you buying a stake in Illusora Luxottica? Yeah. Yeah, I think we've talked about investing in them. It's not going to be a kind of major thing. I'd say it's more of a symbolic thing.
I mean, we want to have this be a long-term partnership. And as part of that, I thought that this would be kind of a nice gesture. And I fundamentally believe in them a lot. I mean, I think that they're going to go from being the premier glasses company in the world to, I think, one of the major technology companies in the world. I mean, my vision for them and how I think about it
is that if you think about how Samsung in Korea made it so that Korea became one of the main hubs of building phones in the world, I think that this is probably one of the best shots for Europe, and Italy in particular, to become a major hub for manufacturing and building and designing the next major category of computing platforms overall. And I think that they're kind of all in on that now.
And it's been this interesting question because they have such a good business and such deep competence in the areas. And I've gotten more of an appreciation of how strong of a technology company they are in their own way, right? Designing lenses, designing the materials that you need to make fashionable glasses that... can be light enough, but also kind of like feel good.
They bring a huge amount that I think is people in kind of our world, the tech world, probably don't necessarily see, but I think that they're really well set up for the future. So I believe in the partnership. I'm really excited about the work that we're doing together. And fundamentally, I think that that's just going to be a massively successful company in the future.
Is it set up to where they control the designs and you provide the tech stack, or do you collaborate on the design?
I think we collaborate on everything. It's actually, I mean, part of working together is... you kind of build a joint culture over time.
There were a lot of really sharp people over there who I think it took maybe a couple versions for us really to gain an appreciation for how each of us approach things because, you know, they really think about things from this like fashion, manufacturing, lens, selling optical devices perspective. And we obviously come at it from a kind of consumer electronics, AI, software perspective, but
I think over time, we just kind of appreciate each other's perspectives on things a lot more. And I mean, I'm like constantly talking to them about things to get their ideas on different things. I mean, but you know, when partnerships are working well, when you reach out to them to get their opinion on things that are not actually currently in the scope of what you're working on together.
And because I do that frequently with Rocco, who runs the wearables and Francesco, who's their CEO. And our team does that too with a large part of the working group over there. It's a good crew. They share good values. They're really sharp. And like I said, I believe in them a lot. And I think it's going to be a very successful partnership and company. We need to take a quick break.
We'll be right back.
Do you want to be a more empowered citizen but don't know where to start? It's time to sharpen your civic vision and ignite the spark for a brighter future. I'm Mila Atmos, and on my weekly podcast, Future Hindsight, I bring you conversations to translate today's most urgent issues into clear, actionable ways to make impact.
With so much at stake in our democracy, join us at futurehindsight.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.
They're not writers, but they help their clients shape their businesses' financial stories. They're not an airline, but their network connects global businesses in nearly 180 local markets. They're not detectives, but they work across businesses to uncover new financial opportunities for their clients. They're not just any bank. They are Citi. Learn more at Citi.com slash WeAreCiti.
That's C-I-T-I dot com slash WeAreCiti.
Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see?
For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore.
That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists. And they're making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion.
It's mind-blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business people. These are organized criminal rings. And so once we understand the magnitude of this problem, we can protect people better.
One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best defenses is simple.
We need to talk to each other. We need to have those awkward conversations around what do you do if you have text messages you don't recognize? What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that's more sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness, a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim and we have these conversations all the time.
So we are all at risk and we all need to work together to protect each other.
Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com slash zelle. And when using digital payment platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust.
We're back with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussing the company's Ray-Ban smart glasses partnership and the future of AR. How many Ray-Ban Metas have you sold so far?
I don't know if we've given a number on that, but... I know, that's what I'm asking. Yeah, it's going very well. One of the things that I think is interesting is we underestimated demand. One thing that is very different in the world of consumer electronics than software is... there are fewer kind of supply constraints in software.
There are some, I mean, like some of the stuff that we're rolling out, like the voice on Meta AI, we need to meter it as we're rolling it out because we need to make sure we have enough inference capacity to handle it. But fundamentally we'll resolve that in weeks, right?
But for manufacturing, it's like, you make these concrete decisions like, okay, are we setting up four manufacturing lines or six? Each one, it was a big upfront CapEx investment, and you're basically deciding upfront the velocity at which you're going to be able to generate supply before you know what the demand is. So on this one, we thought that Ray-Ban Meta was probably going to sell...
three or five times more than the first version did. And we just dramatically underestimated. So now we're in this position where it's actually been somewhat hard for us to gauge what the real demand is because they're sold out and you can't get them. So if you can't get them, then how do you know where the actual curve is? But we're basically getting to the point where that's resolved, where...
The supply, now we kind of adjusted. We made the decision to build more manufacturing lines. It took some time to do it. They're online now. It's not just about being able to make them. You need to get them into all the stores and get the distribution right. We feel like that's in a pretty good place now.
So I'd say over the rest of this year, we're going to start getting a real sense of the demand. But while that's going on, the glasses keep getting better because of over the air AI updates. So the hardware doesn't necessarily change, even though we keep shipping new frames and new type of, you know, they're adding more transitions lenses because people want to wear them indoors.
And that's an interesting thing because I mean, people, Sunglasses are a little more discretionary. So I think a lot more people early on were thinking, hey, I'll experiment with this with sunglasses. I'm not going to make these my primary glasses. Now we're seeing a lot more people say, hey, this is actually really useful. I want to be able to wear them inside.
I want them to be my primary glasses. So whether that's kind of working with them through the optical channel or the transitions, that's an important part. But the AI part of this is also, it just keeps getting better. I mean, we talked about it at Connect. I mean, basically... The ability to now, you know, over the next few months when we roll this out, real-time translations.
You're traveling abroad, someone's speaking Spanish to you, you just get it translated into English in your ear and just roll out to more and more languages over time. I think we're starting with a few. We'll kind of hit more over time.
I tried that. Well, actually I didn't try real time, but I tried looking at a menu in French and it translated into English. And then I was like, at the end, I was like, what is Euro and dollar actually? And it did that too. And then I'm also starting to see the continuum of this to Orion in the sense of the utility aspects of the like, I tried, like you could say,
look at this and remind me about it at 8 p.m. tonight. And then it syncs with the companion app.
Yeah, Reminders is a new picture.
So I guess I'm seeing that becoming more of a, it's not replacing the phone, but it's augmenting what I would do with my phone. And I'm wondering if the app is a place for more of that kind of interaction as well, whether it's like Meta AI or, like how are these glasses going to be more deeply tied to Meta AI over time? Yeah. It seems like they're getting closer and closer all the time.
Yeah, well, I think meta AI is becoming a more and more prominent feature of the classes, right? There's more stuff that you can do. So you just mentioned reminders, another example. It's like now that,
is just going to work and now your glasses can remind you of things and so okay so you can look at a phone number and say call this phone number and then it calls on the phone you know just we'll just add more capabilities over time and some of that are model updates right so like okay now it has llama 3.2 but some of it is is kind of software development around it like reminders you don't get for free just because we updated the model that's
We have this big software development effort, and we're kind of adding features continuously and developing the ecosystem, right? So you get more apps. So Spotify and all these different things kind of can work more natively. So the glasses just get more and more useful, which I think is also going to increase demand over time. And how does it interact with phones?
I mean, like you said, I don't think people are getting rid of phones anytime soon. The way I kind of think about this is that When phones became the primary computing platform, we didn't get rid of computers. We just kind of shifted, right?
So I don't know if you have this experience, but at some point in the early 2010s, I noticed that I'd be sitting at my desk in front of my computer and I'd just pull out my phone to do things. I think what's going to happen It's not like we're gonna throw away our phones, but I think slowly we're just gonna start doing more things with our glasses and leaving our phones in our pockets more.
And it's not like we're done with our computers and I don't think we're gonna be done with our phones for a while, but there's a pretty clear path where you're just gonna use your glasses for more and more things. Over time, glasses are also going to be able to be powered by wrist-based wearables or other wearables.
So you're going to wake up one day 10 years from now, and you're not even going to need to bring your phone with you. Now, you're still going to have a phone, but I think more of the time people are going to leave it in their pocket or leave it in their bag or eventually even some of the time leave it at home.
And I think there will just be this sort of gradual shift to glasses becoming the main way that we do computing.
It's interesting that we're talking about this right now because I feel like phones are becoming kind of boring and stale. I just was looking at the new iPhone and it's basically the same as the year before. People are doing foldables, but it feels like people have kind of run out of ideas on phones and that they're kind of at their natural end state.
And I wonder when you see something like the Ray-Bans and how people have really gravitated to them in a way that's surprised you guys and I think surprised all of us, but it's also just like... People want to interact with technology in different ways now. Yeah.
And I think AI, like you said at the beginning, like the way that AI is intersected with this is just kind of like an aha thing for people that honestly, for me, I didn't expect it to click as quickly as it did. But like when I got whitelisted for the AI, I was like walking around my backyard and like using it. And I was like, oh, like it's obvious now where this is going.
So it feels like we're, like I was saying at the beginning, it feels like things are finally, you can see where it's going. Whereas before it's been a lot of like R&D and talking about it, but like these, the Ray-Bans are kind of a signifier of that. And I'm wondering if you agree with that.
I agree. I mean, I still think it's early. I think you really want to be able to not just ask the AI questions, but ask it to do things. Yeah. and know that it's going to reliably go do it. And we're starting with simple things, right? So voice control of your glasses, although you can do that on phones too, things like reminders, although you can generally do that on phones too.
I think as the model capabilities grow over the next couple of generations and you get more of what people call these agentic capabilities, I think it's gonna start to get pretty exciting. For what it's worth, I also think that all the AI work is gonna make phones a lot more exciting. It's the most exciting thing I think that has happened to our
family of apps roadmap in a long time is all of the different AI things that we're building. So if I were at any of the other companies, I think that if I were trying to design what the next few versions of iPhone or Google's phone should be, I think that there's a long and interesting roadmap of things that they can go do with AI that as an app developer, we can't.
So I think that that's a pretty exciting and interesting thing for them to go do, which I assume that they will.
On the AI social media piece, one of the wilder things that your team told me you guys are going to start doing is showing people AI-generated imagery personalized to them in feed. I think it's starting as an experiment. But if you're a photographer, you would see meta-AI generating content that's maybe personalized for you alongside content from the people you follow.
Yeah.
And that's just the idea that I've been thinking about of AI and kind of invading social media, so to speak. Maybe you don't like the word invading, but you know what I mean. And what does that do to how we relate to each other as humans? Like how much AI stuff and AI-generated stuff is going to be filling feeds in the near future, in your view?
Well, here's how I come at this. So in the history of running the company, where we've been building these apps for 20 years, Every, call it three to five years, there's some new major format that comes along that is typically additive to the experience, right?
So, you know, initially people kind of updated their profiles, then they were able to post statuses that were text, then links, then you got photos early on, then you added videos, then with mobile. Basically, Snap invented Stories, the first version of that, and that became a pretty kind of widely used format. The whole version of short form videos, I think, is sort of a still ascendant format.
But at each step along the way, you want to... It's like you keep on making the system richer by having more different types of content that people can share and different ways to express themselves.
And when you look out for the next 10 years of, okay, if this trend seems to happen where every three, five years, whatever the pace is, that there are new formats, I think given the pace of change in the tech industry, I think you'd bet that that continues or accelerates. And I think you'd bet that...
probably most of the new formats are going to be kind of AI connected in some way, given that that's the kind of driving theme for the industry at this point. So given that kind of set of assumptions, we're sort of trying to understand what are the things that are most useful to people within that. There's one vein of this, which is helping people and creators make better content using AI.
That I think is going to be pretty clear, right? Just make it like super easy for like aspiring creators or advanced creators to make much better stuff than they would be able to otherwise. That can take the format of like, all right, like my daughter is writing a book and she wants it illustrated.
And like we sit down together and work with Meta AI and imagine to help her come up with images to illustrate it.
like okay that's like a thing that's like she didn't have the capability to do that before she's not a graphic designer but now she kind of has that that that ability i think that's going to be pretty cool then i think that there's a version where you have just this great diversity of ai agents that are as part of this system and this i think is a big difference between our vision of ai and most of the other companies is yeah we're building meta ai as kind of the main assistant that you can build
that's sort of equivalent to the singular assistant that maybe like a Google or an OpenAI or different folks are building. But it's not really the main thing that we're doing. Our main vision is that we think that there are going to be a lot of these, right?
It's every business, all the hundreds of millions of small businesses, you know, just like they have a website and an email address and a social media account today. I think that they're all going to have an AI that helps them interact with their customers in the future that does some combination of sales and customer support and all that.
I think all the creators are basically going to want some version of this that basically helps them interact with their community when they're just limited by they don't have enough hours in the day to interact with all the messages that are coming in and They want to make sure that they can show some love to people in their community.
And those, I think, are just the two most obvious ones that even if we just did those, that's many hundreds of millions. But then there's going to be all this more creative stuff that's UGC that people create that are kind of wilder use cases that they want. And our view is, okay, these are all going to live across these social networks and beyond. I don't think that they should just...
be constrained to waiting until someone messages them right i think that they're going to have their own profiles they're going to be creating content people will be able to follow them if they want you'll be able to comment on their stuff they may be able to comment on your stuff if you're connected with them i mean there will obviously be different different logic and rules but that's one way that there's going to be just a lot more kind of ai participants in the
broader social construct that we have. And then I think you get to the test that you mentioned, which is maybe the most abstract, which is just having the central meta AI system
Directly generate content for you based on what we think is gonna be interesting to you and putting that in your feed on that there's been this trend over time where the feed started off as Primarily and exclusively content for people you you followed friends I guess it was friends early on then it kind of broadened out to okay you followed a set of friends and creators and then
It got to a point where the algorithm was good enough where we're actually showing you a lot of stuff that you're not following directly because in some ways that's a better way to show you more interesting stuff than only constraining it to things that you've chosen to follow.
I think the next logical jump on that is like, okay, we're showing you content from your friends and creators that you're following and creators that you're not following that are generating interesting things. And you just add on to that a layer of, okay, and we're also going to show you content that's generated by an AI system that might be something that you're interested in.
Now, how big do any of these segments get? I think it's really hard to know until you build them out over time. It feels like it is a category in the world that's going to exist. And how big it gets is kind of dependent on the execution and how good it is.
Why do you think it needs to exist as a new category? I'm still wrestling with why people want this. I get the companionship stuff that Character AI and some startups have already shown there's like a market for. And you've talked about how meta is already being used for role playing. Yeah. But the big idea is that AI has been used to intermediate in feed how humans reach each other.
And now all of a sudden, AIs are going to be in feeds with us.
Well, I think the main difference... And that feels big. Yeah, but in a lot of ways, the big change already happened, which is people getting content that they weren't following. And the definition of feeds and social interaction has changed very fundamentally in the last 10 years. Now, in social systems...
Most of the direct interaction is happening in more private forums and messaging our groups. This is one of the reasons I think why we were late with Reels initially to competing with TikTok is because we hadn't made this mental shift where we kind of felt like, no, feed is where you interact with people.
Actually, increasingly, feed is becoming a place where you discover content that you then take to your private forums and interact with people there. So a lot of the way that I interact with people, it's like, yeah, I'll still have the thing where A friend will post something and I'll comment on it and engage directly in feed. Again, this is additive. You're adding more over time.
But the main way that you engage with Reels isn't necessarily that you go into the Reels comments and comment and talk to people you don't know. It's like you see something funny and you send it to friends in a group chat. I think that that paradigm will absolutely continue with AI and all kinds of interesting content. So it is facilitating connections with people, but...
i think already we're in this mode where our connections through social media are shifting to more private places and the role of feed in the ecosystem is more as a you know i call it a discovery engine of content to kind of you know icebreakers or interesting kind of topic starters for the conversations that you're having across this like broader spectrum of places where you're interacting
Do you worry about people interacting with AIs like this making people less likely to talk to other people, like it reducing the engagement that we have with humans?
I mean, the sociology that I've seen on this is that most people have way fewer friends physically than they would like to have. I think people cherish the kind of human connection that they have.
And the more we can do to make that feel more real and give you more reasons to connect, whether it's through something funny that shows up so you can message someone or a pair of glasses that lets your sister show up as a hologram in your living room when she lives across the country and you wouldn't be able to see her otherwise.
That's always kind of our main bread and butter in the thing that we're doing. But in addition to that, I mean, if the, you know, the average person, I think, you know, maybe they'd like to have 10 friends. And I mean, there's the stat that it's like, it's sort of sad, but I think the average American feels like they have fewer than three, like real kind of close friends. So.
Does this take away from that? My guess is no. I think that what's going to happen is it's going to help give people more of the support that they need and give people more kind of reasons and ability to connect with either a broader range of people or more deeply with the people that they care about. We need to take another quick break.
We'll be right back.
Support for this show comes from the refinery at Domino. Look, location and atmosphere are key when deciding on a home for your business, and the refinery can be that home. If you're a business leader, specifically one in New York, the refinery at Domino is an opportunity to claim a defining part of the New York City skyline.
The refinery at Domino is located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and it offers all the perks and amenities of a brand new building while being a landmark address that dates back to the mid-19th century. Its 15 floors of Class A modern office environment house within the original urban artifact, making it a unique experience for inhabitants as well as the wider community.
The building is outfitted with immersive interior gardens, a glass-domed penthouse lounge, and a world-class event space. The building is also home to a state-of-the-art Equinox with a pool and spa, world-renowned restaurants, and exceptional retail. As New Yorkers return to the office, the Refinery at Domino can be more than a place to work.
It can be a magnetic hub fit to inspire your team's best ideas. Visit therefinery.nyc for a tour.
Support for this episode comes from Microsoft. Did you know one in 43 US children have had their personal information exposed or compromised? Scammers are targeting our kids online, especially on social media, where unmonitored conversations can easily lead to identity theft. We need better tools to protect our loved ones to stay ahead.
Thankfully, there's Microsoft Defender, all-in-one protection that can help keep our families safe when they're online. Microsoft Defender makes it easy to safeguard your family's data, identities, and privacy with a single security app across your devices. Take control of your family's security by helping to protect their personal info, computers, and phones from hackers and scammers.
Visit Microsoft365.com slash Defender.
This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Forget the frustration of picking commerce platforms when you switch your business to Shopify, the global commerce platform that supercharges your selling wherever you sell. With Shopify, you'll harness the same intuitive features, trusted apps, and powerful analytics used by the world's leading brands.
Sign up today for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash tech, all lowercase. That's Shopify.com slash tech.
We're back with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, talking about the current state of Threads and why the company is trying to back out of politics. How are you feeling about how Threads is doing these days?
I mean, Threads on fire. It's great. I mean, these things, it's like, there's only so quickly that something can get to a billion people. So it's going to, you know, we'll kind of keep on pushing on it over time.
I've heard it's still using Instagram a lot for growth. Like, I guess I'm wondering when you see it getting to like a standalone growth driver on its own.
I mean, I think that these things all connect to each other. I mean, I think threads helps Instagram. I think Instagram helps threads. I don't know that we have some strategic goal, which is like make it so that threads is completely disconnected from Instagram or Facebook. I actually think we're going the other direction.
It started off just connected to Instagram and now we also connected it so that the content can show up. You know, taking a step back, I mean, we just talked about how for most people, they're interacting in more private forums. If you're a creator, what you want to do is have your content show up everywhere, right?
Because you're trying to build the biggest community that you can in these different places. So it's this huge value for people if they can generate a reel or a video or some text-based content, and now you can post it in threads, Instagram, Facebook, and more places over time. So I think the direction there is generally kind of more flow, not less, and kind of more interoperability.
And that's why I've been kind of pushing on that as a theme over time.
I'm not even sure what X is anymore, but I think what it used to be and what Twitter used to be was a place where you went when news was happening. I know you and the company seem to be distancing yourself from recommending news. But with threads, it feels like that's what people want and people thought threads might be.
But it seems like you all are intentionally saying we don't want threads to actually be that.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. There are different ways to look at this. I always looked at Twitter not as primarily about real-time news, but as a kind of short-form, primarily text, discussion-oriented app. To me, the fundamental defining aspect of that format is that... When you make a post, the comments aren't subordinate to the post.
The comments are kind of at a peer level, and that is a very different architecture than every other type of social network that's out there. It's a subtle difference, but within these systems, these subtle differences lead to very different emerging behaviors. So because of that, people can take, they can fork discussions, and it makes it a very good discussion-oriented platform.
Now, news is one thing that people like discussing, but it's not the only thing. And I always looked at Twitter and I was like, hey, this is such a wasted opportunity. Like, this is clearly a billion-person app. You know, maybe in the modern day when you have multiple, like, many billions of people using social apps, it should be multiple billions of people.
For whatever reason, I mean, there are a lot of things that have been complicated about Twitter and the corporate structure and all that, but they just weren't quite getting there. And eventually... I kind of thought, hey, I think we can do this.
I think we can get this, build out the discussion platform in a way that can get to a billion people and be more of a ubiquitous social platform that I think achieves its full potential. But our version of this is we want it to be a kinder place. We don't want it to start with kind of the direct kind of head-to-head combat of news and especially politics. And
Do you feel like that constrains the growth of the product at all?
I mean, I think we'll see.
Or that that needs to exist in the world? Because I feel like with X's seeming implosion, it's not really existing anymore. Maybe I'm biased to someone in the media, but I do think people want, when something big happens in the world, they want an app that they can go to and see everyone that they follow talking about it immediately.
Yeah, well, we're not the only company. There are a ton of different competitors and different companies doing things. And I think that there's a talented team over at Twitter and X and I wouldn't write them off. And then obviously there's all these other folks, there's a lot of startups that are doing stuff. So I don't feel like we have to go at that first.
I think that maybe we get there over time or maybe we decide that it's enough of a zero sum trade or maybe even a negative sum trade where like that use case should exist somewhere, but maybe that use case prevents a lot more usage and kind of a lot more value in other places because it makes it a somewhat less friendly place.
I don't think we know the answer to that yet, but I do think the last 10 years eight years of our experience has been that the political discourse, it's tricky, right? It's on the one hand, it's obviously a very important thing in society. And on the other hand, I don't think it leaves people feeling good. So I'm torn between these two values.
On the one hand, I think like people should be able to have this kind of open discourse and that's good. On the other hand, I don't want to design a product that makes people angry. There's an informational lens for looking at this, and you're designing a product, and what's the feel of the product? I think anyone who's designing a product cares a lot about how the thing feels. And
But you recognize the importance of that discussion happening in the world.
I think it's useful. And look, we don't block it. We just make it so that for the content where you're following people, if you want to talk to your friends about it, if you want to talk to them about it in messaging, there can be groups about it. If you follow people, it can show up in your feed. But we don't go out of our way to recommend that content when you're not following it. And...
I think that that has been a healthy balance for us and for getting our products to generally feel the way that we want. And, you know, culture changes over time. Maybe this stuff will be like a little bit less polarized and anger inducing at some point. And maybe it'll be possible to have more of that. while also at the same time having a product where we're proud of how it feels.
But until then, I think we want to design a product that, yeah, people can get the things that they want. But, you know, fundamentally, I care a lot about how people feel coming away from the products.
Do you see this decision to downrank political content for people who aren't being followed in feed as a political decision, I guess? Because...
i don't know you're also at the same time you know not really saying much about the election this year you're not donating you've said you kind of want to stay out of it now yeah and i see the way the company's acting and it reflects your personal kind of way you're operating right now and i'm wondering like how much more of it is also about what you and the company have gone through and the political environment and not necessarily just what users are telling you
Like, is there a through line there?
I mean, I'm sure it's all connected. I think in this case, it wasn't a trade-off between those two things because this actually was what our community was telling us. And people were saying, generally, we don't want so much politics. Like, this isn't, you know, like, we don't feel good. Like, we want content. We want more stuff from our friends and family. We want more stuff from our interests.
That was kind of the primary driver. But I think it's definitely the case that our corporate experience on this shaped this. And... I mean, there's a big difference between something being political and being partisan.
And the main thing that I care about is making sure that we can be seen as a nonpartisan and, you know, as much as something can in the world in 2024 be sort of like a trusted institution by as many people as possible. And I just think that the partisan politics is so tough in the world right now that...
I've made the decision that I kind of feel like for me and for the company, best thing to do is to try to be as nonpartisan as possible in all of this and kind of be as neutral and distance ourselves as much as possible. And it's not just the substance. I also think the perception matters.
So I think, so that's why, you know, and maybe, you know, it doesn't matter on our platforms whether I endorse a candidate or not, but like, I don't even, I don't want to go anywhere near that. And yeah, sure. I mean, you could say that's a political strategy, but I think it's, you know, I think for where we are in the world today, it's very hard.
Almost every institution has become partisan in some way. And we are just trying to resist that. And maybe I'm too naive and maybe that's impossible, but we're going to try to do that.
the acquired podcast recently you said that the political miscalculation was a 20-year mistake yeah from a brand from a brand perspective and that it was going to take another 10 or so for you to fully work through that cycle yeah yeah what makes you think it's such a lasting thing because you look at like how you personally have kind of evolved over the last couple years and i think perception of the company has evolved and i'm wondering like what you meant by saying it's going to take another 10 years
I'm just talking about where our brand is and our reputation are compared to where I think they would have been. I mean, there's no doubt that even now here in, okay, yeah, sure, maybe things have improved somewhat over the last few years, you can feel the trend, but it's still significantly worse than it was in 2016.
You know, it's, I mean, the internet industry overall, and I think our company in particular, just we're seeing way more positively. And Now, look, there were real issues, right?
So I think that it's always very difficult to talk about this stuff in a nuanced way because I think to some degree before 2016, everyone was sort of too rosy about the internet overall and didn't talk enough about the issues. And then the pendulum sort of swung and people only talked about the issues and didn't talk about the stuff that was positive. And it was all both there the whole time.
So when I talk about this, I don't mean to come across as simplistic or...
Like you guys didn't do anything wrong.
Or that there weren't issues with the internet or things like that. I mean, obviously every year, whether it's politics or other things, there are always things that you look back at and you're like, hey, yeah, if I were playing this perfectly, I would have done these things differently.
But I do think it's the case that I didn't really know how to react to something as big of a shift in the world as what happened. And it took me a while to find my footing. And I do think that it's tricky when you're caught up in these kind of big debates. you're not kind of experienced or sophisticated in engaging with that, I think you can make some big missteps.
And I do think that some of the things that we were accused of over time, it just, you know, I think it's just been pretty clear at this point, you know, now that all the investigations have been done that, like, they... they weren't true.
And you're talking about like Cambridge Analytica.
I think Cambridge Analytica is a good example of something that it's like, people thought that like all this data had been taken and that it had been used in this campaign. And it turns out it wasn't like it wasn't like in the, yeah. So it's like all the stuff. Okay. And like the data wasn't even, you know,
accessible to the to the developer and we'd fix the issue like five years ago so in the moment it was like really hard for us to to kind of have a rational discussion about that and i mean part of the challenge is that you know for the general population i think a lot of people they read the initial headlines and they don't necessarily read the um
And frankly, a lot of the media I don't think was as loud to write about when all the investigations concluded that said that a lot of the initial allegations were just completely wrong. So I think that's a real thing. So okay, so you take these hits. I didn't really know how to kind of push back on that.
And maybe some of it you can't, but I like to think that I think we could have played some of this stuff differently. And I do think it was certainly the case that when you take responsibility for things that are not your...
fault you become sort of a weak target for people who are looking to blame other things and find a target for them it's sort of like this is a different part of of it's it's somewhat related to this but when you think about like like litigation strategy for the company
One of the reasons why I hate settling lawsuits is that it basically sends a signal to people that, hey, this is a company that settles lawsuits, so maybe we can sue them and they'll settle lawsuits.
So you wouldn't write a blank check to the government like Google did for its antitrust case?
No, I think the right kind of...
way to approach this is when you believe in something you fight really hard for it and i think this is a repeat game this isn't like this it's not like there's a single issue and we're going to be around for a long time and i think it's it's really important that people know that we're a company that has conviction and that we we believe in what we're doing and we're going to back that up and defend ourselves and i think that that kind of sets the right tone now
I think over the next 10 years, I think we're sort of digging ourselves back to neutral on this. But I like to think that if we hadn't had a lot of these issues, we would have made progress over the last 10 years, too. So I sort of give it this timeframe. Maybe 20 years is too long. Maybe it's 15. But it's hard to know with politics.
It feels like mental health and youth mental health may be the next wave of this.
that i think is the next big fight and and on that you know i think a lot of the data on this i i think is just not where the narrative is the narrative yeah i think the narrative is a lot of people sort of take it as if it's like an assumed thing that there's some link and like i think the majority of the of the high quality research that's out there suggests that there's no causal connection like a kind of a broad scale between between these things so
no look i mean i think that that's different from saying like in any given issue like was is someone bullied should we try to stop bullying yeah of course but yeah overall i think that this is this is one where there are a bunch of these cases i think that there will be a lot of litigation around them and it's one where we're trying to make sure that the academic research that shows something that i think is you know it um
To me, it sort of foots more with what I've seen of how the platforms operate, but it's counter to what a lot of people think. And I think that that's going to be a reckoning that we'll have to have is basically when as the kind of the majority of the high quality academic research gets shown is like, okay, can people accept this?
And I think that's going to be a really important set of debates over the next
At the same time, you guys have acknowledged there's affordances in the product, like the teen rollout with Instagram recently that you can make to make the product a better experience for young people.
Yeah. And I think this is an interesting part of the balance is, um, you can play a role in trying to make something better even if the thing wasn't caused by you in the first place there's no doubt that being a parent is really hard and there's a big question of in this internet age where we have phones what are the right tools that parents need in order to be able to
raise their kids and like i think that we can play a role in giving people controls over parental controls over the apps i think the parental controls are also really important because parents have different ways that they want to raise their kids or just like schooling and education people have like very significantly different local preferences for how they want to raise their kids i don't think that most people want some internet company setting all the rules for this either so
Obviously, when there are laws passed, we'll kind of follow the government's direction and the laws on that. But I actually think the right approach for us is to primarily kind of align with parents to give them the tools that they want to be able to raise their kids in the way that they want. And some people are going to think that more technology use is good.
That's sort of how my parents raised me growing up. I think it worked pretty well. Some people are going to want to limit it more, and we want to give them the tools to be able to do that. But I don't think that this is primarily or only a social media thing. Even the parts of this that are technology... age verification. I think phones, like the phone platforms have a huge part of this.
I mean, it's, yeah, I mean, there's this big question of how do you do age verification? And I mean, I can tell you what the easiest way is, which is like, all right, like every time you go do a payment on your phone, I mean, there already is child, you know, basically like child age verification. So I don't really understand.
Well, I guess I understand, but I think it's, it's, it's not very, you know, excusable from my perspective, why Apple and, and, and I guess to some extent, Google don't want to just extend the age verification that they already have on their phones to be a parental control for parents to basically be able to say, you know, what apps can my kids use?
It's hard for me to not see the logic in it either. I don't really understand.
I think they don't want to take responsibility.
But maybe that's on Congress then to pass who has to take responsibility.
Yeah. Yeah. And we're going to do our part and we're going to build the tools that we can for parents and for teens. But at the end of the day, and look, I'm not saying it's all the phone's fault either. Although I would say that like the ability to get push notifications and get kind of distracted is, from my perspective, seems like a much greater contributor to mental health issues than parents.
than kind of a lot of the specific apps. But there are things that I think everyone should kind of try to improve and work on. But yeah, I mean, that's sort of my view on all that.
I guess on the regulation piece, as it relates to AI, you've been very vocal about what's happening in the EU. And you recently signed an open letter, and I believe it was saying basically that you guys just don't have clarity on consent for training, how it's supposed to work.
And I'm wondering what you think needs to happen there for things to move forward, because like MetAI is not available in Europe, new Lama models are not. Is that something you see getting resolved at all? I guess. And what would it take?
Yeah. I don't know. It's a little hard for me to parse the European politics. I have a hard time enough with American politics. I mean, I'm American. But in theory, my understanding of the way this is supposed to work is they kind of passed... GDPR regulation.
And you're supposed to have this idea of sort of a one-stop shop, like home regulator, who can basically, on behalf of the whole EU, interpret and enforce the rules. We have our European headquarters, and we work with that regulator. And I think they're like, okay, they're pretty tough on us and pretty firm.
But at least when you're working with one regulator, you can kind of understand how are they thinking about things and you can make progress. And the thing that I think has been tricky is there have been, from my perspective, a little bit of a backslide where now you get all these other DPAs across the continent sort of also intervening and trying to do things.
And it just seems like more of an kind of internal EU political thing, which is like, okay, do they want to have this one-stop shop and have clarity for companies so companies can kind of like can execute or, or do they just want it to be this kind of very complicated regulatory system?
And I look, I think that's for them to sort out, but I know there's no doubt that when you have like dozens of different regulators that can ask you kind of the same questions about different things, it makes it a much more difficult environment to build things. Do you, do you understand that's just us? I think that that's all the companies.
But do you understand the concern people have about training data and how it's used? And this idea that their data is being used for these models, they're not getting compensated, and the models are creating a lot of value. And I know you're giving away Lama, but you've got MetAI. I understand the frustration that people have about that.
I think it's a naturally bad feeling to be like, oh, my data is now being used in a new way that I have no control or compensation over. Do you sympathize with that?
Yeah. I mean, I think that in any new medium in technology, there's the concepts around fair use and where are the boundaries between what you have control over. When you put something out in the world, to what degree do you still get to control it and own it and license it? I think that all these things are basically going to need to get you know, relitigated and rediscussed in the AI era.
So, I mean, I get it. I think that these are important questions. I think this is not like a completely novel thing to AI in the grand scheme of things. I think it was, you know, a lot of them, there were questions about it with the internet overall too, and with different technologies over time. But I think getting to clarity on that is going to be important.
So that way, the things that society wants people to build, they can go build.
What does clarity look like to you there?
I mean, I think it starts with having some framework of like, okay, what's the process going to be for working through that?
But you don't see a scenario where creators get like directly compensated for the use of their content.
I think that there's a lot of different possibilities for how stuff goes in the future. Now, I do think that there's this issue, which is a lot of like, well, psychologically, I understand what you're saying. Yeah. I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content. So it's like, okay, maybe in the grand scheme of this.
So we have this set of challenges with news publishers around the world, which is like, okay, a lot of folks are constantly kind of asking, to be paid for the content. And on the other hand, we have our community, which is asking us to show less news because it makes them feel bad, right? And I mean, we talked about that.
So it's like, there's this issue, which is, okay, it's like, actually, we're showing some amount of the news that we're showing because we think it's socially important against what our community wants. Like if we were actually just following what our community wants, we'd show even less than we're showing. And you see that in the data that people just don't like to engage with this stuff.
And we've had these issues where sometimes we, Like publishers say, okay, if you're not going to pay us, then pull our content down. And it's just like, yeah, sure. Fine. Pull, pull your content down. I mean, that sucks. I'd rather people be able to share it. But to some degree, some of these questions have to get tested by their negotiations and they have to get tested by people walking. Yeah.
And then at the end, once people walk, you figure out where the value really is. If it really is the case that news was a big thing that the community wanted, then, I mean, look, we're a big company. We could probably, you know, we pay for content when it's valuable to people. We're just not going to pay for content when it's not valuable to people.
i think that you'll probably see a similar dynamic with ai which is my guess is that there are going to be certain partnerships that get made when content is really important and valuable and i'd guess that there's probably a lot of people who kind of have a concern about like the feel of it like you're saying but then when push comes to shove if they demanded that we take that we don't use their content then we just wouldn't use their content and it's not like you know that's going to change the outcome of the stuff that much
To bring this full circle where we started, as you're building augmented reality glasses and what you've learned over just the societal implications of the stuff you've built over the last decade, how are you thinking about this as it relates to glasses at scale? Because you're literally going to be augmenting reality, which is a responsibility.
I think that's going to be another platform too, and you're going to have a lot of these questions as well. I mean, I think the interesting thing about holograms and augmented reality is it's going to be this intermingling of the physical and digital much more than we've had in other platforms.
Where on your phone, it's like, okay, yeah, we live a primarily physical world, but then you have this small window into this digital world. And I think we're going to basically have this world in the future that is...
increasingly you know call it half physical half digital or i don't know 60 physical 40 digital and it's like going to be blended together and i think that there are going to be a lot of interesting governance questions around that right in terms of is kind of all of the digital stuff that's overlaid physically going to fit within sort of a physical kind of national
regulation perspective or is it sort of is it actually coming from a different world or something you know and i think these will all be very interesting questions that we will have a perspective i'm sure we're not going to be right about every single thing i think like the world will kind of need to sort out where it wants to be different countries will have different values and take somewhat different approaches on things and i think that that's it's part of the interesting process of this the tapestry of how it all gets built is like you need to work through so that it ends up being positive for
you know, as many of the possible stakeholders as possible.
More to come. Yeah.
A lot to come.
Thanks, Mark.
I'd like to thank Mark Zuckerberg for joining Decoder and thank Alex Heath for guest hosting. I'd also like to thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. You should subscribe to Alex's newsletter, Command Line, which comes out every week. It is absolutely jam-packed with industry insight, scoops, and smart analysis. It's a must-read.
If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads, a meta product. I'm at Reckless1280. We also have a TikTok for as long as TikTok lasts. It's at DecoderPod. It's a lot of fun.
If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Kelly Wright. This episode was additionally produced by Brett Putman and Viren Pavic. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.