Mark Zuckerberg on Threads, the future of AI, and Quest 3

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today. Alex Heath, our longtime decoder guest host and deputy editor here at The Verge, is here with an exclusive sit down with Mark Zuckerberg, where they discussed all of the news out of Meta's Meta Connect conference. Hey Alex, day. This is not the first time you've sat down with Mark. This is like an annual tradition now around Meta Connect. That's right. We get to talk about the state of all things Meta, kind of where his heads at. We really touched on a lot of

ground again this year. It was a really interesting conversation. It struck me just looking at the interview. Mark is really loose. He's got a lot to announce. He's excited about all of it. There's new products and new ideas. Was that your sense of it? Yeah, absolutely. Mark has had quite a shift, I would say, in the public perception of him over the last year, thanks to all of his cage fighting and billionaire CO feuds and just generally leaning into the product stuff at the

company. You can tell that that really fires him up. There's a lot of news out of Meta Connect. There's actually some hardware and then obviously you guys talked about threads. Tell us about the hardware first. Yeah, the company finally debuted its Quest 3 headset, which is the successor to the Quest 2. It's next pair of smart glasses with Rayban that have some extra AI sprinkled in.

We also talked about really what I think is probably the biggest news, which is that Meta is releasing its own chat GPT competitor and a bunch of other AI assistants across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. I think given Meta's pretty much unrivaled scale in terms of users, it's a big moment for the AI industry that will probably introduce a lot of people to these

kinds of agents for the first time. AI is very much the cutting edge of technology. Obviously Meta has a huge investment in the Metaverse, the Quest 3 is also sort of a cutting edge of technology there. But then you talked a lot about threads, which is a competitor to X, the company formerly known as Twitter, and decentralized social media. These are kind of new rifts on older ideas,

but he was really into it. Yeah, he really got in depth about threads and competing with Twitter and decentralized social media and where that's going, which he's never really talked about publicly. We also spent some time talking about AI regulation. He has some interesting thoughts there around open source. We got into that big Senate hearing that recently happened with Chuck Schumer and a bunch of other tech CEOs. What's struck me most about this entire conversation is

for the past years Mark has been a statesman, right? He's acted like a politician. He's determining whether posts on Facebook will stay up or come down. He's been yelled at by Congress. In this interview, he's really lit up when he's talking about two things, building new products and mixed martial arts. Yeah, it's really interesting to hear where his head is at these days. He's in a

very different spot than he was even just last year. We talked at the end about his personal reflection on leading such a big company being the last founder of his era that's still running one of these huge companies. Of course, I did have to ask him about the cage match and if he'll actually ever fight Elon. All right, well, we got to get to that right away. Here's Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta. Here we go.

Mark, I got to be honest. Not long ago, I was thinking we may be doing this as like a post-fight interview in Las Vegas right outside of the octagon after you get out of a fight with Elon. Maybe next year. Maybe next year. Not Elon, but I want to keep competing, but I just need to find someone to ask him. Do you think he was ever serious about fighting? I don't know, you'd have to ask him. But I don't know. This is like a thing that I just really enjoy doing it as a sport.

For me, there's a level of competition and it's a sport. I love doing it. I train with a bunch of a bunch of guys and I definitely want to compete more, but we'll see. Are there any other tech CEO rivals you would want to fight if you could? I think it'll be more fun to fight someone who actually fights seriously. Yeah. This is like their settling tech business rubberies by combat. I don't think that's going to become like a thing now. I don't think so. I think that's not generally the direction

that our society is heading. Probably for the best. Probably is for the best. I think a little bit of a channel to get some aggression out is good. I think the one that was pros with Elon could have been fun. I guess what I'm saying is if he told you, if he came back to you and said, I'll find on your terms, you pick the venue, would you still do that? I don't think it'll happen. It'll happen. Fair. I agree with you.

There's a valorization where people look at this stuff and are like, I could do that. But you have to train. It's very technical. It's very fun. Very intellectual. I used to, when I was a lot younger, I used to fence competitively. A lot of the striking aspects, obviously it's different because I've been fencing your plank for points. So when you get a touch, the point is the sequence is done. Here, you have to worry about being countered and all that.

But it's very intellectual. I really enjoyed thinking about all the different combos and moves and all that. There's a period where you're ramping up and learning all the basic stuff before you can really get to the intellectual part of it. But once you're there, it's super fun. I love doing it with friends. So your mind doesn't just shut off when you're doing it. You actually find it to be mentally stimulating. Interesting. Last year, I asked you if you had any advice for Elon

as he was about to take over Twitter. A lot has happened in a year. I'm not going to ask you for a given advice. But a lot has changed in a year. You've got threads now out. And I'd love to get into why you did threads when you did and the approach that you took. And when you made that decision, because it seemed like it happened pretty quickly. I think the aspiration of Twitter, right, to build this text-based discussion, should be a billion-person social app.

There are certain fundamental social experiences that look at them. And I'm just like, okay, if I were running that, I could scale that to reach a billion people. And that's one of the reason why over time we've done different acquisitions and why we've considered them. You tried to buy Twitter way back in the day, right? Like many, many years ago. Yeah. I mean, we had conversations. I think this was, gosh, this was like, I think when Jack

was leaving the first time. And look, I get it. I mean, different entrepreneurs have different goals for what they want to do. And some people want to run their companies independently. And that's cool. I mean, it's good that there's sort of a diversity of different outcomes. But I guess Twitter was sort of plotting along for a while before Elon came. And I think the rate of change in the product was pretty slow. So it just didn't seem like they were on the trajectory

that would maximize their potential. And then with Elon coming in, I think there was certainly an opportunity to change things up. And he has, right? He's definitely a change agent, right? And I think it's still not clear exactly what trajectory it's on. But I do think he's been pretty polarizing. So I think that the chance that it sort of reaches the full potential on the trajectory that it's on is, I guess I'm probably less optimistic or just think there's less of a chance now

than there was before. But I guess just watching all this play out just kind of reminded me and you know, rekindled the sense that like someone should build a version of this that can be more ubiquitous. A lot of the conversation around social media is around sort of like information and the utility aspect. But I think an equally important part of designing any product is how it makes you feel. Right? What's the kind of emotional charge of it? And how do you come away from

that feeling? I think Instagram is generally kind of on the happier end of the spectrum. I think Facebook is sort of in the middle because it has happier moments. But then it also has sort of harder news and things like that that I think tend to just be more critical and maybe make people see some of the negative things that are going on in the world. And I think Twitter indexes very strongly on just being quite negative and critical. Yeah. Yeah. I think that that sort of the design,

it's not that the designers wanted to make people feel bad. I think they wanted to have like maximum kind of intense debate, right? Which and I think that that sort of creates a certain emotional feeling and load. And I just thought you could create a discussion experience that wasn't quite so negative or toxic. And I think in doing so, it would actually be more accessible to a lot of people. I think a lot of people just don't want to use an app where they come away feeling bad

all the time. Right? I think that there's a certain set of people will either tolerate that because it's their job to get that access to information or they're just waiting to do that way. Yeah. They want to be a part of that kind of intellectual combat. Yeah. But I don't think that that's the ubiquitous thing. Right. I think the ubiquitous thing is like they want to get fresh information. I think there's a place for text-based, right? Even when the world is,

you know, moving towards richer and richer forms of sharing and consumption. I think that text isn't going away. It's still going to be a big thing. But I think how people feel is really important. So that's been a big part of how we've tried to emphasize and develop threads. And you know, over time, you know, if you want it to be ubiquitous, you obviously want to be welcome to everyone. But I think how you see the networks and the culture that you create there, I think

ends up being pretty important for how they scale over time. Or with Facebook, you know, we started with this real name culture and it was grounded to your college email address. And you know, now it obviously hasn't been grounded to your college email address for a very long time. But the kind of real authentic identity aspect to Facebook has continued and continued to be an important part of it.

So I think how we set the culture for threads early on in terms of being a more positive, friendly place for discussion will hopefully be one of the defining elements for, you know, the next decade as we scale it out. We obviously have a lot of work to do. But I'd say it's off to a quite a good start. I mean, it's obviously there's the huge spike and then, you know, not everyone

who who tried it out originally is going to stick around immediately. But I mean, the monthly actives and weeklies, I mean, I don't think we're sharing stats on it yet, but it's good. No, I mean, I feel quite good about about about that. Because there's been the reporting out there that engagement kind of, which I think is natural with any spike like that. engagement's not going to sustain you guys kind of set, I think the original industry standard on engagement for

these kind of products. So I assume you're guiding towards a similar kind of metric. Yeah. And we just have this playbook for how we do this. And there's like phase one is build a thing that kind of sparks some joy and that people appreciate. Then from there, you want to get to something that is attentive. So that way people who have a good experience with a thing come back and want to keep using it. And those two things are not to not always the same. A lot of there

are a lot of things that people think are awesome, but may not always come back to. I mean, I think you know, some of what people are seeing now around like chat GPT is part of that. It's like, I mean, this is like, like this level of AI is, it's like a miracle, right? It's awesome. But I mean, that doesn't mean that everyone is going to have a use case every week. So I think that there's first is I create the spark. Second is create the retention. Then once you have retention,

then you can start encouraging more people to join. But if people aren't going to be retained by it, why would you ask people to go sign up for something? So kind of step one spark, step two, retention, step three, growth and scaling the community. And then only at that point is step four, which is monetization. And we take a while to go through all those. I mean, we're really in some sense only getting started on the monetization of the messaging experiences like WhatsApp now

with stuff like business messaging. But two billion people use the product every day, right? So I mean, we like we scaled it pretty far. But I think with our model that that sort of works. I mean, I know you're saying you want to not necessarily you are competing with Twitter, but you're trying to do it differently. To me as a Twitter addict for way too long and a very early

threads user. And I've been seeing similar feedback from others when like Adam was serious, been asking for feedback on threads is that it kind of still lacks that real time feeling. When you first open it of like I'm going to be getting fresh, you know, because like what's what I go to Twitter for is news. And I know you guys aren't necessarily trying to emphasize news in this for experience, which is a whole another topic really. But like, how do you get that kind of Twitter

like this is what's going on right now feeling? I think it's a thing that will work on improving. But I mean, hard news content isn't the only fresh content. Sure. I think even within news, there's a whole spectrum between sort of hard critical news and like people understand what's going on with the sports that they follow or you know, the celebrities that they follow or things like that. And you know, a lot of those things don't kind of leave people with the same. It's not like

as cutting, right? It's as a lot of that kind of hard news. And especially the political discussion. I think it's just so. Now it's so polarized. Yeah. I think it's hard to come away from reading news about politics these days feeling good. Yeah. But that doesn't go for everything. And part of the overall is just how you tune the algorithm to basically encourage either recency or quality, but less recency. I'm not sure that we have that balance exactly right yet.

It may be the case that in a product like threads where people may want to see more recent content as opposed to something like an Instagram or Facebook where it's more visual and the balance might just be towards balancing towards maybe a little more quality even if it's 12 hours ago instead of two hours ago. I think that this is the type of stuff that we need to tune and kind of optimize. But I think I agree with that point. This hasn't happened yet with threads, but you're eventually

going to hook it into activity pub, which is this to centralize social media protocol. It's kind of complicated in layman's terms, but essentially people run their own servers. So instead of having a centralized company around the whole network, people can run their own fiefdoms. It's federated. Yeah. So threads will eventually hook into this. Yeah. This is the first time you've done anything I think really meaningful in the decentralized social media space. Yeah, and we're building it from

the ground up. Yeah. I mean, I've always believed in this stuff. I mean, a lot of this hasn't. Yeah, I mean, you run the largest centralized social media, but I mean, it didn't exist when we got started. Right. And I think the project of like, I mean, I've had our team at various times do the thought experiment of like, all right, what would it take to move all of Facebook onto some kind of decentralized

protocols? It's like, that's just not going to happen. There's so much functionality that that is on Facebook that like, it's just it's way too kind of complicated and technical support all the different things. Yeah. And it would just take so long and you'd not be innovating during that time. And I think that there's value in being on one of these protocols, but it's not the only way to deliver value. So the opportunity cost of doing this massive transition is kind of this massive thing.

But when you're starting from scratch, you can just design it so it can work with that. And we want to do that with this because I thought that that was one of the interesting things that's evolving around this kind of the Twitter competitive space is a lot of the others. There is a real ecosystem around that. And I think it's interesting. So what does that mean for a company like yours long term if people gravitate more towards these decentralized protocols over time? Where does a

big centralized player fit into that picture? Well, I guess my view is that the more that there's interoperability between different services and the more content can flow, the better all the services can be. And I guess I'm just confident enough that we can build the best one of the services that I actually think that will benefit and will be able to build better quality products by our products making sure that we can have access to all of the different content

from wherever anyone is creating it. And like I get that not everyone is going to want to use everything that we build. I mean, that's obviously the case. I mean, it's like, okay, we have three billion people using Facebook, but like, you know, not everyone wants to use one product. And I think making it so they can use an alternative but can still interact with people on the network

will make it so that that product also is more valuable. That can be pretty powerful. And you can increase the quality of the product by making it's that you can give people access to all the content, even if it wasn't created on that network itself. So I don't know, I mean, it's a bet. Yeah. There's kind of this funny counterintuitive thing where I just don't think that people like feeling locked into a system. Yeah. So in a way, I actually think people will feel better about

using our products if they know that they have the choice to leave. And if we make that super easy to happen and obviously there's a lot of competition and we do download your data on all our products and like it's, you know, people can do that today. But it's, you know, the more that that's designed in from scratch, I think it really just gives, you know, creators, for example, the sense

that, okay, like I'm not, yeah, it's I have a agency. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in a way, that actually makes people feel more confident investing in a system if they know that they have freedom over how they operate. So I don't know, maybe for phase one of social networking, it was fine to like have these systems that people felt a little more locked into. But I think for the mature state of the ecosystem, I don't think that that's going to be where it goes. So I don't I'm pretty optimistic

about this. And then if we can build threads on this, then, you know, maybe we can know over time, you know, as the standards get more built out, it's possible that we can spread that to more of the stuff that we're doing. We're certainly working on interop with messaging. Yeah. And I think that that's been an important thing. The first step was kind of getting interop to work between

our different messaging systems. Right. So I can talk to each other. Yeah. And then the first the first decision there was, okay, well, WhatsApp, you know, we have this very strong commitment to encryption. So if we're going to interrupt, then we're either going to make the others encrypted or we're going to have to decrypt WhatsApp. And it's like, all right, well, we're not going to decrypt WhatsApp. So we're going to go down the path and encrypting everything else. So we're

making good progress on. But that basically has just meant completely rewriting messenger and instant direct from scratch. So you're basically going from a model where all the messages are stored in the cloud. It's like you're completely inverting the architecture where all the messages are stored locally and just the way that they're while the planes in the air. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, that's been sort of this like heroic effort by just like a hundred or more people over like a

multi year period. And we're basically getting to the point where it's starting to roll out now. But you know, now that we're at the point where we can do encryption across those apps, we can also start to support more in drop, which I think is going to be the other services like meta that meta doesn't own other messaging. Yeah. Well, I mean, the plan was always to start with with the the drop that between our services, but then and then to get to that. But yeah, we're starting to

experiment with that too. We need to take a quick break. When we're back, Mark and I dive into the state of AI regulation, the open source debate and meta's new hardware. Decoder is supported by choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Choiceology is a show all about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into questions like, can we learn to make smarter decisions or what

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Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com slash decoder. We're back. I promised to stop bringing up Elon, but you and he were together with Senator Chuck Schumer at the White House recently for this big AI summit. A lot of it was closed. Along with a lot of other people. Along with a lot of other people, you guys were sitting at opposite sides of the table. I thought that was an interesting choice. What was your takeaway from that? And

kind of where the government is in the US on regulating AI? What do you think is going to happen? I didn't really know what to expect going into that conversation, but it was quite substantive. We covered a lot more ground than I expected. The thing that was interesting, I mean,

your question you asked about what does it say about where the government is. But aside from Senator Schumer who basically moderated the discussion, it was really an opportunity for I guess for them to hear from the people in the tech industry, but also folks in civil society. I mean, you had people running unions, you had people from Hollywood and representing all the kind of creative industry and intellectual property. You had researchers, people focused on AI

safety. And one of the things that I actually thought was the most interesting was the senators didn't really speak that much. But I think there's sort of the meme that it's like, okay, a lot of these politicians, they'll go to a place where they'll get attention for themselves. But this was a three hour event. And I think there were like 40 senators exiting and listening and taking notes and not really participating in the discussion,

but just there I think to learn. And I thought that was super interesting. Yeah. Right. In a way that I think sort of reflects pretty well on our system and the intellectual curiosity of the people who are ultimately going to be making those kind of legislative decisions. So that was fascinating to see. Yeah. But no, I mean, I didn't come away, you know, apart from, you know, seeing their heads nod when certain people made certain points, you know, it wasn't a time

for us to really get their sense on where they are. I think it was more just they were hearing the discussion of the issues. Have you seen some of the, I don't think it's necessarily focused at you specifically, but the criticism that the tech industry is performing regulatory capture right now with AI and is essentially trying to, you know, take the drawbridge up with them. Here, are you worried about that at all? I have seen that concern. And I'm somewhat worried about it

myself. I mean, look, I think that there are real concerns here. So I think that, like, I think a lot of these folks are truly earnest in their concerns. And I think that there is valuable stuff for the government to do both in terms of protecting American citizens from harm and preserving, I think what is a natural competitive advantage for the United States compared to other countries.

I think what this is just going to be a huge sector. And it's going to be important for everything, not just in terms of the economy, but there's probably defense components and things like that. I think the US having a lead on that is important to, I think, you know, having the government think through, okay, well, how do we want to leverage the fact that we have the leading work in the world happening here? And how do we want to kind of control that and, you know,

to what restrictions we want to put on that getting to other places? I think that that makes sense. So there are a bunch of concerns there that I think are real. You know, one of the topics that I've spent a lot of time thinking about is open source. Yeah. Right. Because, you know, we do a lot of open source work at Metta, you know, obviously not everything we do is open source. There's a lot of closed systems too. I'm not like a zealot on this, right? But I think I'm probably,

I mean, probably a little more pro open source than most of the other big companies. We believe that it's generally positive to open source a lot of our infrastructure for a few reasons. One is, like, we don't have a cloud business, right? So it's, you know, so it's not like we're selling access to the infrastructure. So giving it away is fine. And then when we do give it away, we generally benefit from innovation from the ecosystem. And when other people adopt the stuff,

it increases volume and drives down prices. So if you like a stuff like, for example, well, when I was talking about driving down prices, I was thinking about stuff like open compute, where we open source to our server designs. And now the factories that are making those kind of servers can generate way more of them because other companies like Amazon and others are designing the, like ordering the same designs that drives down the price for everyone, which is good.

PyTorch is great because it basically makes it's that it's like the standard across the industry as people develop with this, which means that more libraries and modules are created for it, which just makes it better. And it makes it better for us to develop internally too. So and then all that stuff is true and works well for open source. And also, I think it's pretty well established that open source software, you know, it's generally more secure and safer

because it's just more scrutinized, right? People, when more people can see stuff, every, every piece of software has bugs and issues, but the more people who can look at it, you know, the more you're going to basically identify what those issues are and have eyes on fixing them. And then also because there's sort of a standard that's deployed across the industry, those fixes get rolled out everywhere, which is a big advantage for safety and security.

And when I think about AI safety, I think one of the big issues, if there's like a single super intelligence and it's closed and someone figures out how to exploit it, then like, you know, everyone kind of gets screwed at the same time, whereas, you know, in open source system, it's like, okay, people find issues and just like your your Mac or whatever gets patched, right? It's like people find the issues and then it just gets rolled out across the industry.

So, so I think that that's generally positive. But there's obviously this whole debate where when you open source stuff, I mean, we can build in safeguards, but you know, if you open source something, you're not fundamentally going to be able to prevent bad guys from taking that and running with it too. So that there is sort of this debate around, okay, well, what's the balance? So, you know, how capable do you want the models that are that are open source? I think that there

is a real debate there. I do sometimes get the sense that some of the folks whose business model is to is to basically sell access to the closed models that they're developing. I do think that they have to be careful because they are also talking their book when they're talking about dangers of open source. I think that there are dynamics like that that happen that I hear either, um, you know, overtly or sometimes behind closed doors, something will get back to me. That's

like, oh, like this company was talking about why they're kind of against open source. And it's like, yeah, well, their whole business depends on selling access to proprietary models. So I think you got to be careful about that. So I do think the regulatory capture thing, I think you need to be careful about first things like that because I do think one of the big benefits of open source is, it also just decreases the cost of adoption for small companies and a lot of other folks. So I

do think that that's going to be a big thing. Which I think Lama in the Lama 2 release has been a big thing for startups because it is so free or just easy to use access. And I guess I'm wondering did you ever was there ever, you know, debate internally about should we take the closed route? You've spent so, yeah, I mean, you spend so much money on all this AI research. You have one of the best probably AI labs in the world, I think it's safe to say like you have huge distribution.

Why not keep it all to yourself? You could have done that. Yeah, you know, the biggest arguments in favor of keeping it closed were generally not proprietary advantage or competitive advantage. Yeah, no, it wasn't competitive advantage. The two in there was a fairly intense debate around this. And you have to be dissuade. Did you are like, did you know we have to have it open? My bias was that I thought it should be open. But I thought that there were novel arguments on

the risks. And I wanted to make sure we heard them all out. And we did a very rigorous process. And my guess is that you know, we're training the next version of Lama now. And I think we'll probably have the same set of debates around that and how we should release it. And again, I sort of like lean towards wanting to do it open source. But I think we need to, you know, do all the red teaming

and understand the risks. And then, you know, before making a call. But the two big arguments that that people had against making Lama 2 open were one is just that it takes a lot of time to prepare something to be open. So I mean, our main business is basically building consumer products. Sorry. And that's where we're launching a connect. Lama 2 is not a consumer product. It's sort of the engine or infrastructure that powers a bunch of that stuff. But there was this sort of this

argument, especially after we sort of did this partial release of Lama 1. And there was like a lot of stir around that. And then people had a bunch of feedback. And we're wondering when we were incorporate that feedback. And she kind of like, OK, well, if we released Lama 2, is that going to distract us from our real job, which is building the best consumer products that we can. So I mean, that was one debate. I think we sort of got comfortable with that relatively quickly. And then the much

bigger debate was around the risk and safety. I think it's sort of like, what is the framework for how you measure kind of what harm can be done and how do you compare that to other things? For example, someone made this point recently. And this was actually at the at the Senate event. I mean, someone made this point that's like, OK, well, we took Lama 2. And our engineers in just several days were able to take away the safeguards and ask it a question to can you produce anthrax

and it answered on its face. That sounds that sounds really bad, right? That's obviously an issue that you can strip off the safeguards. Until you think about the fact that you can actually just Google how to make anthrax and it shows up on the first page of the results in five seconds. So I do think that there's like a question when you're thinking through these things about what is the actual incremental risk that is created by having these different technologies.

I think a lot of this stuff, we've seen this in like protecting social media as well. If you have like Russia or some country trying to create a network of bots or inauthentic behavior, it's not that you're ever going to stop them from doing it. It's sort of an economics problem. You want to make it expensive enough for them to do that. That it is no longer their best strategy because it's cheaper for them to go try to exploit someone else or something else, right?

And I think the same is true here, right? So for the risk on this, you want to make it so that it's sufficiently expensive that it takes engineers several days to dismantle whatever safeguards we built in instead of just googling it. So you feel generally good, directly with the safety work for Lama 2. I think that we did leading work on that. I think the white paper around Lama 2 where we basically outlined all the different metrics and

all the different things that we did. And we did internal red teaming and external red teaming and we got a bunch of feedback on it. So because we went into this knowing that nothing is going to be foolproof, right? So we're going to, there are some bad actors is going to be able to find somewhere to exploit it. We really knew that we needed to create a pretty high bar on that. So yeah, I felt good about that for Lama 2, but it was a very rigorous process.

And you guys have now announced the meta AI agent, which is your proprietary. I'm sure it's using Lama technology, but it's not, it's a closed model. You're not really disclosing a lot about the model and its weights and all that. But this is the new agent that people are going to be seeing in the apps. Yeah, so I mean, it connect we announced a bunch of different things on this.

So meta AI and the other AI is that we released or based on, they're based on Lama 2, right? So it's not exactly the same thing that we open sourced because we used that as the foundation and then we kind of built on top of that to build the consumer products. But yeah, there were a few different things that we announced. I mean, meta AI, I feel like that part, the AI to me feels

like the biggest deal in the near term because a lot of people are going to be seeing it. It may be the first time, even with all the coverage of like GPT, it may be the first time that a lot of people experience a chat about like this, actually. Yeah, I mean, I'm really curious. Which is different. Yeah, I'm very curious to see how the stuff goes. I used it for a little bit and it has web, you know, it can pull in web results. So it's got a recency, which is nice. It wouldn't give me advice

on how to break up with my girlfriend. But it wouldn't. I don't have a girlfriend. I was just trying to see like, well, I'm married, but I was just trying to see like, well, I was trying to see what it won't and will answer. It seems relatively safe. It was like the type of thing that it

should be fine. I'll just tell you. But what do you imagine people using this for? Because it's got that search engine component, but it can do a lot of things is, I mean, is this a pure GPT, chat GPT competitor in almost every way in your mind or how do you think about it? I think that there's a bunch of different spaces here. So that I think people are going to want

to interact with AI's around. Take a step back. I think that the vision for a bunch of folks in the industry, when I look at like open AI or Google, is the sense that there's going to be like one big super intelligence and they want to be it. I just don't think that that's the best future. I think the way that people tend to process the world is like, we don't have one person that we go to for everything. We don't have one app that we go to for everything. I don't think that we want one AI.

It's overwhelming. I find this with the current chatbots. I'm like, I feel like it can do so much that I'm not actually sure what to ask it. So I mean, our view is that they're actually going to be a lot of these. Right? That people talk to you for different things. And you know, one thought experiment that I did to sort of prove to myself that this would be the case is like, all right, let's say you're a small business and you want to have an AI that can help you interface with

customers to you sales and support. You want to be pretty confident that your AI isn't going to be promoting your competitors products. Right? So you want it to be yours. You want it to be aligned with you. So you're going to want a separate agent than your competitors agent. So you know, then you get to this point where, okay, well, they're going to be 100 million AI is just helping businesses sell things. Then you get the creator version of that or like every creator, I think,

is going to want an AI assistant or something that can help them build their community. And you know, people are going to really want to interact with. It's like, there's just way more demand to interact with creators and there's only one highly generic. Yeah. You can. So it's this. I mean,

there's a, I think a huge need here. People want to interact with Kylie. Kylie wants to cultivate her community, but there are only so many hours in a day, you know, creating an AI that's sort of an assistant for her, where it'll be clear to people that they're not interacting with, with like the physical Kylie Jenner. It would be kind of an AI version that'll help the creators. And I think it'll be fun for consumers. That one's actually really hard because I think getting the creator

one to work. We're not actually launching that now. That's I think more of a next year thing because there's so many, you can call it like brand safety type concerns where you, like if you're a creator, you really want to make sure, you know, these AIs like reflect the personality of the creator and don't talk about things that the creators don't want to get into or, you know, don't say things that are going to be problematic for the creator and their endorsement

feels. I have things in all of this. They should be able to like say, I don't want to say. Yeah, but like I think in some ways, the technology doesn't even exist yet to make it that train. I mean, this isn't code in the deterministic sense. It's like a model that you need to be able to train it to stay right in certain bounds and I think a lot of that is still getting developed. So that's more next year. Yeah. So, anyhow, so there's businesses, there's creators. That stuff is fun,

where the business stuff is I think more useful. And then I think that there's a bunch of stuff that's just interesting kind of consumer use cases. So there's more of like the utility, which is what meta AI is, like answer any question. You'll be able to use it to help navigate your Quest 3 and the new Rayband glasses that we're shipping, which I wish I get to that in a second. So that will be pretty wild is having that having meta AI that you can just talk to all day long on your

glasses. So yeah, I think that'll be pretty powerful. But then there are also going to be all these other new characters that are getting created, which is somewhat of an easier question to start with than having AI's that are kind of acting as a real person because there aren't as many kind of brand safety concerns around that. But they could still be pretty fun. So we're experimenting with a bunch of different AI's for different interests that people have, whether it's

you know, interest in different kinds of sports or fashion or. But when I tried it was a travel agent type of travel. Yeah, there's some that are more around giving people advice. There's like, you know, life coach and like an aunt. And then there's some that are more gaming, right? So there's like like Snoop Dogg is playing the dungeon master. And there's like a few that are just these text-based adventure games and the ability to just drop that into a thread and you know, play a

text-based game. I think it's going to be super fun. So I think like part of this is we want to create a diversity of different experiences to see what resonates and what we want to go deeper on. This is sort of the first step towards building this AI studio that we're working on that will make it set anyone can build their own AI's sort of just like you create your own UGC, your own content across across social networks. You should be able to create your own AI and publish it.

And I think that's going to be I think it's going to be really wild. I do agree. It's going to be wild. There's a bit of an easyness to it for me of just the idea that we as a society are going to be increasingly having relationships with AI's. I mean, there's stories about like character AI which has a similar kind of library of personas you can interact with and people literally like falling in love with some of these chatbots. I mean, what do you think about that

phenomenon? Is it just inevitable with where the tech is going? That's not where we're starting. So I think that there's a lot of use cases that are just a lot more clear than that in terms of someone who can help you make workouts. Someone who can help you with cooking. More utility. Or you can help you figure out travel or even like the game type stuff. I think that a bunch of these things can help you in your interactions with people. I think that that's more our natural

space. One of the things that we can do that's harder for others to do is the ability to make it so you can drop these into group chats. It's starting with meta AI. You can just invoke it in any thread. Like I can be having a one-on-one thread with you and I can just ask meta AI something. I can do that in a group chat thread. I think that's going to be really fun. It's just having these these kind of fun personalities in these threads. I think we'll create sort of an interesting

dynamic. I think especially when I image generation. We haven't talked about that as much. I use that. It was pretty impressive. It was fast. I think the team has made awesome progress. We're at good photo realistic quality. For people who haven't used it yet, you just type into the bot. What you want the image to be in. It'll just make it. Yeah. The fact that it's fast and free, I think it's going to be pretty

game-changing. There are photo realistic image generators out there, but a lot of them they take a minute. They're harder to use. Yeah. You have to pay a subscription fee. I think having it be free, fast, able to exist in group chat threads, people are just going to create a ton of images for fun. I don't know. I'm really curious to see how this gets used, but I think it's going to be super fun. I already just sit there with my kids and the word that you say to get it to make an

image is imagine. My daughter is just like, I just want to play imagine and just imagine this. It's like we get an image and it's like, oh, well, I actually want to change it. Imagine this and edit the prompt, but because it's just a five second turnaround, you could do that so easily and you could do it over the internet with group chat. I'm doing that sitting there with

my daughter, but I think that that's going to be really fun. I think that there are all these things where you can use these tools to facilitate connections and just create entertainment, which I think is actually probably more what the technology is capable of today than even some of the more utility use cases because there is the factuality issue with the hallucinations and all that. We're trying to address that by doing partnerships with

search engines that you mentioned. You can type in a question and ask real time, like who on this fight this weekend and it'll be able to go do a search and bring that in. But there's still, I think hallucination hasn't been solved completely in any of these.

So I think to some degree, the thing that these language models have really been best at is, I mean, it's kind of with the name generative, I suggest being generative, suggesting ideas coming up with things that could be interesting or funny are much better than, like, I wouldn't necessarily yet want it to be like my doctor and ask it for a diagnosis

and have to rely that it's not hallucinating. So I think having it fit into a consumer product where the primary goals are, you know, suggesting interesting content and entertainment is actually maybe a more natural fit for what the technology is capable of today than some of the initial use cases that people thought about it was like, oh, it's going to be it's kind of like all intelligent assistant or it's going to be my new search engine or something.

I mean, it's fine for those a bunch of the time and I think it will be, it'll get there right over the next few years. But I think the consumer thing is actually quite a good fit today.

It seems like a key differentiator for meta in the whole model race is you have probably second to maybe Google the most user data to train on and I know a lot of it's private and you wouldn't train on like ever train on like private chats or what's absolutely we don't we don't we don't what's absent crept and crept it to but like public stuff reels public Facebook posts. That seems pretty natural for this. Is that is that in feeding meta AI right now?

Yeah, I mean, like you said, we don't train on on kind of private chats that people have with their friends or things like that. But you're but you're sitting on this just massive, you know, port of data. Yeah, I think a lot of the stuff that we've done today is just is actually still pretty basic. There's a lot of upside and I think we need to experiment to see what ends

have been useful. But I mean, one of the things that I think is interesting is these AI problems, they're kind of so tightly optimized that having the AI basically like live in the environment that you're trying to get it to get better at is is pretty important. So like so for example, you know, you have things like chat GPT. They're just in like a kind of abstract chat interface.

But getting an AI to actually live in a group chat, for example, is actually a completely different problem because now you have this question, which is okay, when should the when should the AI

jump in? Right. Right. So it actually like in order to get an AI to be good at being in a group chat, you need to have experience with ais and group chats, which even though like, I don't know, Google or open AI or other folks may have a lot of experience with other things, that kind of like product dynamic of having the actual experience that you're trying to deliver the product in a thing that that's super important. Similarly, one of the things that I'm pretty excited about,

I think multimodality is pretty important interaction. Right. I think a lot of these things today are like, okay, you're an assistant, I can chat with you in a box, you don't change, right. It's like you're the same assistant every day. I think that that's not really how people tend to interact in order to make things fresh and entertaining. Even the apps that we use, they change, right. They get refreshed. They add new features. I kind of think that people will

probably want the ais that they interact with. I think it'll be more exciting and interesting if they do too. So part of what I'm interested in is this isn't just chat, right. Chat I think will be where most of the interaction happens, but these ais are going to have profiles on Instagram and Facebook and they'll be able to post content and they'll be able to interact with people and interact with each other. Right. I think that's, there's this whole like interesting set of

flywheels around how that interaction can happen, how they can sort of evolve over time. I think that that's going to be very compelling and interesting. Obviously, we're kind of starting slowly on that, but I think that having them sort of exist in that environment. So we wanted to build it so that it kind of worked across the whole meta universe of products, including having them be able to, in the near future, be embodied as avatars in the metaverse. So as you go into VR,

and you have an avatar version of the AI and you can talk to them there. I think that's going to be really compelling. Right. It's at a minimum creating much better NPCs and experiences when there isn't like another actual person who you want to play a game with. You can just have ais that are

much more realistic and kind of compelling to interact with. But I think having this crossover where you have an assistant or you have someone who tells you jokes and kind of cracks you up and entertains you and then they can show up in some of your metaverse worlds and be able to be there as an avatar, but you can still interact with them in the same way. I think this is pretty cool.

We need to take another short break. When we return, Mark and I discuss meta's ambitions for the metaverse and how he sees AR, VR and AI all coming together. Support for the show comes from NPR. What are labor strikes, climate chains, and your crappy office printer all having common? Simple. They all have issues with money. Money is everywhere, fueling all our lives, altering our environment and driving behavior all around the world.

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Find out more at Wix.com slash studio. We're back. So you think the advent of these AI personas that are way more intelligent will accelerate interest in the metaverse and VR? Well, I think that all this stuff makes it more compelling. I think it's probably an even bigger deal for smart glasses than for VR. You need something. You need a kind of visual or a voice control for something. I thought, you know, when I was thinking about what would be the key features for smart glasses,

I kind of thought that we were going to get holograms in the world. And that was one. So that's kind of like augmented reality. But then there was always some sort of vague notion that you'd have like an assistant that could do something. I thought that things like Siri or Alexa were very limited. So I was just kind of like, okay, well, like over the time period of

building AR glasses, like hopefully the AI will advance. And now it definitely has. So now I think we're at this point where it may actually be the case that for smart glasses, the AI is compelling before the holograms and the displays are, which is sort of where we got to with the new version of the Ray Bands that we're shipping this year. When we started working on the product, all this generative AI stuff hadn't happened yet. So we actually started working on the

product just as an improvement over the first generation. Right? So that the photos are better, the audio is a lot better, like the form factors better. It's just sort of like a much more refined version of the initial product. And there's some new features like you can live stream now, which is pretty cool, right? Because you can live stream what you're looking at. But it was only over the course of developing the product that we realized that, hey, we could actually put this whole

generative AI assistant into it. And you could have these glasses that are kind of stylish Rayban glasses. And you could be talking to AI all throughout the day about different questions you have. This isn't in the first software release, but sometime early next year, we're also going to have this multi modality. So you're going to be able to ask the AI, hey, what is it that I'm looking at? Like what is it? What type of plant is that? Like where am I?

How expensive is this thing? Yeah, I mean, it's because it has a camera built into the glasses. So you can just look at something and like, all right, and you're filming with some Canon camera. It's like, where do I get one of those? Again, this is all like really novel stuff. So I'm not pretending to know exactly what the key use cases or how people are going to use that. But some more classes are very powerful for AI because unlike having it on your phone, glasses as a form factor

can see what you see and hear what you hear from your perspective. So if you want to build an AI assistant that really has access to all of the inputs that you have as a person, glasses are probably the way that you want to build that. And it's sort of this whole new angle on, on smart

glasses that I thought might materialize over a five to ten year period. But in this odd twist of the tech industry, I think actually is going to show up maybe before even super high quality holograms do is overall interest in the Ray bands and the quest line kind of tracking with where you thought it would be at this point. Let's take each of those separate. So yeah, they're separate products. Quest one was the first kind of standalone product and it did well,

but all the content had to be developed for it. So it was really when we developed Quest 2, which was the next generation of it that already had all the content built and it was sort of the the kind of refinement on it. That one blew up. So Quest 2 was like a huge hit, tens of millions, right? It's and it just that did very well and was sort of like the kind of defining VR device so far. Though we ship Quest Pro, which was making the leap to mixed reality, but it was $1,500.

And what we've seen so far is that at least consumers are very cost conscious. So we expected to sell way fewer Quest pros than Quest 2's and that bear it out. It's always hard to predict exactly what it will be when you're shipping a product at $1,500 for the first time. But like I'd say it was

kind of fine. Within expectations, it wasn't like a grand slam, but it was it did fine. And now Quest 3 is sort of the refinement on mixed reality kind of like Quest 1 was, but with Quest 3, we're sort of at the point where we've gotten mixed reality, which is even higher quality than what was in Quest Pro, but it's a third of the price, right? So it's $500. So I'm really excited to see how that one will go.

It seems like you all based on my demos still kind of primarily think of it as a gaming device. Is that fair? That the main use cases for Quest 3 are going to be. And these kind of gaming meets social. So you've got Roblox now. I think social is actually the first thing, which is interesting. I mean, because Quest used to be primarily gaming. And now if you look at what experiences are people spending the most time in, it's actually just different social metaverse type experiences. So

you know, things like Recroom, VRChat, Horizon, Roblox. But even with Roblox, just kind of starting to grow on the platform, social is already more time spent than gaming use cases. So it's different if you look at the economics because people pay more for games, whereas social kind of has that whole adoption curve thing that I talked about before, where first you have to kind of build out the big community and then you can enable commerce and kind of monetize it over time. But this is

sort of my whole theory for VR was people looked at it initially as a gaming device. And I thought, hey, I think this is a new computing platform overall. Computing platforms tend to be good for three major things. Gaming, social and communication and productivity. And I'm pretty sure we can nail the social one if we can find the right partners on productivity. And if we can support the gaming ecosystem, then I think that we can help this become a big thing. So I'd say

broadly that's sort of on track. I thought it was going to be a long-term project. But I think the fact that social has now overtaken gaming is the thing that people are spending the most time on is an interesting software evolution and how they're used. But yeah, like you're saying, I mean, entertainment, social, gaming, still the primary things, productivity, I think, still needs some time to develop. I tried the Quest 3. It's definitely a meaningful step change

in terms of graphics and performance and all the things you guys have put into it. It feels still like we're a little ways away from this medium becoming truly mainstream, becoming something that nearly as mainstream. Well, I know you're already at kind of console level sales. So you could say that's mainstream. But I guess in terms of like what you could think of as a general purpose computing platform. So even like PC or something like that, seems. Well, in what sense?

I think there's a few parts of this. I think for productivity, you probably want somewhat higher resolution screens. And that I think will come. And I think we're waiting for the cost curve to basically like we could have super high resolution screens today, just that the device would be thousands and thousands of dollars, right? Which is basically the tradeoff that Apple made with their with their vision pro. Have you tried it yet? No, I haven't now. Yeah, but

it's your right. It's they guided towards that one's back. You can tell. Yeah, you just have to imagine that over the next five plus years, like there will be displays that are that good, and they'll come down in cost. And we're just sort of riding that curve. So for today, when you're building one of these products, you basically have the choice of, if you have it at that expensive, then you will sell hundreds of thousands of units or something. But we're trying to build something

where we build up the community of people using it. So we're trying to thread the needle and have the best possible display that we can while having a cost $500, you know, not not $3,500. Yeah, I reported on some comments you made to employees after Apple debuted the vision pro. And you didn't seem super phased by it. Like it seemed like it didn't bother you as much as it maybe could have. I have to imagine if they released a $700 headset. We'd be having a different

conversation. But I mean, they're shipping low volume and probably three to four years out of a general, like a lower tier type released. It's at any meaningful scale. So I guess, I mean, is it because the market's yours foreseeably then for Apple is obviously very good at this. So

I don't want to be dismissive. But, you know, because we're relatively newer to building this, the thing that I wasn't sure about is when Apple released a device where they just going to have made some completely new insight or breakthrough that just made our effort. Blear R&D apps. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like, oh, like, well, now we need to go start over something. Yeah. And to me, that was the thing that, yeah, I thought we were doing pretty good

work. So I thought that was unlikely, but you don't know for sure until they show up with their thing. And there was just nothing like that. Right. So I think that there are some things that they did that are clever. I think we'll, we know when we actually get to use it more, I'm sure that there are going to be other things that will learn that are interesting. But mostly they just chose a different part of the market to go in. And I think it makes sense for them. I mean,

I think that they sell, it must be 15 to 20 million MacBooks a year. And from their perspective, if they can replace those MacBooks over time with things like Vision Pro, then that's like a pretty good business for them. Right. And it'll be many billions of dollars of revenue. And, you know, they're pretty happy selling 20 million or 15 million MacBooks a year. It's good. But we play a different game, right? It's, I mean, we're not trying to sell devices at a big premium

and make a ton of money on the devices. You know, going back to the curve that we're talking about before, we want to build something that's great. Get it to be so that people use it and want, want to use it like every week and every day. And then over time, scale it to hundreds of millions or billions of people. And I think if you want to do that, then you have to innovate not just on the quality of the device, but also in making it affordable and accessible to people. So I do

just think we're playing somewhat different games. And that I think makes it that over time, you know, they'll, I'm sure, build a high quality device in the zone that they're focusing on. And it may just be that these are in fairly different spaces for a long time. But I'm not sure. I think what we'll see as it goes from the developer perspective. Does it help you to have developers building on, do you see a, I guess, because I, you could lean too much, I guess, into the Android versus iOS

analogy here. But yeah, I guess where do you see that going where is meta, does meta really lean into and the Android approach and you start licensing your software and technology to other? Yeah, I would like to have this be a more open ecosystem over time. My theory on how these computing platforms evolve is there will be a closed integrated stack and a more open stack. And there have been in every generation of computing so far. The thing that's actually not clear

is which one will end up being the more successful, right? It's, I think we're looking, we're kind of coming off of the mobile one now where Apple has truly been the dominant company. Even though there are technically more Android phones, there's way more economic activity in the center of gravity for all the stuff is clearly on iPhones. And a lot of the most important countries for defining this, I think iPhone has a majority in growing share. And I think it's clearly just

the dominant company in the space. But that wasn't true in computers and PCs. So our approach here is to focus on making it as affordable as possible. We want to be the open ecosystem and we want the open ecosystem to win. So I think it is possible that this will be more like PC is than like mobile where you know, it's like where maybe Apple goes for this for kind of a high-end segment. And maybe we end up being the kind of the primary ecosystem and the one that

ends up serving billions of people. That's the outcome that we're sort of playing for. On the progress that you're making with AR glasses, it's my understanding that you're going to have your first kind of internal at least dev kit next year. You may, I don't know if you're going to show it off publicly or not if that's been decided. But is that progressing at the rate that you have hoped as well? It seems like Apple's dealt with this. Everyone's been dealing with kind of the

the technical problems with this. I don't think we have anything to announce on that today. You've said AR glasses are a kind of end of this decade thing and I guess what I'm trying to get at is to be it to be at more of a mainstream consumer product, not like a V1. I don't have anything new to announce today on this. And we have a bunch of versions of this that we're building internally.

You know, we're kind of coming at it from two angles at once. We're starting with Rayban, which is like, alright, if you take stylish glasses today, what's the most technology that you can cram into that and make it a good product? And then we're coming at it from the other side, which is like, alright, we want to create what is already ideal product with full holograms. You walk into a room. There's as many holograms there as there are physical objects that you can

interact with. People as holograms, AI's, holograms, all this stuff. And then how do we get that to basically fit into glasses like form factor at, dude, it has affordable of a price as we can get to? I'd say the Rayban one, I'm really curious to see how the second generation of the Raybans does. And the first one, I think the reception was pretty good. I mean, there was a bunch of reports

about the retention being somewhat lower. And then yeah, I think that there's a bunch of stuff that we just need to polish where the cameras are just so much better, the audio is so much better. And we didn't realize that a lot of people were going to want to use it for like listening to podcasts when they go on a run, right? That wasn't what we designed it for, but it was a great use case.

So it's like, okay, yeah, great. Let's make sure that's good in V2. So, you know, the cycle for iterating on this, if you're doing it for, you know, doing like a thread to release your Instagram, you know, the cycle is like a month. It's very hard. It's like 18 months right? Right. But I know this is the next step and we're, I think I'm just going to climb up that curve. But the initial interest, I think, is there. I think this is an interesting base to build from.

So I feel good about that. Going the other direction, I mean, the technology is hard, right? And it's, we are able to get it to work. It's currently very expensive. So, and if you want to reach a consumer population, it's got to wait for the cost curve to come down. Yeah. So that's kind of, so that's kind of the main limiting factor. Well, I think there's that. And we, yeah, we, I mean, we want to keep on improving it. So I think, but look, you learn by trying to assemble and integrate

everything. It's, you can't just like do a million R&D efforts and, um, in isolation and then like, hope that they come together. I think part of what lets you get to building the ultimate product, is having a few tries practicing building the ultimate product. And it's like, oh, well, we did that, but I don't know, it like wasn't quite as good on this one dimension as we wanted. So it's not

shipped that one. Let's hold that one and then do the next one. So that's sort of some of the process that we've had is we have like multiple generations of how we're going to build this. You know, when I look at the overall budget for reality labs, I mean, it's, augmented reality and the glasses, I think, is the most expensive part of what we're doing. That's why I ask. Because I think people are wondering, like, where's all this going?

I mean, look, I think at the end of the day, I'm quite optimistic about both augmented and virtual reality. I think AR glasses are going to be the thing that's like mobile phones that you walk around the world wearing. VR is going to be like your workstation or TV, which is when you're like settling in for a session and you want, uh, kind of higher fidelity, more compute, rich experience, um, than it's going to be worth putting that on. But you're not going to walk down the street

wearing VR headset. I mean, that I, like, at least I hope not. I mean, that's not the future that we're working towards. But I do think that there's just some sort of bias. Maybe, maybe this is in the tech industry or maybe overall where people think that the mobile phone one, the, the glasses one is sort of the only one of the two that will end up being valuable. But I think, like, there are a ton of TVs out there, right? And there are a ton of, uh, you know, people who are

kind of like spend a lot of time in front of computers working. So I actually think the VR one will be quite important too. But I don't know. There's no question that the larger market over time, I think, should be smart glasses. And I mean, now I think you're going to have both all the immersive quality of being able to interact with people and feel present no matter where you are in,

in sort of a normal form factor. And you're also going to have like the perfect form factor to deliver all these AI experiences over time because they'll be able to see what you see and hear what you hear. So yeah, and the stuff is challenging. I think, um, big and thing small is also very hard. Right? It's like, there's this funny kind of counterintuitive thing where I think humans

get super impressed by building big things like the pyramids. But I think a lot of time building small things like, um, cures for diseases at a cellular level or, um, miniaturizing a super computer to fit into your glasses are like maybe even bigger feats than building some like really physically large things. But it just it like sort of seems like less impressive. But it's,

but I know it's it's like it's super fascinating stuff. The last year has been, I feel like every time we talk, there's a lot has happened in a year, you seem really dialed in to managing the company. And I'm curious kind of what motivates you these days because you've got a lot going on and you're getting into fighting, you've got three kids, you've got the philanthropy stuff, you're, there's a lot going on and you seem more active and kind of day to day stuff at least externally

than ever. You're kind of the last, I think, founder of your era still leading a company of this large. Do you think about that? Do you think about kind of what motivates you still or is it just kind of still clicking and you don't it's kind of more subconscious? I don't know. I'm not sure that that much of the stuff that you said is that new. I mean, it's, I mean, and kids are seven years old almost eight now, right? So that's been that's been for a while.

Yeah, the fighting thing is relatively new over the last few years, but I've always been very physical. So, so you know, a lot of, a lot of sports and stuff like that. But I don't go through different waves in terms of like what what the company needs to be doing. And I think that calls for somewhat different styles of leadership. I think we went through a period where a lot of what we needed to do was tackle and navigate some important social issues. And I think

that that required a somewhat different style. And then we went through a period where we had some quite big business challenges handling in a recession and you know, revenue not coming in the way that we thought and needing to do layoffs. And I think that required a somewhat different style. But now I think we're squarely back in developing really innovative products, especially because of some of the innovations in AI. I think that in some ways that just like plays exactly

to I think my favorite style of running a company. But I don't know, I think these things evolve over time. It sounds like you're having more fun. Well, can you not? I mean, this is like, I mean, this is I think what's great about the tech industry is like every once in a while you get something like these AI breakthroughs and it just changes everything. And yeah, I mean, that can be threatening if you're if you're behind it. But I just think that that's like when stuff changes and

when awesome stuff gets built. So I think that's exciting. I guess personally, I think a lot of people, I mean, the world has been so weird over the last few years, right? Especially going back to the COVID pandemic and all that stuff. And I think it was like, it was an opportunity for a lot of people to just sort of like reassess what they found meaningful in their lives. And you know,

there's obviously a lot of stuff that was tough about it. But you know, the silver lining is like, I got to spend a lot more time with my family and spend more time out in nature because I wasn't coming into the office quite as much. And I was definitely a period of reflection where I sort of I felt like since the time I was basically, it was like 19 when I started the company. And like every year is just okay, we want to connect more people, right? It's like connecting people is

is good. That's sort of what we're here to do. Let's like make this bigger and bigger and just like and kind of connect more people and build more products that a lot of people to do that. I guess we just sort of hit the scale where to me, what I found sort of satisfaction in life from and what I think is like the right strategy. I think both for like me personally and for the company is less to just focus on like, okay, we're going to just like connect more people. And more like,

let's do some awesome things. And it sounds very technical. I mean, there are a lot of different analogies on this. But I mean, someone made this point to me that doing good things is different from doing awesome things. And social media in a lot of ways, it's good, right? It gives a lot of people a voice and it lets them connect and it's like sort of warm and it's taking like a basic technology and bringing it to billions of people. But I think that there's an inherent awesomeness

of like doing some technical feat for the first time. And I guess I'm for the next phase of what we do, just a little more focused on that. Like I think we've done a lot of good things. I think we need to make sure that they stay good. Right? I think that there's like a lot of work that needs to happen to on making sure the balance of all that is right. But for the next wave of like it's my life and for the company, but also outside of the company, you know, what I'm doing at CZI. And it's

just some of my personal projects. It's like I sort of define my life at this point more in terms of getting to work on awesome things with great people who I like working with. So it's like I work on all this reality lab stuff with BAS and a team over there and like it's just super exciting. And I get to work on all the say I stuff with Chris and Ahmed and like the folks who are working on that and like it's really exciting. And like we get to work on some of the philanthropy work and

helping to cure diseases with Priscilla and a lot of the best scientists in the world. And that's really cool. And it's like so just then there's like personal stuff. It's like we get to raise a family. It's like that's really neat. And like there's no other person I'd rather do that with. And but I don't know. To me that's just sort of where I am in life now. But um. It sounds like a nice place to be. I mean I'm enjoying it. Mark Zuckerberg the

optimist. I mean always somewhat optimistic. But yeah, no, this is. Thanks for the time, Mark. Yeah, appreciate you. Thanks again to Mark Zuckerberg for taking the time to talk today. Thanks as always to Alex Heath for guest hosting. And thank you for listening to Coder. I hope you enjoyed it. You can find Alex at this newsletter command line. It's the verge.com slash command line. It is jam packed with scoops and every week. It is just a great newsletter.

Alex is also a code this week interviewing Roblox CEO Dave Vizuki. Stay tuned for that and plenty of more interviews from a code conference in the feed to come. As always I'd love to hear you think of decoder. You can email us at decoder at the verge.com. We read every email. You can also hit me up on threats on Matt reckless 1280 on threads. And we have a TikTok which is super fun. Check it out at decoder.com. If you like decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe

wherever you get your podcasts. If you really like the show, hit us with that five star review. Decoder is a production of the verge and part of the Boxing You Podcast Network. Today's episode is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and is edited by Kat Right. The decoder music is by Break Master Sonder. Our editorial director is working mentors and our executive producer is Alan Ardonovan. We'll see you next time.

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