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Today it's become a decoder tradition every fall to have Verge deputy editor Alex Heath interview met a CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the show at Meta Connect. 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. The 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. It's in my mind, a marker of where we are actually in the development of AR glasses. 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 Meta Ray bands. We talked a lot about that. They're expanded partnership with Elisor Luxotica.
He thinks this really storied I wear conglomerate out of Europe could do to smart glasses what Samsung did to smartphones and for Korea. He sees this as becoming a huge millions of units a year market. And I think everyone here at the verge can see that the Ray bands are an early hit. And that Meta has tapped on to something here that may end up being pretty big in the long run, which is just not over packing tech into glasses that look good that do a handful of things really well.
And Meta is expanding on that rapidly to share with some other AI features that we also talked about. You guys got into that in depth. The other thing that really struck me about this interview is that Zucker 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 camera, Jan. Lydica and how he thinks the company was unfairly blamed for it in hindsight.
Yeah, I would say he's this is a news 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.
Let's just get into it. Here's Alex interviewing metastio mark Zuckerberg. Mark, we just tried Orion together. Yeah, would you think? We're fresh 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. Like 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, right? 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 I 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, where was the 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's the transition from computers to mobile, mobile is not going to be the end of the line. So as soon as we started becoming like a more, I guess, a 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. It's like, okay, let's start planting some seeds for what we think could be the future.
It's like mobile is already kind of getting defined. You know, by 2012, 2014-ish, it was generally too late to really shape that platform in a meaningful way. I mean, we had some experiments and then it 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 are 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 know, 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 to 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 that kind of shows up on the 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 now.
We got started with this I 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 faith that the AI part is actually possible before the holograms are really able to be mass produced at a kind of 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 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 are 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 Luxotica. So it's like, okay, before you have a display, you can get normal looking glasses, that kind of a camera, that kind of 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 Met AI and just kind of have kind of a full AI there, multi-modal 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 we 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 and 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 display list 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, OK, well, we're not going to try to fit into a glasses form factor for that one. We're going to say, OK, we're going to really go for all the compute that we want. And we're going to say, OK, this is going to be more of like a headsetter 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 you know, 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 products when you first set out to build it. 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 wanted to be a little smaller, a little brighter, like a little bit higher resolution and a lot more affordable before we've kind of put it out. There's a product. And in look, we have a 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 that'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? Is there any part of you that was like, man, I really wish this could have just been the consumer product we had built two years to keep it going. 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, especially around the form factor.
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 going to be fashionable, but also tech forward. But even so, I'd say these are unmistakably glasses. They're reasonably comfortable. They're under 100 grams. I think for two hours. I mean, it's hell.
I think we aspire to building things that look really good. I think this is good glasses, but I wanted it to be a little smaller so it can fit within really fashionable. When people see the Ray Bands, there's no compromise on fashion. It's 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.
I think for the future version of Orion, that's the target too. We want to make it so that most of the time you're going through your day, you're not computing. Or something is happening in the background or something. It just needs to be good in order for you to kind of want to keep it on your face. I feel like we're almost there. I think we've made more progress than anyone else in the world than I'm aware of, but it didn't quite hit my bar.
I mean, it's going to be on price. These are going to be more expensive than the Ray Bands. There's just a lot more tech that's going in them. But 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 some of the way. Are you imagining that the first commercial version, whenever it is in the next couple of few years, will it be a developer focused product that you're selling publicly?
The consumer is already, 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 be able to consume? We are using this as a developer kit, just primarily internally and maybe with a handful of partners.
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 and now it's a dev kit that like that kind of arbitrary developers can go by 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. We're going to 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 if 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. 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 displayless glasses like all the work we're going to do on on Rayban. And we just announced the expanded partnership with Luxotica, Estella or Luxotica, 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 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? How 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. 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. So are you buying a stake in Elisor, Looksatica?
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. And 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.
In my vision for them and how I think about it, is that if you think about like how Samsung in Korea made it so that Korea became one of the main hubs of building phones in the world. I mean, I think that this is probably kind of 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.
So, 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 and the areas. And I've gotten more of an appreciation of how strong of a technology they 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. 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 or 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 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, 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 with Rocco who runs their wearables in Francesco, who's their CEO, and our team does that too with like a large part of the working group over there. It's a good crew. They kind of 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 in company. We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
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We're back with metacio, Mark Zuckerberg discussing the company's Rayband smart glasses partnership in the future of AR. How many Rayband meds have you sold so far? I don't know if we've given a number on that, but I know it's going very well. You know, one of the things that I think is interesting is we we underestimate a demand. You know, one thing that is very different in the world of consumer electronics than software is there are fewer kind of supply constraints than 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 will resolve that in weeks. Right, but for manufacturing, it's like you make these concrete decisions like, okay, we're setting up four manufacturing lines or six and.
You know, 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 Rayband met it was probably going to sell three or five times more than the first version did.
And we just dramatically underestimated what the 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 like then 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 more manufacturing lines that took some time to do it. They're online now we're kind of you know 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 the ultra 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 the next few months when we roll this out real time translations.
You're traveling abroad. Some speaking Spanish to you. You just get it translated into English in your year. I can 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 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 company and the minders is a new thing. So I guess I'm seeing that becoming more of a not 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 met AI or like how are these glasses going to be more deeply tied to met AI over time. Yeah, seems like they're getting closer and closer all the time. Yeah well I think met AI is becoming a more and more prominent feature of the glasses.
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. Yeah 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 can 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 if Spotify and all these different things kind of kind of can work more natively.
So the glasses just get more and more useful which I think is also going to create increased 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 just pull out my phone to do things.
I think what's going to happen it's not like we're going to throw away our phones but I think slowly we're just going to 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 going to be done with our phones for a while but there's a pretty clear path where you're just going to use your glasses for more and more things over time.
I think 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 ten 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 like 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 in their 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 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 Bands 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 and I think AI like you said at the beginning like the way that AI is intersected with this is just kind of like a hawking for people that honestly for me I didn't expect it to click as quickly as it did but like when I got why listen 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 it where it's going.
Whereas before it's been a lot of like R&D and talking about it but like these the Ray Bands 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 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 to things like reminders although you can generally do that on phones to but I think is the model capabilities grow over the next couple of generations and you get more of you know what people call these. Agentic capabilities I think it's it's going to start to get pretty exciting for what it's worth I also think that all the AI work is going to make phones a lot more exciting.
It's the most exciting thing I think that has happened to our family of apps road map in a long time is all of the all the different AI things that we're building so if I were to any of the other companies I think that you know if I were trying to design what you know the next few versions of iPhone or Google's phone should be I mean I think that there's a long and interesting road map of things that they can go do with AI that as an app developer we can't so I think that that's like a pretty exciting and an 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 like if you're a photographer you would see met AI generating content it'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 maybe you don't like to or invading but you know what I mean and what does that do to how we 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 we've been building these apps for 20 years every call three to five years there's some new major format then 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 texts then links you got photos early on then you added videos then with mobile basically you know 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 still a sudden format but it each step along the way you want to read it's like you keep on making the system richer by having more different types of content that people can share and in different ways to express
themselves and when you look out for the next 10 years of okay if this trend seems to happen wherever 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 bet that that continues or accelerates
and I think you 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 medai and imagine to help her come up with images to illustrate it it's 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 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 medai as kind of the main assistant that you can build that's sort of equivalent to you know the singular assistant that maybe like a Google or an open AI or different folks are building but
it's not really the main thing that we're doing you know our main vision is that we think that there 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 count 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 the number of hours in the data 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 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 for that are kind of wilder use cases that they want and our views and these are all going to like live across these social networks and beyond I don't think that they should just be constrained to waiting until someone messages them.
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 and 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 kind of 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 kind of the central meta AI system directly generate content for you based on what we think is going to 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 was friends early on then it kind of brought it out to you follow to set a friends and creators and then they 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 and I think the next logical jump on that is a go 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 content.
And you're just adding to that a layer of okay and we're also going to show you content from that's generated by an AI system that might be something that you're interested in now how big to any of these segments get I think it's really hard to know until you build them out over time but 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 wants this I get the companionship stuff that get great and some startups have already shown there's like a market for and you've talked about how met eye is already being used for role playing and yeah but the big ideas that AI has been used to intermediate in feed how humans reach each other and now all of a sudden a eyes are going to be in feeds with us.
I think the main difference and I feel 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 relate with reals initially to competing with tiktok is because we 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 a gap that I'll still have the thing where.
A friend will post something and I'll comment on it and engage directly in feed again you know this is additive you're adding more over time but the main way that you engage with reals isn't necessarily that you know you go into the reals comments and comment and talk to people you don't know it's like you see something funny and you send it to friends and a group chat right 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 that it's not going to be a lot of fun.
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 ecosystems more as a you know I call it a discovery engine of content to kind of you know of 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 a eyes 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.
You can message someone or a pair of glasses that lets like your sister show up as a hologram in your living room when you you know she lives across the country and you would be able to see her otherwise like that's always kind of our main bread and butter and the thing that we're doing. But in addition to that.
I mean if the average person I think you know maybe that liked 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. This is advertiser content. Food prices are just too high.
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We'll find it on the gray area feed wherever you get your podcasts. We're back with metacio 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 it's 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.
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 stand alone 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 in the other direction it started off just connected to Instagram and now we also connected it's that the content can show up you know take a step back I mean we just talked about how
for most people they're interacting more private forums yeah 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 real or a video or some text based content and now you can
do it and 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 that's why I've been kind of pushing on that is 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 seemed 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 are intentionally saying we don't want threads to actually be that yeah I mean it's interesting there's 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
up to me the fundamental defining aspect of that format is that you don't when you make a post the comments aren't subordinate to the post the comments are kind of at a pure level right 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
behavior 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 was 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
millions of people for whatever reason I mean there was a lot of things that have been complicated about Twitter in the corporate structure and all that but they just weren't quite getting there and eventually you know I kind of thought hey I think we can do this right I think we can get this like build out the discussion platform in in a way that can get to a billion
people and be more ubiquitous social platform that I think achieves the like it's full potential but our version of this is we wanted to be a kinder place right we don't want to start with kind of the like direct kind of head to head combat of news and especially politics and I'm feeling that it constrains the growth of the product at all I mean I think we'll see that needs to exist in the world because I feel like with
X is seeming implosion it's not really existing anymore maybe I'm biased to someone in the media but I do think 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 there's not only a company yeah there's like a ton of different competitors and different companies doing things and you know I mean I think that there's a talented team over at Twitter and X and I wouldn't write them off even 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 like maybe we get there over time or maybe we decide that
it's enough of a zero some trade or maybe even a negative some 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 right it's like I mean is that there's an
informational lens for looking at this and there's kind of a you're designing a product and like what's the feel of the product right it's like 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 you know we
just make it so that you know 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 in messaging there can be groups about it out if you follow people 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 forgetting our products to generally feel the way that we
are doing and you know culture changes over time maybe the 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 wanted 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
you see this decision to downrank political content for people that are 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 said you kind of want to stay out of it now yeah and I see the way the companies 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
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 it like this isn't you know like we don't feel good like we want we want content to say that 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 shape this and I mean there's something 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 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 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 yeah and yeah sure I mean you could say that's a political strategy but I think it's 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 that's we're going to try to do that on the acquired podcast recently you
said that the political miscalculation was a 20 year mistake from a brand from a brand perspective and that 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 is 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 and 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 so I 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 you know come across this simplistic or you know I 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 you know whether it's politics or other things there are
always things that you look back at and you're like hey yeah like if I were playing this perfectly I would have done these things differently and but I do think it's the case that I didn't really know how to react to something as big of sort of a shift in the world is 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
and you're not kind of experienced or sophisticated and 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 camera genitalitica I think camera genitalitica is a good example
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 and like and yeah so it's like all the stuff okay and like the data wasn't even you know accessible 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 kind of have a rational discussion about that and I'm 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 you know and frankly you know a lot of the media I don't think was like as loud to write about when all the investigations concluded that said that like a lot of the initial allegations were just completely
wrong so I think that's like a that's a real thing so case you take these hits I didn't really know how to 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 this some of the 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 it's somewhat related to this but when you think about like litigation strategy for the company one of the reason why I hate settling lawsuits is that it it basically sends a signal to people that hey this is a company that settles lawsuits so maybe like we can sue them and they'll settle lawsuits so you wouldn't write a blank check to the government like Google did for his antitrust case.
No I think like 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 time for maybe 20 years is too long maybe it's 15 but it's hard to net 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 on that I think a lot of the data on this 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 high quality research that's out there suggests that there's no causal connection.
Like a kind of a broad scale between these things so no look I mean I think that's different from saying like an 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 to me it sort of fits 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's going to be a reckoning that we'll have to have is is basically when as the
kind of the majority of the high quality academic research gets shown is like okay I think can people accept this and I think that's going to be a really important set of debates over the next day. 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 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. Obviously when there are laws passed we'll follow the government's direction and the laws on that.
But I actually think the right approach for us is to primarily align with parents to give them the tools that they want to be able to raise their kids in the way that they want. Some people are going to think that more technology uses good that sort of have my parents raise me growing up. I think it worked pretty well. Some people are going to be kind of more, you know, 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 there's this big question of how do you do age verification? And 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 not very, you know, excusable from my perspective why Apple 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. 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 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 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, 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. Yeah. How it's supposed to work.
And I'm wondering what you think needs to happen there for things to move forward because like med AI 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? 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, it's an American. But in theory, my understanding of the way this is supposed to work is they kind of passed this 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 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 execute or they just wanted to be this very complicated regulatory system.
And look, I think that's for them to sort out. But I know there's no doubt that when you have dozens of different regulators that can ask you the same questions about different things, it makes it a much more difficult environment to build things. Do you understand that's just us? I think that's all the companies. 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're still, you've got mid AI. 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 there in any new medium in technology, there's the concepts around fair use and where the boundary is 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 kind of own it and license it, I think that all these things are basically going to need to get 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 and the grand scheme of things. I think it was 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, while psychologically I understand what you're saying, I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content. So it's like, okay, maybe, like, in the grand scheme of this. So we have this set of challenges with news publishers around the world, which is like, okay, they're like a lot of folks are constantly asking to be paid for this.
To be paid for the content, and then on the other hand, we have our community, which is asking us to show less news because it makes them feel bad. 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 to 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 doing that. 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, share it fine. 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. 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, 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.
So 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. So 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. And how are you thinking about this as a relates to glasses at scale because you're literally going to be augmenting reality, which is a, it's 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. Or on your phone, it's like, okay, yeah, we live a primarily physical world, but then you have the 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 mean, 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 some 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. Yeah, thanks Mark. I'd like to thank Mark Zuckerberg for joining the coder 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 inside scoops and smart analysis. It's a must read. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, really anything else? Drop a slide. You can email us at decoderthoverdsch.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can even be up directly on threads, a meta product. I'm Matt Reckless, 1280.
You also have a TikTok, where as long as TikTok lasts, it's at decoder pod. It's a lot of fun. If you'd like to code or please share with your friends and subscribe or read your podcast. Decoder is a production of the version, part of the Doxmanly podcast network. Our producers are Kate Cox, Nick Stat. Our editor is Kelly Wright. This episode was additionally produced by Brett Putman and Viren Pavick, our supervising producer is Liam James. The decoder music is by break master cylinder.
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She'll work to pass the first ever federal ban on price gouging on food. Donald Trump, on the other hand, he'd impose what is effectively a national sales tax, a Trump tax on food, gas and more. It'll cost a typical family $3,900 a year. We can't afford to go back. We need a president who fights for us. That's Kamala Harris. Wait for it by Harris for president.