Dlaczego Mark Zuckerberg uważa, iż okulary AR zastąpią Twój telefon

We have a very peculiar episode of Decoder today. It’s become a tradition all fall to have Verge deputy editor Alex Heath interview Mark Zuckerberg on the show for Meta Connect.

There’s a lot to talk about this year: on Wednesday, the company announced fresh developments in VR, AI, and the fast-growing planet of consumer smart glasses, including a fresh pair of AR glasses the company is calling Orion. Before we start, Alex and I talked a small about the Orion demo he experienced at Meta’s headquarters, any of the context around the company’s large AR efforts of late, and how Mark is approaching his reputation as a leader and the public perception of Meta as a whole.

Nilay Patel: Alex, it’s good to have you.

Alex Heath: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be back.

NP: You had the chance to effort on any prototype AR glasses, and you besides sat down with Zuckerberg. Tell us what’s going on here.

AH: So the large header this year out of Connect is Orion, which are AR glasses that Meta has been building for a truly long time. any crucial context up front is right before we started this interview, we had 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 channel.

We had just come fresh off that demo, walked into the podcast studio, sat down, and hit record. It was fresh in our minds, and that’s where we started. Orion is very much the communicative of AR as a category. It’s something that Meta hoped would be a consumer product and decided toward the end of its improvement that it wouldn’t be due to how costly it is to make. So instead, they’ve turned it into a fancy demo that people like me are getting around Connect this year.

It’s truly meant to signify that, “Hey, we have been building something the full time. We yet have something that works. It’s just not something that we can ship at commercial scale.”

NP: The first thing that struck me listening to the interview was 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 most likely couldn’t erstwhile Meta was a younger company, erstwhile it was just Facebook.

AH: Yeah, and they’re seeing quite a few early traction with the Meta Ray-Bans. We talked a lot about that, their expanded partnership with EssilorLuxottica, and why he thinks this truly storied eyewear conglomerate out of Europe could do to smart glasses what Samsung did to smartphones in Korea. He sees this as becoming a immense millions-of-units-a-year market.

I think everyone here at The Verge can see that the Ray-Bans are an early hit and that Meta has tapped into something here that may end up being beautiful large in the long run, which is not overpacking tech into glasses that look good, that do a fistful of things truly well. And Meta is expanding on that rapidly this year with any another AI features that we besides talked about.

NP: You got into that in depth, but the another thing that truly struck me about this interview is that Zuck just seems loose. He seems confident. He seems almost defiant, in a way.

AH: Yeah, he’s done quite a few self-reflection. In the back half of this interview, we get into quite a few the brand stuff around Meta, how he’s worked through the last fewer years, and where he sees the company going now, which is, in his own words, “nonpartisan.” He even admits that he may be naive in reasoning that a company like Meta can be nonpartisan, but he’s going to effort to play a back seat function to all of the discourse that has truly engulfed the company for the last 10 years.

And we get into all of the dicey stuff. We get into the link between social media and teen intellectual health. We get into Cambridge Analytica and how, in hindsight, he thinks the company was unfairly blamed for it. I would say this is simply a fresh Zuckerberg, and it was fascinating to hear him talk about all of this in retrospect.

NP: The 1 thing I’ll say is he was in a very talkative temper with you, and you let him talk. There are any answers in there peculiarly around the harms to teens from social media where he says the data isn’t there, and I’m very curious how parents are going to respond to his comments.

NP: All right, let’s get into it. Here’s Verge deputy editor Alex Heath interviewing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

This transcript has been lightly edited for dimension and clarity.

Alex Heath: Mark, we just tried Orion together.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah. What did you think?

We’re fresh off of it. It feels like actual AR glasses are yet getting closer. Orion is simply a product that you have been working on for five-plus years.

Take me back to the beginning erstwhile you started the project. erstwhile it started in research, what were you reasoning about? What was the goal for it?

A lot of it goes all the way back to our relation with mobile platforms. We have lived through 1 major platform transition already due to the fact that we started on the web, not on mobile. Mobile phones and smartphones got started around the same time as Facebook and early social media, so we didn’t truly get to play any function in that platform transition.

But going through it, where we weren’t born on mobile, we had this awareness that, okay, web was a thing; mobile is simply a thing that 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, and it kind of pulls you distant from another interactions. Those things are not great.

There was this designation that, just like there was the transition from computers to mobile, mobile was not going to be the end of the line. As shortly as we started becoming a more unchangeable company, erstwhile we found our footing on mobile and we weren’t clearly going to go out of business or something like that, I was like, “Okay, let’s start planting any seeds for what we think could be the future.” Mobile is already getting defined. By 2012, 2014, it was mostly besides late to truly form that platform in a meaningful way. I mean, we had any experiments, but they didn’t win or go anywhere.

Pretty quickly, I was like, “Okay, we should focus on the future because, just like there was the shift from desktop to mobile, fresh things are going to be possible in the future. So what is that?” I think the simplest version of it is fundamentally what you started seeing with Orion. The imagination is simply a average pair of glasses that can do 2 truly fundamental things. 1 is to put holograms in the planet to deliver this realistic sense of presence, like you were there with another individual or in another place, or possibly 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 store and pull up your full workstation of different monitors. You can be on a flight or in the back seat of a car and pull up a full-screen movie theater. There’s large computing and a full sense of presence, like you’re there with people no substance where they are.

Thing 2 is that it’s the perfect device for AI. The reason for that is due to the fact that glasses are uniquely positioned for you to be able to let people see what you see and hear what you hear. They give you very subtle feedback where they can talk in your ear or have silent input that shows up on the glasses that another people can’t see and doesn’t take you distant from the planet around you. I think that is all going to be truly profound. Now, erstwhile we got started, I had thought that the hologram part of this was going to be possible before AI. It’s an interesting twist of destiny that the AI part is actually possible before the holograms are truly able to be mass-produced at an affordable price.

But that was the vision. I think that it’s beautiful easy to wrap your head around [the thought that] there are already 1 to 2 billion people who wear glasses on a regular basis. Just like everyone who upgraded to smartphones, I think everyone who has glasses is beautiful rapidly going to upgrade to smart glasses over the next decade. And then I think it’s going to start being truly valuable, and quite a few another people who aren’t wearing glasses present are going to end up wearing them, too.

That’s the simple version. Then, as we’ve developed this out, there are more nuanced directions that have emerged. While that was the full version of what we wanted to build, there are all these things where we said, “Okay, possibly it’s truly 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 EssilorLuxottica.

So it’s like, “Okay, before you have a display, you can get normal-looking glasses that can stream video and capture content and have a camera, a microphone, and large audio.” But the most crucial feature at this point is the ability to access Meta AI and just have a full AI there, and it’s multimodal due to the fact that it has a camera. That product is starting at $300. Initially, I thought, “Hey, this is on the technology way to building full holographic glasses.” At this point, I actually just think both are going to be long term. I think there are going to be people who want the full holographic glasses, and I think there are going to be people who like the superior form origin or lower price of a device where they are primarily optimizing for getting AI. I besides think there’s going to be a scope of things in between.

So there’s the full field of view that you just saw, where it’s 70 degrees, a truly wide field of view for glasses. But I think that there are also products in between that, too. There’s a heads-up display version, which, for that, you most likely just request 20 or 30 degrees. You can’t do full-world holograms where you’re interacting with things. You’re not going to play ping-pong in a 30-degree field of view, but you can communicate with AI. You can text your friends, you can get directions, and you can see the content that you’re capturing.

I think that there’s a lot there that’s going to be compelling. At each step along this continuum, from display list to tiny display to full holographic, you’re packing more technology in. Each step up is going to be a small more costly and is going to have 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 simpler ones and much smaller form factors permanently. And then, of course, there are the mixed reality headsets, which kind of took a different direction, which is going toward the same vision. But on that, we said, “Okay, well, we’re not going to effort to fit into a glasses form factor.” For that one, we’re going to say, “Okay, we’re going to truly go for all the compute we want, and this is going to be more of a headset or goggles form factor.”

My guess is that that’s going to be a long-term thing, too, due to the fact that there are a bunch of uses where people want the full immersion. And if you’re sitting at your desk and working for a long period of time, you might want the increase in computing power you’re going to be able to get. But I think there’s no uncertainty that what you saw with Orion is the quintessential imagination of what I thought and proceed to think is going to be the next major multibillion-person computing platform. And then all these another things are going to get built out around it.

It’s my knowing that you originally hoped Orion would be a consumer product erstwhile you first set out to build it.

Yeah. Orion was meant to be our first consumer product, and we weren’t certain if we were going to be able to pull it off. In general, it’s most likely turned out importantly better than our 50-50 estimates of what it would be, but we didn’t get there on everything that we wanted to. We inactive want it to be a small smaller, a small brighter, a small bit higher resolution, and a lot more affordable before we put it out there as a product. And look, we have a line of sight to all those things. I think we’ll most likely have the thing that was going to be the version 2 end up being the consumer product, and we’re going to usage Orion with developers to fundamentally cultivate the software experience so that by the time we’re ready to ship something, it’s going to be much more dialed in.

But to be clear, you’re not selling Orion at all. What I’m wondering is, erstwhile you made the call, I think it was around 2022, to say Orion is going to be an interior dev kit, how did you feel about that? Was there any part of you that was like, “I truly want this could have just been the consumer product we had built for years”?

I always want to ship stuff quickly, but I think it was the right thing. On this product, there’s a beautiful clear set of constraints that you want to hit, especially around the form factor. It is very helpful for us that chunkier glasses are kind of ascendant in the fashion planet due to the fact that that allows us to build glasses that are going to be fashionable but besides tech-forward. Even so, I’d say these are unmistakably glasses. They’re reasonably comfortable. They’re under 100 grams.

I wore them for 2 hours and I couldn’t truly tell.

I think we aspire to build things that look truly good, and I think these are good glasses, but I want it to be a small smaller so it can fit within what’s truly fashionable. erstwhile people see the Ray-Bans, there’s no compromise on fashion. Part of why I think people like them is you get all this functionality, but even erstwhile you’re not utilizing it, they’re large glasses. For the future version of Orion, that’s the target, too.

Most of the time you’re going through your day, you’re not computing, or possibly something is happening in the background. It needs to be good in order for you to want to keep it on your face. I feel like we’re almost there. We’ve made more advancement than anyone else in the planet that I’m aware of, but we didn’t rather hit my bar. Similarly, on price, these are going to be more costly than the Ray-Bans. 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, and this was outside of that range, so I wanted to wait until we could get to that scope in order to have any of them shipped.

Are you imagining that the first commercial version — whenever it’s ready in the next couple of years — will be a developer-focused product that you’re selling publicly? Or do you want it to be consumer-ready?

That’s why I’m asking about the strategy, due to the fact that Apple, Snap, and others have decided to do developer-focused plays and get the hardware going with developers early. But are you saying you’re skipping that and just going consecutive to consumer?

We are utilizing this as a developer kit, but just primarily internally and possibly with a fistful of partners. At this point, Meta is by far the 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 have quite a few that talent in-house and then we besides have well-developed partnerships with quite a few folks externally who we can go to and work with as well.

I don’t think we request to announce a dev kit that arbitrary developers can go buy to get access to the talent that we request to go build out the platform. We’re 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 fewer years. We’re going to hone the experience and figure out what we request to do to truly nail it erstwhile it’s ready to ship.

A lot has been written about how much you’re spending on Reality Labs. You most likely can’t have an exact number, but if you were to guess the cost of building Orion over the last 10 years, are we talking $5 billion-plus, or was it more than that?

Yeah, probably. But overall for Reality Labs, for a while, quite a few people thought all of that budget was going toward virtual and mixed reality. I actually think we’ve said publically that our glasses programs are a bigger budget than our virtual and mixed reality programs, but that goes across all of them. So that’s the full AR, that’s the display-less glasses, all the work we’re going to do on Ray-Ban, and we just announced the expanded partnership with EssilorLuxottica. They’re a large company. We’ve had a large experience working with them. They’ve designed so many large glasses, and working with them to do even more is going to be truly exciting. There’s a lot more to do there on all of these things.

How does this partnership work, and this renewal that you just did with them, how is it structured? What does this deal look like?

I think it was a kind of commitment from the companies that we’re feeling beautiful good about how this is going, and we’re going to build a lot more glasses together. alternatively than doing 1 generation and then designing the next generation, a longer-term partnership allows the teams to not just gotta worry about 1 thing at a time — “Okay, is this 1 going to be good? And then how do we build on that for the next one?”

Now, we can start a multiyear roadmap of many different devices, knowing that we’re going to be working together for a long time. I’m optimistic about that. That’s kind of how we work internally. Sometimes, erstwhile you’re early on, you definitely want to learn from each device launch, but erstwhile there are things that you’re committed to, I don’t think you want the squad to feel like, “Okay, if we don’t get the short-term milestone, then we’re going to cancel the full thing.”

Are you buying a stake in EssilorLuxottica?

Yeah, I think we’ve talked about investing in them. It’s not going to be a major thing. I’d say it’s more of a symbolic thing. We want to have this be a long-term partnership, and as part of that, I thought that this would be a good gesture. I fundamentally believe in them a lot. I think that they’re going to go from being the premier glasses company in the planet to 1 of the major technology companies in the world. My imagination for them and how I think about it is like if you think about how Samsung in Korea made it so that Korea became 1 of the main hubs of building phones in the world. I think this is most likely 1 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.

They’re kind of all in on that now, and it’s been this interesting question due to the fact that they have specified a good business and specified deep competence in the areas. I’ve gotten more of an appreciation of how strong of a technology company they are in their own way: designing lenses, designing the materials that you request to make fashionable glasses that can be light adequate but besides feel good. They bring a immense amount that people in our world, the tech world, most likely don’t necessarily see, but I think that they’re truly well set up for the future. So I believe in the partnership. I’m truly 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 in a way where they control the designs and you supply the tech stack, or do you collaborate on the design?

I think we collaborate on everything. Part of working together is that you build a joint culture over time, and there were quite a few truly sharp people over there who, I think, it took possibly a couple versions for us to gain an appreciation for how each of us approaches things. They truly think about things from this “fashion, manufacturing, lenses, selling optical devices” perspective. And we evidently come at it from a consumer electronics, AI, and software perspective. But I think, over time, we just appreciate each other’s perspectives on things a lot more.

I’m constantly talking to them to get their ideas on different things. You know partnerships are working well erstwhile you scope out to them to get their opinion on things that are not actually presently in the scope of what you’re working on together. I do that frequently with Rocco [Basilico], who runs their wearables, and Francesco [Milleri], who’s their CEO, and our squad does that with a large part of the working group over there. It’s a good crew. They share good values. They’re truly sharp. And like I said, I believe in them, and I think it’s going to be a very successful partnership and company.

How many Ray-Ban Metas have you sold so far?

I don’t know if we’ve given a number on that.

I know. That’s why I’m asking.

It’s going very well. 1 of the things that I think is interesting is we underestimated demand. 1 thing that is very different in the planet of consumer electronics than software is that there are less supply constraints in software. There are some. I mean, like any of the stuff that we’re rolling out, like the voice on Meta AI, we request to metre it as we’re rolling it out due to the fact that we request to make certain we have adequate inference capacity to handle it, but fundamentally, we’ll resolve that in weeks.

But for manufacturing, you make these concrete decisions like, “Okay, are we setting up 4 manufacturing lines or six?” And each 1 is simply a large upfront [capital expenditure] investment, and you’re fundamentally deciding upfront the velocity at which you’re going to be able to make supply before you know what the request is. On this one, we thought that Ray-Ban Meta was most likely going to sale 3 or 5 times more than the first version did. And we just dramatically underestimated it.

Now, we’re in this position where it’s actually been somewhat hard for us to gauge what the real request is due to the fact that they’re sold out. You can’t get them. So, if you can’t get them, how do you know where the actual curve is? We’re fundamentally getting to the point where that’s resolved. Now, we kind of adjusted, and we made the decision to build more manufacturing lines. It took any time to do it. They’re online now. It’s not just about being able to make them; you request to get them into all the stores and get the distribution right. We feel like that’s in a beautiful good place now.

Over the remainder 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 due to over-the-air AI updates. So, even though we keep shipping fresh frames and they’re adding more transition lenses due to the fact that people want to wear them indoors, the hardware doesn’t necessarily change. And that’s an interesting thing due to the fact that sunglasses are a small more discretionary, so I think a lot more people early on were thinking, “Hey, I’ll experimentation 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 truly useful. I want to be able to wear them inside. I want them to be my primary glasses.”

So, whether that’s working with them through the optical channel or the transitions, that’s an crucial part, but the AI part of this besides just keeps getting better. We talked about it at Connect: the ability to have, over the next fewer months erstwhile we rotation this out, real-time translations. You’re traveling abroad, someone’s speaking Spanish to you, you just get it translated into English in your ear. It will rotation out to more and more languages over time. I think we’re starting with a fewer languages, and we’ll hit more over time.

I tried that. Well, actually, I didn’t effort real-time translation, but I tried looking at a menu in French, and it translated it into English. And then, at the end, I was like, “What is the euro [price] in USD?” And it did that, too. I’m besides starting to see the continuum of this to Orion in the sense of the utility aspects. You could say, “Look at this and remind me about it at 8PM tonight,” and then it syncs with the companion app.

Yeah, Reminders are a fresh thing.

It’s not replacing the phone, but it’s augmenting what I would do with my phone. And I’m wondering if the [AI] app is simply a place for more of that kind of interaction as well. How are these glasses going to be more profoundly tied to Meta AI over time? It seems like they’re getting closer and closer all the time.

Well, I think Meta AI is becoming a more and more prominent feature of the glasses, and there’s more stuff that you can do. You just mentioned Reminders, which is another example. Now, that is just going to work, and now your glasses can remind you of things.

Or you can look at a telephone number and say, “Call this telephone number,” and then it calls on the phone.

Yeah, we’ll add more capabilities over time, and any of those are model updates. Okay, now it has Llama 3.2, but any of it is software improvement around it. Reminders you don’t get for free just due to the fact that we updated the model. We have this large software improvement effort, and we’re adding features continuously and developing the ecosystem, so you get more apps like Spotify, and all these different things can work more natively.

So the glasses just get more and more useful, which I think is besides going to increase request over time. And how does it interact with phones? Like you said, I don’t think people are getting free of phones anytime soon. The way I think about this is that erstwhile phones became the primary computing platform, we didn’t get free of computers. We just kind of shifted. I don’t know if you had this experience, but at any point in the early 2010s, I noticed that I’d be sitting at my desk in front of my computer, and I’d just pull out my telephone to do things.

It’s not like we’re going to throw distant our phones, but I think what’s going to happen is that, slowly, we’re just going to start doing more things with our glasses and leaving our phones in our pockets more. 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 beautiful clear way where you’re just going to usage your glasses for more and more things. Over time, I think the glasses are besides going to be able to be powered by wrist-based wearables or another wearables.

So, you’re going to wake up 1 day 10 years from now, and you’re not even going to request to bring your telephone with you. Now, you’re inactive going to have a phone, but I think more of the time, people are going to leave it in their pocket or leave it in their bag, or eventually, any of the time, leave it at home. I think there will be this gradual shift to glasses becoming the main way we do computing.

It’s interesting that we’re talking about this right now, due to the fact that I feel like phones are becoming kind of boring and stale. I was just looking at the fresh iPhone, and it’s fundamentally 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. erstwhile you see something like the Ray-Bans and how people have gravitated to them in a way that’s amazed you, and I think amazed all of us, I wonder if it’s besides just that people want to interact with technology in different ways now.

Like you said at the beginning, the way that AI has intersected with this is kind of an “aha” thing for people that, honestly, for me, I didn’t anticipate it to click as rapidly as it did. But erstwhile I got whitelisted for the AI, I was walking around in my backyard and utilizing it, and I was like, “Oh, it’s apparent now where this is going. It feels like things are yet in a place where you can see where it’s going. Whereas before, it’s been quite a few R&D and talking about it, but the Ray-Bans are kind of a signifier of that, and I’m wondering if you agree.

I agree. I inactive think it’s early. You truly want to be able to not only ask the AI questions but besides ask it to do things and know that it’s going to reliably go do it. We’re starting with simple things, so voice control of your glasses, although you can do that on phones, too, and things like reminders, although you can mostly do that on phones, too. But as the model capabilities grow over the next couple of generations and you get more of what people call these agentic capabilities, it’s going to start to get beautiful exciting.

For what it’s worth, I besides think that all the AI work is going to make phones a lot more exciting. The most breathtaking thing that has happened to our household of apps roadmap in a long time is all the different AI things that we’re building. If I were at any of the another companies trying to plan what the next fewer versions of iPhone or Google’s phones should be, I think that there’s a long and interesting roadmap of things that they can do with AI that, as an app developer, we can’t. That’s a beautiful breathtaking and interesting thing for them to do, which I presume they will.

On the AI social media piece, 1 of the wilder things that your squad told me you’re going to start doing is showing people AI-generated imagery personalized to them, in feed. I think it’s starting as an experiment, but if you’re a photographer, you would see Meta AI generating content that’s personalized for you, alongside content from the people you follow.

It’s this thought that I’ve been reasoning about, of AI invading social media, so to talk — possibly you don’t like the word “invading,” but you know what I mean — and what that does to how we relate to each another as humans. In your view, how much AI stuff and AI-generated stuff is going to be filling feeds in the close future?

Here’s how I come at this: in the past of moving the company — and we’ve been building these apps for 20 years — all 3 to 5 years, there’s any fresh major format that comes along that is typically additive to the experience. So, initially, people updated their profiles; then they were able to post statuses that were texts; then links; then you got photos early on; then you added videos; then mobile. fundamentally Snap invented stories, the first version of that, and that became a beautiful widely utilized format. The full version of shortform videos, I think, is inactive an ascendant format.

You keep on making the strategy richer by having more types of content that people can share and different ways to express themselves. erstwhile you look out over the next 10 years of, “This trend seems to happen where all 3 to 5 years, there are fresh formats,” I think you’d bet that that continues or accelerates given the pace of change in the tech industry. And I think you’d bet that most likely most of the fresh formats are going to be AI-connected in any way given that that’s the driving subject for the manufacture at this point.

Given that set of assumptions, we’re trying to realize what things are most useful to people within that. There’s 1 vein of this, which is helping people and creators make better content utilizing AI. So that is going to be beautiful clear. Just make it super easy for 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, my daughter is writing a book and she wants it illustrated, and we sit down together and work with Meta AI and Imagine to aid her come up with images to illustrate it.” That’s a thing that’s like, she didn’t have the capability to do that before. She’s not a graphic designer, but now she has that ability. I think that that’s going to be beautiful cool.

Then there’s a version where you have this large diversity of AI agents that are part of this system. And this, I think, is simply a large difference between our imagination of AI and most of the another companies. Yeah, we’re building Meta AI as the main assistant that you can build. That’s kind of equivalent to the singular assistant that may be like what Google or an OpenAI or different folks are building, but it’s not truly the main thing that we’re doing. Our main imagination is that we think that there are going to be quite a few these. It’s all business, all the hundreds of millions of tiny businesses, just like they have a website and an email address and a social media account today, I think that they’re all going to have an AI that helps them interact with their customers in the future, that does any combination of sales and client support and all of that.

I think all the creators are fundamentally going to want any version of this that fundamentally helps them interact with their community erstwhile they’re just limited by not having adequate hours in the day to interact with all the messages that are coming in, and they want to make certain that they can show any love to people in their community. Those are just the 2 most apparent 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 [user-generated content] that people make that are kind of wilder usage cases. And our view is, “Okay, these are all going to live across these social networks and beyond.” I don’t think that they should be constrained to waiting until individual 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 evidently be different logic and rules, but that’s 1 way that there’s going to be a lot more AI participants in the broader social construct. Then you get to the test that you mentioned, which is possibly the most abstract, which is just having the central Meta AI strategy straight make content for you based on what we think is going to be interesting to you and putting that in your feed.

On that, I think there’s been this trend over time where the feeds started off as primarily and exclusively content for people you followed, your friends. I guess it was friends early on, then it kind of broadened out to, “Okay, you followed a set of friends and creators.” And then it got to a point where the algorithm was good adequate where we’re actually showing you quite a few stuff that you’re not following straight because, in any ways, that’s a better way to show you more interesting stuff than only constraining it to things that you’ve chosen to follow.

I think the next logical jump on that is like, “Okay, we’re showing you content from your friends and creators that you’re following and creators that you’re not following that are generating interesting things. And you just add on to that, a layer of, “Okay, and we’re besides going to show you content that’s generated by an AI strategy that might be something that you’re curious in.” Now, how large do any of these segments get? I think it’s truly hard to know until you build them out over time, but it feels like it is simply a category in the planet that’s going to exist, and how large it gets is kind of dependent on the execution and how good it is.

Why do you think it needs to be as a fresh category? I’m inactive wrestling with why people want this. I get the companionship stuff that Character.AI and some startups have already shown there’s a marketplace for. And you’ve talked about how Meta AI is already being utilized for roleplaying. But the large thought is that AI has been utilized to intermediate and feed how humans scope each other. And now, all of a sudden, AIs are going to be in feeds with us, and that feels big.

But in quite a few ways, the large 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, in messaging or groups.

This is 1 of the reasons we were late with Reels initially to compete with TikTok is due to the fact that we hadn’t made this intellectual shift where we kind of felt like, “No, the feed is where you interact with people.” Actually, increasingly, the feed is becoming a place where you discover content that you then take to your private forums and interact with people there. It’s like, I’ll inactive have the thing where a friend will post something and I’ll comment on it and engage straight in feed. Again, this is additive. You’re adding more over time. But the main way that you engage with Reels isn’t necessarily that you go into the Reels comments and comment and talk to people you don’t know. It’s like you see something comic and you send it to friends in a group chat.

I think that paradigm will absolutely proceed with AI and all kinds of interesting content. So it is facilitating connections with people, but already, we’re in this mode where our connections through social media are shifting to more private places, and the function of the feed in the ecosystem is more of what I’d call a discovery engine of content: icebreakers or interesting subject starters for the conversations that you’re having across this broader spectrum of places where you’re interacting.

Do you worry that interacting with AIs like this will make people little likely to talk to another people, that it will reduce the engagement that we have with humans?

The sociology that I’ve seen on this is that most people have way less friends physically than they would like to have. People cherish the human connections 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 comic that shows up so you can message individual or a pair of glasses that lets your sister show up as a hologram in your surviving area erstwhile she lives across the country and you wouldn’t be able to see her otherwise, that’s always our main bread and butter in the thing that we’re doing.

But in addition to that, the average person, possibly they’d like to have 10 friends, and there’s the stat that — it’s kind of sad — the average American feels like they have less than 3 real close friends. So does this take distant from that? My guess is no. I think that what’s going to happen is it’s going to aid give people more of the support that they request and give people more reasons and the ability to connect with either a broader scope of people or more profoundly with the people they care about.

How are you feeling about how Threads is doing these days?

Threads is on fire. It’s great. There’s only so rapidly that something can get to 1 billion people, so we’ll keep pushing on it.

I’ve heard it’s inactive utilizing Instagram a lot for growth. I’m wondering, erstwhile do you see it getting to a standalone growth driver on its own?

I think that these things all connect to each other. Threads helps Instagram, and Instagram helps threads. I don’t know that we have any strategical goal, which is to make it so that Threads is completely disconnected from Instagram or Facebook. I actually think we’re going in the another direction. It started off just connected to Instagram, and now we besides connected it so that the content can show up [elsewhere].

Taking a step back, we just talked about how most people are interacting in more private forums. If you’re a creator, what you want to do is have your content show up everywhere due to the fact that you’re trying to build the biggest community that you can in these different places. So it’s this immense value for people if they can make a reel or a video or any text-based content. Now, you can post it on Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and more places over time. The direction there is mostly more flow, not less, and more interoperability. And that’s why I’ve been pushing on that as a subject over time.

I’m not even certain what X is anymore, but I think what it utilized to be, what Twitter utilized to be, was a place where you went erstwhile news was happening. I know you, and the company, seem to be distancing yourself from recommending news. But with Threads, it feels like that’s what people want and what people thought Threads might be, but it seems like you are intentionally saying, “We don’t want Threads to be that.”

There are different ways to look at this. I always looked at Twitter not as primarily about real-time news but as a shortform, primarily text discussion-oriented app. To me, the fundamental defining aspect of that format is that erstwhile you make a post, the comments aren’t subordinate to the post. The comments are kind of at a peer level.

That is simply a very different architecture than all another kind of social network that’s out there. And it’s a subtle difference, but within these systems, these subtle differences lead to very different emerging behaviors. due to that, people can take and fork discussions, and it makes it a very good discussion-oriented platform. News is 1 thing that people like discussing, but it’s not the only thing.

I always looked at Twitter, and I was like, “Hey, this is specified a wasted opportunity. This is clearly a billion-person app.” possibly in the modern day, erstwhile you have many billions of people utilizing social apps, it should be multiple billions of people. There were quite a few things that have been complicated about Twitter and the corporate structure and all of that, but for whatever reason, they just weren’t rather getting there. Eventually, I thought, “Hey, I think we can do this. I think we can get this, build out the discussion platform in a way that can get to a billion people and be more of a ubiquitous social platform that I think achieves its full potential.” But our version of this is that we want it to be a kinder place. We don’t want it to start with the direct head-to-head combat of news, and especially politics.

Do you feel like that constrains the growth of the product at all?

I think we’ll see. We’ll run the experiment.

That needs to be in the world. due to the fact that I feel like with X’s seeming implosion, it doesn’t truly be anymore. possibly I’m biased as individual in the media, but I do think erstwhile something large happens in the world, people want an app that they can go to and see everyone that they follow talking about it immediately. There’s not an immediacy [on Threads].

Well, we’re not the only company. There are a ton of different competitors and different companies doing things. I think that there’s a talented squad over at X, so I wouldn’t compose them off. And then obviously, there are all these another folks, and there are quite a few startups that are doing stuff. So I don’t feel like we gotta go at that first. I think that possibly we get there over time, or possibly we decide that it’s adequate of a zero-sum trade, or possibly even a negative-sum trade, where that usage case should be somewhere but possibly that usage case prevents a lot more usage and a lot more value in another places due to the fact that it makes it a somewhat little friendly place. I don’t think we know the answer to that yet. But I do think, the last 8–10 years of our experience has been that the political discourse is tricky.

On the 1 hand, it’s evidently a very crucial thing in society. On the another hand, I don’t think it leaves people feeling good. I’m torn between these 2 values. I think people should be able to have this kind of open discourse, and that’s good. But I don’t want to plan a product that makes people angry. There’s an informational lens for looking at this, and then there’s “you’re designing a product, and what’s the feel of the product?” I think anyone who’s designing a product cares a lot about how the thing feels.

But you admit the importance of that discussion happening.

I think it’s useful. And look, we don’t block it. We just make it so that for the content where you’re following people, if you want to talk to your friends about it, if you want to talk to them about it in messaging, there can be groups about it. If you follow people, it can show up in your feed, but we don’t go out of our way to urge that content erstwhile you are not following it. I think that has been a healthy balance for us and for getting our products to mostly feel the way that we want.

And culture changes over time. possibly the stuff will be a small bit little polarized and anger-inducing at any point, and possibly it’ll be possible to have more of that while also, at the same time, having a product where we’re arrogant of how it feels. Until then, I think we want to plan a product where people can get the things that they want, but fundamentally, I care a lot about how people feel coming distant from the product.

Do you see this decision to downrank political content for people who aren’t being followed in feed as a political decision? due to the fact that you’re also, at the same time, not truly saying much about the US presidential election this year. You’re not donating. You’ve said you want to stay out of it now.

And I see the way the company’s acting, and it reflects your individual way you’re operating right now. I’m wondering how much more of it is besides what you and the company have gone through and the political environment, and not necessarily just what users are telling you.

Is there a throughline there?

I’m certain it’s all connected. In this case, it wasn’t a tradeoff between those 2 things due to the fact that this actually was what our community was telling us. And people were saying, “Generally, we don’t want so much politics. We don’t feel good. We want more stuff from our friends and family. We want more stuff from our interests.” That was kind of the primary driver. But it’s definitely the case that our corporate experience on this shaped this.

I think there’s a large difference between something being political and being partisan. And the main thing that I care about is making certain that we can be seen as nonpartisan and be a trusted institution by as many people as possible, as much as something can be in the planet in 2024. I think that the partisan politics is so tough in the planet right now that I’ve made the decision that, for me and for the company, the best thing to do is to effort to be as nonpartisan and neutral as possible in all of this and distance ourselves from it as much as possible. It’s not just the substance. I besides think perception matters. possibly it doesn’t substance on our platforms, whether I endorse a candidate or not, but I don’t want to go anywhere close that.

Sure, you could say that’s a political strategy, but for where we are in the planet today, it’s very hard. Almost all institution has become partisan in any way, and we are just trying to defy that. And possibly I’m besides naive, and possibly that’s impossible, but we’re going to effort to do that.

On the Acquired podcast recently, you said that the political miscalculation was a 20-year mistake.

Yeah, from a brand perspective.

And you said it was going to take another 10 years or so for you to full work through that cycle. What makes you think it’s specified a lasting thing? due to the fact that you look at how you personally have evolved over the last couple of years, and I think perception of the company has evolved. I’m wondering what you meant by saying it’s going to take another 10 years.

I’m just talking about where our brand and our reputation are compared to where I think they would’ve been. Sure, possibly things have improved somewhat over the last fewer years. You can feel the trend, but it’s inactive importantly worse than it was in 2016. The net manufacture overall, and I think our company, in particular, we’re seen way more positively.

Look, there were real issues. I think it’s always very hard to talk about this stuff in a nuanced way because, to any degree, before 2016, everyone was kind of besides rosy about the net overall and didn’t talk adequate about the issues. Then the pendulum swung and people only talked about the issues and didn’t talk about the stuff that was positive, and it was all there the full time. erstwhile I talk about this, I don’t mean to come across as simplistic or—

Or that you guys didn’t do anything incorrect or anything.

Or that there weren’t issues with the net or things like that. Obviously, all year, whether it’s politics or another things, there are always things that you look back on and you’re like, “Hey, if I were playing this perfectly, I would’ve done these things differently.” But I do think it’s the case that I didn’t truly know how to respond to something as large of a shift in the planet as what happened, and it took me a while to find my footing. I do think that it’s tricky erstwhile you’re caught up in these large debates and you’re not experienced or sophisticated and engaging with that. I think you can make any large missteps. I do think that any of the things that we were accused of over time, it’s been beautiful clear at this point now that all the investigations have been done that they weren’t true.

You’re talking about Cambridge Analytica and all that.

I think Cambridge Analytica is simply a good example of something that people thought that all this data had been taken and that it had been utilized in this campaign.

It turns out, it wasn’t used.

Yeah, it’s all this stuff, and the data wasn’t even accessible to the developer, and we’d fixed the issue 5 years ago. But in the moment, it was truly hard for us to have a rational discussion about that. Part of the challenge is that, for the general population, I think quite a few people read the first headlines and they don’t necessarily read [the remainder of the story]. Frankly, quite a few the media I don’t think was as loud erstwhile all of the investigations concluded that said that quite a few the first allegations were just completely wrong. I think that’s a real thing.

You take these hits, and I didn’t truly know how to push back on that. And possibly any of it, you can’t, but I’d like to think that we could have played any of this stuff differently. I do think it was surely the case that erstwhile you take work for things that are not your fault, you become a weak mark for people who are looking for a origin of blame for another things. It’s somewhat related to this, but erstwhile you think about litigation strategy for the company, 1 of the reasons I hatred settling lawsuits is that it fundamentally sends a signal to people that, “Hey, this is simply a company that settles lawsuits, so possibly we can sue them and they’ll settle lawsuits.”

You wouldn’t compose a blank check to the government like Google did for its antitrust case.

No, I think the right way to approach this is erstwhile you believe in something, you fight truly hard for it. I think this is simply a repeat game. It’s not like there’s a single issue. We’re going to be around for a long time, and I think it’s truly crucial that people know that we’re a company that has conviction and that we believe in what we’re doing and we’re going to back that up and defend ourselves. I think that sets the right tone.

Now, over the next 10 years, I think we’re digging ourselves back to neutral on this, but I’d like to think that if we hadn’t had quite a few these issues, we would’ve made advancement over the last 10 years, too. I give it this timeframe. possibly 20 years is besides long. possibly it’s 15. But it’s hard to know with politics.

It feels like intellectual wellness and youth intellectual wellness may be the next wave of this.

That, I think, is the next large fight. And on that, I think quite a few the data on this is just not where the communicative is.

Yeah, I think quite a few people take it as if it’s an assumed thing that there is any link. I think the majority of the high-quality investigation out there suggests that there’s no causal connection at a broad scale between these things.

Now, look, I think that’s different from saying, in any given issue, was individual bullied? Should we effort to halt bullying? Yeah, of course. But overall, this is 1 where there are a bunch of these cases. I think that there will be quite a few litigation around them.

The academic investigation shows something that I think, to me, fits more with what I’ve seen of how the platforms operate. But it’s counter to what quite a few people think, and I think that’s going to be a reckoning that we’ll gotta have. Basically, as the majority of the high-quality academic investigation comes out, okay, can people accept this? I think that’s going to be a truly crucial set of debates over the next fewer years.

At the same time, you have acknowledged there are affordances in the product, like the teen [safety] rollout with Instagram recently, that you can make to make the product a better experience for young people.

Yeah, this is an interesting part of the balance. You can play a function in trying to make something better even if the thing wasn’t caused by you in the first place. There’s no uncertainty that being a parent is truly hard. And there’s a large question of, in this net age where we have phones, what are the right tools that parents request in order to be able to rise their kids? I think that we can play a function in giving people parental controls over the apps. I think that parental controls are besides truly crucial due to the fact that parents have different ways that they want to rise their kids. Just like schooling and education, people have very importantly different local preferences for how they want to rise their kids. I don’t think that most people want any net company setting all the rules for this, either.

Obviously, erstwhile 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 rise their kids in the way that they want. any people are going to think that more technology usage is good. That’s how my parents raised me increasing up. I think it worked beautiful well. any people are going to want to limit it more, and we want to give them the tools to be able to do that. But I don’t think this is primarily or only a social media thing, even the parts of this that are technology.

I think the telephone platforms have a immense part in this. There’s this large question of how do you do age verification? I can tell you what the easiest way is, which is, all right, all time you go do a payment on your phone, there already is fundamentally kid age verification. I think it’s not very excusable from my position why Apple and, to any 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 fundamentally be able to say what apps their kids can use.

It’s hard for me to not see the logic in it, either. I don’t truly understand.

Well, I think they don’t want to take responsibility.

But possibly that’s on legislature then to pass [a law determining] 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. And look, I’m not saying it’s all the phone’s fault, either, although I would say that the ability to get push notifications and get distracted, from my perspective, seems like a much greater contributor to intellectual wellness issues than quite a few the circumstantial apps. But there are things that I think everyone should effort to improve and work on. That’s my view on all of that.

On the regulation part as it relates to AI, you’ve been very vocal about what’s happening in the EU. You late signed an open letter. I believe it was fundamentally saying that you don’t have clarity on consent for training and how it’s expected to work. I’m wondering what you think needs to happen for things to decision forward. Because, right now, Meta AI is not available in Europe. New Llama models are not available. Is that something you see getting resolved? What would it take?

I don’t know. It’s a small hard for me to parse European politics. I have a hard adequate time with American politics, and I’m American. But in theory, my knowing of the way this is expected to work is they passed this GDPR regulation, and you’re expected to have this thought of a one-stop store home regulator who can basically, on behalf of the full EU, interpret and enforce the rules. We have our European headquarters, and we work with that regulator. They’re beautiful tough on us and beautiful firm. But at least erstwhile you’re working with 1 regulator, you can realize how they are reasoning about things and you can make progress.

The thing that has been tricky is there has been, from my perspective, a small bit of a backslide where now you get all these another [data protection authorities] across the continent besides intervening and trying to do things. It seems like more of an interior EU political thing, which is like, “Okay, do they want to have this one-stop store and have clarity for companies so companies can execute? Or do they just want it to be this very complicated regulatory system?”

I think that’s for them to kind out. But there’s no uncertainty that erstwhile you have dozens of different regulators that can ask you the same questions about different things, it makes it a much more hard environment to build things. I don’t think that’s just us. I think that’s all the companies.

But do you realize the concern people and creators have about training data and how it’s utilized — this thought that their data is being utilized for these models but they’re not getting compensated and the models are creating quite a few value? I know you’re giving distant Llama, but you’ve got Meta AI. I realize the frustration that people have. I think it’s a naturally bad feeling to be like, “Oh, my data is now being utilized in a fresh way that I have no control or compensation over.” Do you sympathize with that?

Yeah. I think that in any fresh average in technology, there are the concepts around fair usage and where the boundary is between what you have control over. erstwhile you put something out in the world, to what degree do you inactive get to control it and own it and licence it? I think that all these things are fundamentally going to request to get relitigated and rediscussed in the AI era. I get it. These are crucial questions. I think this is not a completely fresh thing to AI, in the grand strategy of things. There were questions about it with the net overall, too, and with different technologies over time. But 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 think it starts with having any framework of, “Okay, what’s the process going to be if we’re working through that?”

But you don’t see a script where creators get straight compensated for the usage of their content models?

I think there are quite a few different possibilities for how stuff goes in the future. Now, I do think that there’s this issue. While, psychologically, I realize what you’re saying, I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their circumstantial content in the grand strategy of this.

We have this set of challenges with news publishers around the world, which is that quite a few folks are constantly asking to be paid for the content. And on the another hand, we have our community, which is asking us to show little news due to the fact that it makes them feel bad. We talked about that. There’s this issue, which is, “Okay, we’re showing any amount of the news that we’re showing due to the fact that we think it’s socially crucial against what our community wants. If we were actually just following what our community wants, we’d show even little than we’re showing.”

And you see that in the data, that people just don’t like to engage with the stuff?

Yeah. We’ve had these issues where sometimes publishers say, “Okay, if you’re not going to pay us, then pull our content down.” It’s just like, “Yeah, sure, fine. We’ll pull your content down.” That sucks. I’d alternatively people be able to share it. But to any degree, any of these questions are negotiations, and they gotta get tested by people walking. Then, at the end, erstwhile people walk, you figure out where the value truly is.

If it truly is the case that news was a large thing that the community wanted then… Look, we’re a large company. We pay for content erstwhile it’s valuable to people. We’re just not going to pay for content erstwhile it’s not valuable to people. I think that you’ll most likely see a akin dynamic with AI, which my guess is that there are going to be certain partnerships that get made erstwhile content is truly crucial and valuable. I’d guess that there are most likely quite a few people who have a concern about the feel of it, like you’re saying. But then, erstwhile push comes to shove, if they demanded that we don’t usage their content, then we just wouldn’t usage their content. It’s not like that’s going to change the result of this stuff that much.

To bring this full circle, given what you’ve learned from the societal implications of the stuff you’ve built over the last decade, how are you reasoning about this as it relates to building augmented reality glasses at scale? You’re virtually going to be augmenting reality, which is simply a responsibility.

I think that’s going to be another platform, too, and you’re going to have quite a few these questions. 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 another platforms. On your telephone it’s like, “Okay, yeah, we live in a primarily physical world,” but then you have this tiny window into this digital world.

I think we’re going to fundamentally have this planet in the future that is increasingly, call it half physical, half digital — or I don’t know, 60 percent physical, 40 percent digital. And it’s going to be blended together. I think there are going to be quite a few interesting governance questions around that in terms of, is all of the digital stuff that’s overlaid physically going to fit within a physical national regulation perspective, or is it actually coming from a different planet or something?

These will all be very interesting questions that we will have a position on. I’m certain we’re not going to be right about all single thing. I think the planet will request to kind out where it wants to land. Different countries will have different values and take somewhat different approaches. I think that’s part of the interesting process of this. The tapestry of how it all gets built is something you request to work through so that it ends up being affirmative for as many of the stakeholders as possible.

There’s more to come.