Mark Zuckerberg talks Apple vs. Meta Headset Wars, AI Innovations & Raising Cattle

0:00Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today we have an insane bonus episode for you. We are interviewing Mark Zuckerberg. Let's ride.

0:15mark welcome to the show hey good to see you guys good to see you as well all right let us jump right in on tuesday you posted a video to instagram where you reviewed the apple vision pro a competing headset and compared it to your own the quest 3 what we're all wondering is why did you decide to make that video you know having a ceo publicly review a rival's product isn't exactly typical, you know, the CEO of Papa John's isn't going over to Domino's and eating their pizza. Oh man. Well, I mean, look in, in my household, it's basically like my wife, Priscilla screaming at me to like, it's like, Mark, come, come to sleep.

0:55And I'm like, no, there's someone wrong on the internet. You gotta, gotta do something about this. Um, so yeah, I mean, that's, that's kind of the, the, the daily, but no, for, for real though, I mean, you know, basically going I hadn't tried the Vision Pro for a while. I mean, Apple wasn't in a rush to give me one. But going into that, I sort of expected that for a device, though, I mean, their device is$3 ,500. Ours is$500. I kind of thought, okay, theirs would be better at a bunch of things than ours, but ours would still be the better value for most people, given that it's seven times less expensive.

1:32But when I actually got a chance to try theirs out, I was like, wow. No, it's actually ours isn't just the better value. It's the better product. You know, and and I think that, you know, I just saw all the media coverage around this was just sort of breathlessly assuming that, you know, I think because it's Apple and because it was such an expensive product, like it must be, you know, the better one in quality. Even though a lot of people were saying, hey, no, you should probably go buy Quest 3 because it's a it's a better price. And I just wanted to kind of put my flag down and say, hey, no, you know, just because this thing costs seven times more, it doesn't mean it's better.

2:05If you actually go use case by use case on this thing, Quest 3 stacks up really well. And I'm just really proud of the work that we did. So I just kind of wanted to put that out there and say that. It was definitely you flexed on them a little bit. You brought the receipts. On some level, though, you do have to be a little pleased that Apple is getting into the space because, well, everyone is talking about headsets now. They weren't as much this time last year. Do you think you're benefiting from this Apple halo effect? well i mean i think competition is does end up being good for people right it's i mean i'm a very competitive person so i mean having a a competitor who's doing a good job will also motivate us and and um it's good for the teams it creates more of a sense of urgency so i do think that you know people really win when there's competition and i and i i definitely think that that's that's true and yeah i mean i do think that because people sort of assume that if apple comes into a space they're going to do a good job then it's okay you know maybe i hadn't considered wearing one of these headsets and now I will.

3:03And, you know, hey, the Quest 3 is actually better and it's$500. So I'll go for that one. I do think a lot of people are going to buy Quest because of that. So that's going to be a pretty exciting thing. But I don't know. I mean, we're in this for the long term. I think it's going to be, there are going to be a lot of ups and downs. So I don't worry too much about any given year. I just try to do the best stuff that we can. I mean, speaking of a given year, I do want to take us back to 2007 for a second. There is this infamous Steve Ballmer interview where he literally laughs at the iPhone after its introduction because he thought it was way too expensive.

3:37It didn't have a keyboard gasp, and he said it would never really gain market share. Are you at all nervous that when you start comparing a product from Apple that is less than a month old to your product, which has 10 plus years of development behind it, that you might be making the same laughing at the iPhone like Steve Ballmer type mistake? I don't think so. So, I mean, look, first of all, I'm not laughing at them. I mean, I take Apple seriously. I think it's like a good company. They do good work. I mean, I'm just laying out the facts as I see them today. I'm not saying that they're not going to improve, but hey, we're going to improve too.

4:09And, you know, we're a company that moves pretty quickly. So I actually think we'll probably improve faster. But I do think that there's this whole vibe with Apple fanboys, which I find kind of a little funny. and, you know, where it's like a lot of people just get upset if you dare to question if Apple is going to lead in a new space. And I don't know. I mean, I just think if you look at the history of computing, you know, every major generation has sort of an open model where it's more partnership oriented, more favorable to developers. And then they have a closed model where it's just like, you know, it's usually just Apple basically just integrating all their stuff closely together.

4:49And yeah, in mobile, Apple won. I mean, there's technically more Android phones out there, but basically Apple, from a business perspective, won. And in all the developed countries where people could afford their products, I mean, people basically prefer the iPhone. But that's not the way it always works, right? And PCs before that, in the 90s, Microsoft and Windows were really the leader and they had the open model. So I just don't think that the future is written on this yet. And I think that for this next generation, Apple's clearly going to be the closed model, you know, meta and our approach is going to be more open and partnership oriented, more developer focused.

5:28And, you know, I think we have a really good chance at winning. And I'm really committed to doing that. I mean, I'm like a, you know, I'm a competitive person. I'm like passionate about what we're doing and like we're playing to win. So no, I mean, you know, it's, I can't like sit here and guarantee that the future will go one way or another. But I think people who try to say that there's no chance that it goes the other way are just wrong. I think that this is an open game, and I feel pretty good about the team and the effort and the products that we're putting out. Apple fanboys have been put on notice.

6:01Absolutely. And we know you're a competitive person, too, and we're going to get to that later in the show. But I do want to talk about Neil and I's personal experience with the Quest 3. We actually tried it on yesterday, had a great time while I was in it. But as soon as I took it off and looked at Neil across the room, kind of waving his arms around, he was playing Beat Saber at one point. And I thought to myself, whoa, this is pretty socially isolating, actually, if you're not physically wearing it. Is this the future that you or that you think consumers and people really want? Well, I think that there's a mix.

6:36I mean, we do spend a lot of time in front of our computers today. You know, I think that there's a space for having a big TV or an entertainment station in your living room where you kind of do immersive things for hours at a time, like play games. I think that that is a thing that I think people want. But, you know, when I see these videos of people like wearing these devices, walking down the street, that is not what we're designing this for. I do think that there's going to be a mobile version in this next generation of computing. And that's more going to be glasses. And we're getting started on that with the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses that we put out that are doing really well.

7:10You know, it's in the second generation that we just put out. It's, you know, we have Meta AI in there. There's a lot of really exciting use cases. I'm really excited to roll out the multimodal part of that, which basically in AI speak is like you can ask questions using both the camera. So it's like, look at what's around and you can speak to it. So, you know, we have people doing stuff like, you know, going for a walking tour around Stanford campus and they just like look at a building and they just ask the glass. It's like, hey, look and tell me what is the significance of this building and the history behind it?

7:42OK, what about this sculpture that's here? Tell me about that. And I mean, just that's like pretty wild and and can be more social stuff. And I think is is more the thing that you're going to see more out in the world. But I mean, yeah, look, people do spend many hours in front of their big screens today, either doing entertainment or productivity type things and increasingly even fitness oriented devices with things like Peloton or big screen component of that. So will the future involve those activities, but in a more immersive version of that? Yeah, I think so. And I think part of what we need to do is make that social, right?

8:20So part of it is the mixed reality so you can see the physical world around you and blend the digital objects into that. That's a big part of what we did. That was the big jump from Quest 2 to Quest 3 is now we have this high resolution, color, mixed reality pass-through so you can see the world around you and put digital objects there. But, you know, a big focus for us, you know, when I talk about the metaverse, it is about that kind of social sense of presence and being there with other people, which is something that we kind of designed into our products to make them all sort of multiplayer and social.

8:50And I just think, I mean, that's like the DNA of our company. So, like, you know, we're going to really focus on that. That's an area where I think we'll probably do the best work in the industry. So in your ideal world, someone would be using the Quest headset in their home and then wear out the glasses. Is that kind of the relationship between those two? Yeah, I mean, I think that you can think of the glasses as the next computing generation's phone, right? It's the mobile, truly you're using it on the go computing platform. Whereas I think the headset is going to be more the next generation's computer or TV screen.

9:28So the bigger screens that you have. And yeah, I mean, I think for most people, the phone is probably the more important device in their life. And I think that that's probably going to be true in this next generation, that the glasses are probably going to be the more important and more ubiquitous thing. But I think that they're both meaningful. And I also think technologically, there's a path where you want to build kind of this immersive kind of 3D content. And you can build it first in mixed reality because the devices, by virtue of the fact that they're a bit bigger, have more compute. So it's easier to build stuff there.

10:02And then by the time we get to glasses that can put holograms in the world, we'll have built up the whole kind of developer ecosystem and platform to have a bunch of the content there. But the thing that I think has been really cool is, you know, I kind of thought that smart glasses weren't going to be a like ubiquitous consumer product until we got to that kind of hologram and putting, you know, digital objects, you know, just overlaying them physically on the world. But then this kind of crazy thing happened in the last year, which is this emergence of these AI models, right, where you can talk to them and ask questions and they can do a lot of things for you.

10:39So now I actually think that something like the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses is going to have much broader appeal than I would have guessed even a few years ago. And we sort of, when we started that, we thought of it as like the kind of intro project working our way up towards holograms, whereas now I actually think a lot of people are just going to want that, right? Because, you know, it's an affordable product. It's a stylish product. It's like you don't need to cram a ton of technology into it. You can just like, yeah, it's like it has cameras. It has speakers. It has a microphone. You can talk to AI.

11:10You can take phone calls on it. You can listen to audiobooks while you're out there. It's just pretty capable already. Right. Many people in the tech industry have been questioning whether AI will render the end of the smartphone. And they're building these different hardware gadgets from a pin to Pepper's little thing. I don't even know how you would describe it. But you think that the smartphone, because of AI, will replace, or I'm sorry, the glasses will replace the smartphone. Well, I guess maybe I should clarify that. I think what tends to happen is that the last generation of computing doesn't go away.

11:46It's not like when we got phones, people stopped using computers, but you do shift in terms of use. Before, we probably used computers more, and then we got phones. Now, I do a lot of stuff on my phone today that I would have done on my computer before, and that's clearly the primary thing. So what I think is going to happen is that glasses are going to become the primary mobile device. I'm not predicting that in 10 years, like we're not also going to have phones. I just think that like a lot of the time they're going to sit in our pocket when we're just doing stuff that we can do more naturally and in a more socially good way with glasses without having to have something in your hand or like take your kind of eyes away from the interaction they were having and look down at a phone.

12:30But I'm certainly not predicting the kind of complete disappearance of phones. I think that that's not in the cards, I think, anytime soon. And to some degree, I think the glasses will interact with the phone because, you know, if you're asking the glasses a question, the AI basically connects to the phone and then uses the phone's connection to the internet to then talk to our infrastructure to ask the question and get it resolved. So we're kind of betting that you will have a phone. You will probably just take it out a lot less. I've been so surprised to see the creator kind of economy embrace this product as well I don't know if you saw the trend that went pretty viral on TikTok of people kind of dancing around while wearing the glasses That yeah Completely organic by the way and I was just surprised to see them kind of immediately Glom onto this new piece of technology and immediately integrate it into their content Were you surprised about that or is that the goal all along?

13:20Um Well, it's always awesome to see and you know I mean my history and and like where I come from I'm more of like a like an engineer right at build software so building stylish hardware is relatively new for me right I mean that's that's not like Mark you got a quiet luxury vibe to you give yourself some credit okay I mean I appreciate that but um uh but that's wearing other people's stuff but but it's you know it's Don't get me wrong. I have a lot of confidence. I do believe that given enough iterations, I can get there on building the stuff that we want to. But for this one, we did something different, which is we worked with Ray-Ban.

14:02All right. And, you know, they're like, you know, the company that builds the Ray-Bans is the leading, you know, fashion and kind of glasses company in the world. So they do great work on style and luxury, which it's really been a very fascinating partnership. I mean, the technology behind even producing kind of normal glasses before you put any electronics in it is actually quite sophisticated. And, you know, we've learned a lot about working with them about how do you integrate kind of this new consumer electronics technology with all the technology that goes into creating like really sophisticated lenses and making it so that the materials in the glasses feel premium but are light.

14:43So there's all this stuff that I think like neither one company could have done on their own. But through this partnership, I think we've produced something that like brings state of the art technology around AI with something that has been a fashion icon for decades. And I think it's pretty neat. Yeah. I mean, it's so I mean, I don't know. It's tough for me to predict exactly what the uptake would be. but it's not that out of the question. I think a lot of that is because the design is really nice. Okay, I do want to transition to a pretty under the radar topic right now. We've mentioned a few times already on the show and that is artificial intelligence.

15:22On your most recent earnings call, the phrase AI was mentioned 70 times versus just seven for the metaverse. You change your company name to meta and you keep saying you're not trading AI and the metaverse, but it still feels like that's where the industry focus is right now. The metaverse feels pretty 2022 right now. How much did your strategy shift after AI kind of blew up when ChatGPT was released? Well, you know, we've been working on AI and the metaverse for a long time. I mean, those have been the two major kind of big tech bets for the company for like a decade. And, you know, the reality is that we're spending, if you just look at how much we're investing, It's like$15 billion a year, at least into each of them.

16:07So yeah, I mean, what we talk about will vary at different points. And yeah, like what we see happening in the industry will help sharpen our product strategy and our sense of what we can be building. Right now, I definitely think where we are in the hype cycle is much more, you know, people want to talk about AI. Whereas, Because, you know, yeah, in like in 21, 22, I think people were pretty excited about the talking about the metaverse. Now, I think we're in this mode where people are waiting for the products to get like more fully adopted. But like we're just kind of quietly churning and building this stuff in the background.

16:42Like I don't care that much whether something is cool one year or not. But yeah, I mean, at a moment when people have more questions about the AI work that we're doing, I think it's natural that you'll hear me be talking more about AI. when the metaverse space heats up a bit, or people try to call it different things because they don't want to embrace our branding around this. But when that kind of heats up, then you go through these moments where, okay, now we're talking about our headsets or that stuff more. So I just think this will kind of go back and forth a little bit over the next several years.

17:12But the reality is that these have been huge focuses for a while and I think are going to continue to be for the next decade or so until these things both reach their full potential. Let's talk about Sam Altman a bit. The OpenAI CEO, he's been reportedly trying to raise$7 trillion to build the semiconductor infrastructure needed to power artificial intelligence systems. NVIDIA's CEO said this week that Altman's plan was overkill. But what do you think? Is Sam insane or is this scale of investment needed to support the development of AI? I don't know. I mean, Sam is, I think, actually like a very earnest and thoughtful guy.

17:50And I think his level of ambition for the space, I think, has been very helpful for building it out overall. And I mean, the number is astronomical. So, I mean, it is hard to kind of wrap my head around that. But honestly, I haven't gotten a chance to talk to Sam about it. So I don't want to kind of weigh in too much on that. But I think the place that he's right is that like, Like, you know, if you look year over year, these companies keep on building these larger and larger training clusters of computers to basically train the state of the art models. So it's like a couple of years ago, maybe it was like a thousand chips that you kind of wired together.

18:29Then it's 10 ,000. Then it's 100 ,000. You know, at some point it's going to be a million. Right. And then it's like at some point, OK, yeah, you really need to produce a ton of chips. So at that point, I don't think he's crazy. I don't know what it will take to kind of accelerate all of this to the point where kind of the technological curve can keep up. But I think that this is one of these things where like building software sometimes hits roadblocks when you get into physical stuff. Right. And all the stuff that we do, it's like when we're building the apps, right, you're building like Instagram or WhatsApp or Facebook.

19:05you know, we can just ship updates like every week. But, you know, when we're building like a new headset, it's like, okay, we work on that for two years and we ship one headset, right? And then we work on another one for two years, ship another headset. It's just that the cycle time is slower. So I think the software part of AI will probably want to move fast. But I think at some point, Sam is right that we're going to run into some physical constraints on like, how many chips can you churn out? And, you know, how much power you need from like, power plants to be able to train the next bigger model.

19:36And I don't know, I think it is worth thinking about how to kind of alleviate some of those constraints because I think it's just going to enable, and this technology is going to enable all of these awesome use cases that I think are going to make our lives better in so many ways. I do just want to get into kind of the philosophical argument around AI a little bit. On one side of the spectrum, you have people who think that it's got the potential to kind of wipe out humanity and we should hit pause on the most advanced systems. And on the other hand, you have the Marc Andreessen's of the world who said stopping AI investment is literally akin to murder because it would prevent valuable breakthroughs in the healthcare space.

20:10Where do you kind of fall on that continuum? Well, I'm really focused on open source, which is, I'm not sure exactly where it would fit on the continuum, but my theory of this is that what you want to prevent is like one organization organization from getting like way more advanced and powerful than everyone else. Here's like one thought experiment is, okay, like every year kind of security folks are figuring out, you know, what are all these bugs in our software that can get exploited if you don't do these security updates, right? And it's like everyone who's using any modern technology is constantly doing security updates and updates for stuff.

20:52So if you could go back 10 years in time and kind of know all the bugs that would exist, then like any given organization would basically be able to like exploit everyone else. And that would be bad, right? It would be bad if someone was way more advanced than everyone else in the world because it could lead to some like really uneven outcomes. And the way that the industry has tended to deal with this is by making a lot of infrastructure open source. So that way it can just get rolled out and every piece of software can kind of get incrementally a little bit stronger and safer together. So that's the case that I worry about for the future.

21:28It's not like, I mean, you know, I don't want to write off the potential that like there's some runaway thing, but right now I don't see it. I don't see it anytime soon. The thing that I worry about more sociologically is just like one organization basically having some like really super intelligent capability that isn't broadly shared. And I think the way you get around that is by open sourcing it, which is what we do. And the reason why we can do that is because we don't have a business model to sell it. Right. So if you're Google or you're open AI, this stuff is expensive to build. The business model that they have is they kind of build a model, they fund it, they sell access to it.

22:02So they kind of need to keep it closed. And it's not their fault. I just think that that's where the business model has led them. But we're kind of in a different zone. I mean, we're not selling access to this stuff. We're building models and then using it as an ingredient to build our products, whether it's like the Ray-Ban glasses or an AI assistant across all our software or eventually AI tools for creators that everyone's going to be able to use to kind of like let your community engage with you when you can engage with them and things like that. And so open sourcing, it actually fits really well with our model.

22:34But that's kind of my theory of the case is that, yeah, this is going to do a lot more good than harm. And the bigger harms are basically from having the system either not be widely or evenly deployed or not hardened enough, which is the other thing, is open source software tends to be more secure historically because you make it open source. It's more widely available. So more people can kind of poke holes at it and then you have to fix the holes. So I think that this is the best bet for keeping it safe over time and part of the reason why we're pushing in this direction. I'd love your take on AI and the job market.

23:08You know, there's a lot of anxiety among people that AI could replace them, especially with all the tech layoffs of the last few years and companies signaling huge investments in AI. From your point of view as the person who is literally building these systems, say I'm the average white collar employee working in professional services as an accountant, say, should I be worried? Like, should I pivot my career to become a chatbot prompt engineer or whatever?

23:36I'm not sure I'd pivot my career yet. I mean, look, there's a lot in what you're saying. Over the long term, I'm actually quite bullish that all these tools will give more people the potential to kind of do what they care about. Right. It's like when I see my kids, it's like, you know, they they want to do all this creative stuff. And then we're like, go eat broccoli. Right. And I do think that they like a lot of people, I think, maybe are not in the jobs that they would like ideally want to be in. and I think in the future, we'll just have the capacity to do more of that. So I think that that is the long term, but then there's always the question of how do you get there?