Mark Zuckerberg on the AI bubble and Meta's new display glasses

23:29Well, I always think about everything from a communication connection angle first, right? Because that's kind of the legacy and the DNA of the company. um so probably the most important thing that i've focused on wanting to get them to do is be able to wear them get a text message respond really quickly and subtly with your hand if you want um with like like we're having this conversation now and i could i mean like we're talking about like this level of hand motion yeah like i'm making it's like not i thought you

24:05Alex Heath:might wear them in the interview and then i went i mean i could i could i could have gone i mean Yeah, I'll put them on. Yeah, put them on. Another thing about them is you can't tell they have a display. Like even when, in their transitions and even when their sunglasses. So that's actually an important part of the technology. Is light leakage is a feature of some types of waveguides. And so basically you get these trade-offs where you want them to be very efficient. There are waveguides where you have to pump just a ton of light through them in order to get anything to show up. But then some waveguides have just different artifacts, usually in a bad way.

24:48It's like the light will catch them and you'll see all kind of like rainbowing or something. Another artifact that we think is pretty bad because it's a privacy issue is if the person who you're looking at can basically - See it. Yeah. See what you see. Well, the very worst version of it would be if they could see what you're seeing. but I think another version that I think is still not that socially acceptable is if they can see that you're looking at something at all right so I think that that's one of the things that we're really proud of in the design here and that we put a lot of energy into is you know the the displays are super bright to you and to the person that you're looking at they can not even really tell that you're doing anything.

25:35I think that that's an important thing for having it to be socially acceptable, right? I mean, we also, we design them so that way when the display comes up, it's offset slightly to the side. We don't want to block what you're doing. An important principle for the glasses is the technology needs to get out of the way, right? It's, I mean, fundamentally, it's like, you know, this is something that you're going to be wearing on your face for a lot of the day. I mean, we designed these specifically to be, both indoor and outdoor with the transition lenses. They work really well. Sunglasses outdoors.

26:07But the reality is that most of the day you're not going to be using technology or at least visual yet. So maybe you'll be listening to music or something. But we want, when you are interacting with something, it should show up. It should kind of be off to the side. If you don't interact with it, it needs to get out of the way really quickly. That's a really important principle of the whole technology.

26:27Alex Heath:You've got this wake gesture with the band where you can just tap quickly to make the display go away. Yeah, very subtle. And again, I want to get into the band. The band is wild in its own right. The thing that really stood out to me from my demo from these was some things that you only could do in a form factor like this. Because I mean, the texting is cool, but like there's this live captions thing where I was in a room with a bunch of people and they all started talking really loudly. And if I just looked at someone, it would live caption what they were saying and tune out everything else.

26:57Alex Heath:It's like super hearing. and then you're also doing that with language translation so you can do real time i mean ideally both people are wearing the glasses to get the full experience but you don't actually need to have the other you could just hear what they're saying in your language or see it yeah that's pretty wild and that speaks to like what just this form factor could do i'm curious like there's that are there other things that this form factor uniquely can do in your mind that a smartphone can't um i mean the all the things around ai yeah where you have an ai that basically you want to have context around what's going on with you right so like if you want an ai that can see what you see hear what you hear can just kind of talk to you passively throughout the day um and then can show you information contextually that's just not something that a phone can do i mean i guess technically you could walk around holding a phone like this but you can't really do that.

27:51No one does it.

27:52Alex Heath:Yeah, you can't. Those demos have existed forever and I'm always like, I don't want to hold my phone up. So I think that's actually going to be the main one. And I think all the live AI stuff, it's interesting. It takes on a different feel. So we have live AI in the Ray-Bans without a display too, the kind of classic Ray-Bans. And for that, it's audio only live AI. So it's really helpful for when you're doing something kind of um by yourself if you're cooking or something then you know it can just give you it can it's it's watching what you're doing with the video and and you can ask questions about what you should be doing or it can give you tips and that's all that's all great but it's not really useful when you're in another kind of conversation and the thing that the thing that i've observed with the thought experiment I've run, but also just wearing these is, so we go through the world, we have dozens of conversations a day.

28:54And in every conversation, I usually have like five things I want to follow up on. Maybe there's like some, it reminded me that I should go do a thing or it reminded me of a person who I wanted to talk to, or maybe I'm talking to someone and maybe they like assert some assumption that doesn't quite sound right and I want to fact check it or like gut check it. These are all things that I think with live AI, you can have this AI that's sort of running in the background and that goes and often does work for you and then can bring that context back, whether it's asynchronously kind of offline when you're done with the conversation or sometimes like when you're in the middle of a conversation, It's just useful to have more context right then.

29:42Alex Heath:How have you been using these? Someone on your team was saying you text a lot through them. Yeah. Well, I'm a texter. I run the company through text messages. So when you were asking about what can you do that you can't do on a phone, I mean, I guess you can. You can obviously text on a phone and we all do it dozens of times a day. But I think that there's like a lot of times where it's just not socially acceptable. to send a text message. And so like, let's say you're in the middle of a conversation. You want to like ask someone a question or get some information. I mean, I have this like all the time.

30:17I'm like having a one-on-one conversation with someone and I like, oh, I like wanted to ask someone this or like, I wanted to ask someone else a question to like pull some context. So I can ask this person what they think about it, but I'm not gonna like pull out my phone in the middle of a conversation. Um, with this, it's actually just super quick. You can just like send a message in like five seconds, get the context back. Like it actually just really improves the conversations that you're having, I find. To me, this is the one thing that I think is basically better about Zoom than in-person conversations is that you can sort of multitask a little bit, right?

30:58It's like - Or a lot. It's worse in basically like every other way than kind of an in-person physical conversation. But the one thing that I think is useful is you can go from having a conversation to basically asking someone else a question. It's not necessarily distracting. It's additive, right? Because otherwise your option is like, all right, you have a conversation. Then you go check in with someone else. Then you have to go back and call the other person back and have a whole second conversation. So it just short circuits these things all the time. And now I think this kind of brings the best part of that into physical conversations.

31:30Well, you basically feel present in the conversation. You can pull in whatever information you need. It's super, super helpful.

31:35Alex Heath:Yeah, a real like, holy shit thing about this product is the band i i thought that because it was with orion the demo you guys had last year too and i thought it at the time i was like there's something special with this band and you're calling it's a neural band is that right yeah the neural band it's a because it's a neural interface it picks up nerve activity so like it feels like it's reading your mind it's not doing that but it's not reading your mind what you're doing is you're sending signals through your muscular nervous system that it actually picks up before you even make movements but um you it basically picks up these micro gestures and that allows you to control your interface um no matter where your hand is so it's not doing like hand tracking visually or anything like that like you can have your hand by your side you can have your hand behind your back like whatever in your jacket pocket um and it's fine and um and the gestures are really subtle right so like it's like this is all i need to do to bring it up i mean this brings up met ai so i really like the music one did you um i didn't try that one no oh so the way when you're listening to music that you adjust the volume is you just kind of oh the dial yeah you pretend that there's a dial and you just turn the dial i did that with the zoom in on something yeah you could do you could do it on on photos too yeah um that's like it feels like minority report when you do that it's like in real life it's a it's a good interface yeah i think it's what you mean but yeah it's like not not the weird part of minority reports yeah the good part of where tom cruise is doing the hands like it's it feels like sci-fi and um yeah and i'm wondering why this band like why did you land on this band as the input for this because people have been trying to figure out input for glasses like these forever and it's usually voice or hand gestures or something, but it's like, I'm not going to be in the subway, like gesturing out into space.

33:23So, okay. I think that those are going to be useful too, but I don't think that they're, I don't think that they're complete, right? So voices is obviously going to be important. People talk to MetAI, they do voice calls, they, you know, you do video chats. So voice is going to be a big thing, but I think the reality is that a lot of the time we're around other people. and for the use case that we really wanted to nail which which i actually think is the most frequent and most important use case that we do on our phones is messaging so if you want to nail that what you need is the ability for a message to come in to not be distracting not be like center in your field of view but just be there um and then you need a way in whatever situation you're in to be able to quickly respond in like five or ten seconds um in a way that is not interruptive to your current interaction and is socially acceptable and doesn't feel rude.

34:20And then you get to, okay, hand gestures. I mean, yeah, I think that there are going to be useful things for, I mean, in Minority Report, he's doing a fair amount of that. But for gaming and things like that, I think you'll do that. But like you said, you're not going to walk down the street like that, right? I mean, that's kind of - Pretty goofy. Yeah. It looks weird. Your arms get tired. It's much more the former than the latter in terms of reason why it doesn't work but the latter is also true um so we needed something that was basically silent and in subtle so the questions are there are a few options for that one that people are working on is basically whispering right so you can like sub audibly even um pick up on the sound or you can have some camera that can like look at your mouth and do like lip reading that's still pretty weird in a meeting i agree yeah i agree so it didn't pass my bar for kind of subtlety even though it is silent in theory so i i think like so i think you need to go for the neural interface and the other thing that's nice about the neural interface is you can get really high bandwidth input too um so it's not like you know with like you know smart watches today you basically like you know you can move your arm and it can pick up like a gesture or two but it's but it's a very low bandwidth there aren't that many things that it can do um you need something that can basically be reading the muscle signal um so that way you can just control it very subtly and um and this can do that i mean i can i can i mean already i haven't like you know we're not that optimized i think we're going to get the auto correct a lot better but I'm already, I think, around like 30 words a minute typing.

36:05Really?

36:05Alex Heath:Yeah. Man. I mean, how advanced do you think the band gets in its current form factor in terms of what it can do? I think quite a bit. I mean, basically today, well, I guess you have the sensors which can pick up the signals from your muscles. But then on top of that, it's basically just an AI machine learning problem to be able to pick up what you mean by the thing and right now um it's not particularly personalized so um so you get it out of the box and it needs to work with certain gestures and you've never used it before so it works with these like like you're you're doing kind of it's like i mean this isn't a big gesture but i mean this is much bigger than what it needs to be in the future and then in the and then for for um kind of the neural text entry you're basically you can kind of think about it as if you have a mini pencil and you're just like writing out the letter but over time what should happen is that the ai learns your pattern for how you you know write each letter and you should be able to write make like increasingly subtle and invisible motions that it basically learns are your way of doing that letter or that input or whatever.

37:36And I think the future version of this is that the motions just get really subtle and you're effectively just firing muscles in opposition to each other and making no visible movement at all. Um, and it picks it up.

37:48Alex Heath:So personalized autocomplete via your wrist, basically. Yeah. So super fast, because if you're not moving, there's no latency from actually having to actually physically move and then retract after after making a motion um so i think the upper bound of that is very high the the other thing is um and that's just for typing which is one kind of modality but i think you can kind of there are all these different dimensions where you can use it to input into things and you could control a a hand in space that is like operating a ui right it's like there's um all kinds of different things that it can do that i think will just be really interesting to get into over time.

38:30And we basically, we invented the neural band to work with the glasses, but I actually think that the neural band could end up being a platform on its own to basically just interact with all of your electronics and devices and do all kinds of different things once we kind of get it to be a little bit more mature.

38:51Alex Heath:So you could have an API for it that could theoretically plug into a smart home or something like that that'd be wild yeah yeah yeah the the price point for these is also lower than i expected it's only like 800 bucks yeah um who are these for from a like is this an early adopter thing like you care about the cutting edge like this is for you you're not making a ton of these right i assume this is not like a mass they're going to be a massive thing for you it's more to to see how people use this technology what's i mean i mean i think that this is going to be a big part of the future. I mean, my view is that, you know, there's between a billion and 2 billion people who wear glasses on a daily basis today for a vision correction.

39:31Like, is there a world where in five or seven years, the vast majority of those glasses aren't AI glasses in some capacity? Like, I think that that's, it's kind of like when the iPhone came out and everyone had flip phones, and it's like just a matter of time before they all become smartphones. I think that these are all going to become AI glasses. And the question is, all right, well, there are 8 billion people in the world, not, you know, one to two. So are there going to be a bunch of other people who also wear glasses? I would guess yes. I mean, there are a lot more people who wear sunglasses some of the time.

39:58So yeah, I mean, I think it's a big category. And there's a lot going on here. I mean, there's, I think what you see when you're building products is that V1, you build what you think is going to be great and then you get a lot of feedback but you also didn't get everything exactly perfect in v1 so you know v2 and v3 just end up a lot better right it's not a it's not a coincidence i think that you know the first version of the ray-bans ray-ban stories um we thought it was good then when we did the the second version of ray-ban meta i think it sold five times more. And it was just refined, right?

40:45It was like, so I think that there's going to be some dynamic here where it's like, you have the first version, you learn from it. The second version is just a lot more kind of polished and the software gets polished too, not just the hardware and that just kind of compounds and gets better and better. And full AR that fills your vision that's still coming too. Yeah, I mean, we're working on all this stuff and we want to get it all to be as affordable as possible. The reality is that the more technology you want to cram into the glasses, be more expensive, that is, because you're putting more components in.

41:18We also want the glasses to be as thin as possible. And that's a process of miniaturization that happens. And similarly, the more technology that you cram in, the harder it is to make smaller. So as much as we can miniaturize this technology, it will always be true that if you put half the technology in, you'll be able to make even thinner glasses. and some people have different aesthetic preferences where they'll want fortunately thick glasses are kind of in style but you know some people want thinner ones like yours you can't fit many electronics well now I don't feel cool you may have to rethink your aesthetic choices in the future but see on pricing we I mean we did we work on getting it to be as affordable as possible and And our view is that our profit margin isn't going to come from a large device profit margin.

42:11It's going to come from people using AI and the other services over time.

42:16Alex Heath:Because you'll pay a subscription for the AI or something? Or use it and do commerce through it or whatever the different things are that people do. So we're not like a company like Apple whose primary or a large part of their margin comes from having a large margin on the hardware. But in general, yeah, we try to make it as affordable as possible. And my hope is that if we build another one of these, hopefully it's even more affordable. Or the other choice that we can make is put even more technology in it and keep the price point there. But I think you're going to have a few different price points.

42:50There's going to be the kind of standard AI glasses that don't have a display. And I think those will sort of range between$300 to$500 or$600, depending on the aesthetic and kind of how high fashion it is. Maybe even more than$600 if you get something that's really high fashion. But that's kind of the range that we've seen so far from the early Ray-Bans to some of the Oakley Meta Vanguards with all the kind of custom stuff in it, like optical lenses with a prescription. Then there's a category like this with the kind of a display that isn't kind of a full field of view AR display. and i think that that's going to be yeah on the order of a thousand dollars like maybe you get it a little better maybe it's a little more but i but you can call it in that area and then i think when you get to the full ar glasses um that'll be somewhat more to start and and i think like people will just want to have the whole portfolio and then the goal over time will be to get as much of that technology into as affordable and as thin of a form factor so you can just like have as many styles is possible.

44:10Class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look. Try it. Style it. Make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up. It shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest proc store today.

45:08Alex Heath:And so you've got these new Oakleys and your deal with Elser Luxottica means you can do other smart glasses with all their other brands, right? So I think that implies, right, that there will be future brands that have meta tech. We'd love to do it. Yeah. So you see it as like building out a kind of constellation of all these different form factors and price points. That's the goal. Yeah. What about all these other AI wearables that are glasses that are happening? There's the friend pendant I'm sure you've seen. There's all these displayless non-glasses devices. Sam and Johnny Iver apparently working on something.

45:42Alex Heath:There's a lot of interest in this. And I'm curious, is this something that since AI has really taken off in the last few years, you see opportunity there in addition to glasses? Or are you still just the main focus is glasses? Well, our main focus is glasses because I think glasses are the best form factor for this for all the reasons that we talked about before. I think that anything else that you have to kind of fiddle with takes your attention away from the physical world around you. I don't think that there's any other form factor that can see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you throughout the day and generate a UI in your vision.

46:20and then there's the whole augmented reality part about blending the physical and digital world but I don't know I mean people use different electronics so I mean I'm not gonna I mean I certainly don't think that it's like in the future all eight billion people in the world are doing the exact same thing I mean some people use their phone more some people use a computer more some people use an iPad instead of a computer right some people you know primarily you know watch videos on a TV. Some people watch videos primarily on a, on phone. So I do think that they're going to be different things. Um, my guess is that glasses will be the most important.

46:57Um, I think something like earbuds is kind of interesting too. I mean, Apple clearly is like by far the leader on that with AirPods. I think partially because they did a good job and partially because I think they gave themselves some, um, kind of unfair advantages with how they bundle it and couple it and have technology that works with the um with the phone that i guess they're now just starting to open up which is great but um but for a while i think it just made it impossible for anyone else to build anything like the airpods um watches i think are interesting um in some ways too and you're not a fan of the like the pendant thing the pendant trend that's

47:40Alex Heath:kind of starting right now um i mean is it a trend is i don't know it's early i mean there's a lot of startups doing this stuff. I think it's an interesting idea. I don't want to be too dismissive. My point is that I actually think that they're... My guess is that different people are going to like different things, but that glasses are going to be the most popular. There was no new quest this year at Kinect. And I'm curious how you're feeling about the quests these days in VR, mixed reality generally as a category. It seems like glasses are really taken off. There's obviously a lot more quests out in the world.

48:12Alex Heath:They've sold a lot more. but I'm curious, you know, not, they're not being a new one this year and also just how you're feeling about it these days, like the category. Yeah, no, I mean, I think we're, we're making progress on it. I mean, this year, what we focused on was the MetaHorizon creation tool. So we announced MetaHorizon Studio and MetaHorizon Engine, which are, are these basically foundational tools for creating worlds and content using AI. And that's going to go towards making it so that people can create a lot more content in VR. But I think that that's also going to be the case. And all that stuff, I think, should translate over to AR too.

48:53I think a lot of this content you'll be able to have there. I mean, glasses that are see-through may not be quite as immersive as VR, but you can deliver a lot of the same kind of holographic experience. And then I think a lot of these things will also end up showing up on phones, right? I think there's this huge opportunity with AI to, you know, you're browsing your feed on Instagram and Facebook and like it's like each story should be its own world that you can jump into. But like the, and you're starting to see some of this with some of the AI models, some of the stuff that Google has put out recently, for example, are like interesting glimpses of where that could go.

49:42But I think that there's this real sense that the whole stack for how you create those kinds of immersive experiences needs to get rethought. It's not just going to be people doing things in the same way that they've created 3D video games historically. I mean, that's a very, very intensive process where the tools are like very - Yeah, hybrid entry. Yeah. I mean, so my kids are kind of into programming and into making things. And we try to build different 3D worlds. And I think some of the stuff is just like intractable for them, right? It's like, I mean, they're still kids, so it's fine. But if you extract it to like a prompt, I mean, then it becomes - I think by the - Yeah.

50:27But with the MetaHorizon Studio, which I've been playing with, with them, and obviously this isn't primarily designed for an eight-year-old to be able to use, but my bar is if it's enough that I can kind of make something good with my eight-year-old, then that's pretty cool. You really can create all these interesting things, right? It's like you can define what the world dynamic is, like what kind of you want the world to be. If you want to put stuff in the world, you can do it. If you want to texture things differently, if you want to change the skybox, you can do that. You know, if you like, so I think it's, it's, I think it'd be a very different way of creating things that's fundamentally a lot more accessible, which will then unlock a lot more creativity.

51:12And there will just be a lot more interesting worlds and things to do. And that I think is going to be important, not just for VR and AR, but I think it's going to unlock all these experiences that billions of people will probably first see on their phones at some point. So that's what we're doing with the MetaHorizon studio work. It's this kind of agentic AI flow where people at different levels of sophistication can go in and create really interesting worlds and immersive environments. And I think that's neat. Then we paired that with MetaHorizon engine, which is basically this custom graphical rendering engine that we've been creating for two years now um it's this project that we've had for to build it from the ground up because you know previously we were using unity which is great but it's not really built for this use case i mean most games you know you you load a game it takes you know 20 seconds to um to kind of get into the game which kind of makes sense because you're loading this whole 3d world that you now need to be able to interact with but we want the worlds that you can interact with to feel more like jumping between two web pages or jumping between like two screens within a native app that's like really fast.

52:36So the whole like, okay, it has to take 20 seconds to like page this whole new world into memory was not going to cut it. So we rebuilt, we basically built MetaHorizon engine from scratch to be this graphics engine that can support rendering these kinds of worlds with high concurrency and the avatar system, the photorealistic avatars and all this with just a few seconds of load time. So it's more like a website or just a transition and an app. And that's the kind of thing that'll make it so that when you're in VR, you can jump between worlds easily. It's not like some big commitment or some big decision.

53:13You can just feel free to explore because it's not like you're gonna have to wait 20 or 30 seconds for the next thing to load. You walk through the portal. You don't like it. You walk back through the portal the other direction. And similarly, for things like within Facebook or Instagram, having the ability to kind of see a post and jump into a world, that's something that needs to have very low friction to do. So the MetaHorizon engine is this kind of core piece of technology. So yeah, I'd say on the Metaverse side, this year's announcements at Connect were more about kind of the software foundations than hardware.

53:49Alex Heath:But you're still committed to the hardware. Yeah, I mean, the way that we do the hardware is we don't have it plans that there's a new device every single year. Sure. We have multiple device lines. There's sort of the higher end one where we introduce some new technology and then we try to get it to be as affordable as possible. So we did Quest 3, then we did Quest 3S. But it's not like every year there's one. it's basically, you know, most years there will be a new one of one of those two. And then sometimes there's like an off year where we're pretty much just tuning the software to get ready for the new paradigm.

54:26Alex Heath:Got it. Okay. So Quest is still going. Yeah. We're first. Okay. Yeah. I've been saving this. I've got to ask you about this. You know, there is a tremendous amount of interest in your AI strategy right now. Unlike anything I've seen in the tech industry, honestly. Well, AI overall. AI overall, but I think like what you've done over the summer with the hiring and the super intelligence, you know, mission that you put out and all of that. Yeah. And we've been talking about AI as it relates to the hardware throughout this conversation. And, you know, AI was a part of my demo. It wasn't, I would say, like front and center.

55:01Alex Heath:And it seems like a lot of the work you're doing now is to get ready for when it will be. And I'm curious, you know, when I was here actually for the demo, I got to see the pod of the new lab and see them at work. and they're in there cranking. Like you can tell. And I would love to know, like maybe we can start here. Like when you decided I need to, I need to change things and why you decided to go about it the way that you did. Because I think that's the thing that people were like, whoa, like this is crazy. I think if you're on the inside, it doesn't feel as crazy because the talent market is very small.

55:36Alex Heath:It's kind of rational if you look at the numbers. But just the strategy, like walk me through like when you were like, okay, I want to make a change. This is what I want to do. Walk me through that. Yeah. I mean, this is an area that I just think it, I think AI and super intelligence are going to be the most important technologies in our lifetime. I think it's so important that it sort of demands its own hardware platform, which is a big part of why I'm so excited about glasses, because I think glasses are going to be the best kind of hardware device category to provide personal super intelligence to people.

56:14But I think AI is just this incredibly profound thing. It's going to change how we run the company. It's going to change how all companies run. It's going to change how we build products. It's going to change what products are possible. Change how creators do their work, right? So change the content that's possible, the mix of content, all these different things. So I think being on the frontier there is really critical if you want to continue just doing interesting work and pushing the world forward. I think just like with mobile, if you didn't invent the mobile phone, you could still do interesting work building apps.

56:54But I do think at some level you can do even more interesting work if you can both pair the software with the hardware experience. So we are definitely committed to being at the frontier and building superintelligence. I think it's going to be the most important technology, like I just said. And because of that, I just think we're very focused on making sure we build a leading effort. So over the last few years, we stood up an effort that was improving very quickly. So Lama was a good initial academic project. Lama 2 was a kind of good initial version of that as an open source release. Lama 3 was a big improvement over Lama 2.

57:46And then Lama 4 introduced some important improvements over Lama 3 too. but um i didn't feel like we were on the trajectory that we needed to be on to to basically like be at the frontier and be pushing the field forward and that was so i you know it's like i think every company at some point um goes through periods where you're not on the trajectory that you want to be on something and these are decisions that you get to make in your life or in building a company where the real question is not like, it's not like, is there going to be a moment where you feel like you're not kind of on the track that you want to be on?

58:24It's what do you do in that moment? And so I just decided that, you know, we should take a step back and build a new lab. And, you know, I think part of that was informed by the shape that I thought the effort should be. we have this real focus on talent density, right? And the idea is that you really want to have, this is like a group science project, right? So you want to have the smallest group of people who can fit the whole thing in their heads at once. And there's not many people who can do that. No, but you also want the group to be as small as possible, right? So there are some problems that we're working on around the company where like you can just have more people work on them.

59:10And even if the marginal productivity per person declines, you can just keep on scaling the net productivity of the effort. You know, our feed and ads recommendation is an interesting example of this, where we have a lot of people are just testing different improvements to the systems. And if one guy's sitting next to you, if that guy's experiments don't work that well, it doesn't necessarily slow you down that much. But I think building these language models is not that way, right? It's a small group effort. You want the smallest group of people that can keep the whole thing in their head and do the best work that they can.

59:48So each seat on that boat is incredibly precious and in high demand. You also don't want a lot of layers of hierarchy because when someone gets into management, their technical skills kind of start decaying pretty quickly. Even if they were an IC researcher a few months ago, now if they're spending all their time kind of helping to manage, then okay, after six months, a year, they might be less in the technical details than they were before. So I think that there's this huge premium on just having a relatively small, extremely talent-dense effort that is organized to be quite flat. And you're very hands-on with this team.

1:00:31well yeah i mean in the sense that i mean i'm not like an ai scientist yeah but the thing that i'm

1:00:36Alex Heath:sitting near you i mean it's clear that this is like the priority so yeah the thing that that i'm focused on is one getting the very best people in the world to join the team so i've spent a lot of time just meeting all of the top researchers and folks around the field and getting a sense for who i think would be good here and um who might be at a point in their career where we can give them a better opportunity. That's one piece. Another thing that I'm very focused on is making sure that we have significantly higher compute per researcher than any other lab, which I think we are just way higher on compute per researcher than any other lab today.

1:01:15And as the founder and CEO, and because we have a strong business model that can support this, I mean, we make a lot of profit.

1:01:23Alex Heath:A decent amount, yeah. Yeah, it's a reasonable amount. You can just call up Jensen and be like, more GPUs, please. It's not that simple. It's not that simple. And I normally text him with my glasses. But no, but it's, but there's a whole supply chain that goes into it. And the GPUs are one part of it. But then you also need to build data centers and get energy and get the other pieces and get the networking. And so, yeah, but the bottom line is we're very committed to that. and doing what we need to do to make sure that we have leading levels of compute. So we talked about recently how we're building this Prometheus cluster, which I think is going to be the first kind of single contiguous gigawatt plus cluster for training that I think has been built.

1:02:11In the world, we're building this Hyperion data center in Louisiana that I think is going a scale to five gigawatts over the coming years. And several other of these, we call them Titan data centers. They all have different Titan code names that are each going to be one to multiple gigawatts. And that's a significant investment. I think it took a fair amount of conviction. so i think unless you're um i think like a bunch of conditions need to be met like basically you need to have a business model that can support it you need to have a ceo who like believes in this very deeply right it's that they're just willing to like make that kind of investment for that um and then you need to have the technical ability to actually go build the things and bring them online and i think we're one of if not the only company in the world that meets all of those criteria.

1:03:11So, um, so yeah, um, I mean, other people will do other interesting things too, but no, I think that this is going to be very interesting. The other principle though, that we have for the lab is, um, you know, it's, it's split into different efforts, right? There's the, the lab that we call TBD, which, um, it, that's what I saw. Yeah. That's the, that's the research lab. Um, TBD was, it was the placeholder name, but then it's stuck. Cause it's kind of a good vibe, right? It's like, all right, it's like a work in progress type vibe. Then we also have applied research and product in Nat Friedman's group.

1:03:48And that team is working on a lot of research that goes directly into the products. So things that may not necessarily directly be on the path to superintelligence, like speech that passes the Turing test and things like that, but are important for the products nonetheless. So we're working on all those things and the research effort, the TBD effort is truly a long-term research effort. So one of the principles that we have for the lab is just no deadlines, right? So people are asking, okay, when are we going to ship the model? This is very kind of, it's a strategy and it's also the values that we're trying to put in it is, I mean, all these researchers are very competitive.

1:04:35They all want to be at the leading edge. They know the industry is moving quickly. They're going to put a ton of pressure on themselves. Me telling them that something should get done in nine months or six months or whatever isn't going to help them do their job. It's only going to put another artificial constraint on it that makes them sub-optimize the problem. And I want them to go for kind of the full thing. I mean, it's like we're going for trying to build AI that can improve itself responsibly and that can... And we're basically building these models that bring all these modalities together to deliver the kinds of experiences that we're talking about.

1:05:11And yeah, I mean, I think me putting a deadline on that is not going to be helpful. So yeah, so I'm very focused on, and that's the nature of research, right? It's not engineering. It's not like engineering is when you know how to do something and you go and you need to put together a complex process to build it. Research is when there's several unknown problems. In an AI, I don't even think we have a sense of how many unknown problems there are. For something like glasses, we have a sense. It's like, okay, there's like 10 areas of unknown problems that we need to go solve. Like, how do we get the right wave guides?

1:05:41How do we get the right laser display? No one's ever done this, but like we can try 10 different things in each one of those and kind of run it forward. And AI, I don't think anyone can definitively tell you how deep the problem space is. So it's very much research.

1:05:57Alex Heath:That's fascinating. So yeah. So what do you do to do that as well as possible? You get the very best team, talent density, make sure that people have the resources that they need, and clear all the other stuff that comes from running a big company out of the way. And that's kind of my job for them. Yeah. You were talking about the CapEx and the data centers. You obviously see something on the other side of that that will warrant that being worth it. But I'm wondering, do you ascribe to these bubble fears at all that people are talking about that we're in this massive overspending, getting ahead of the skis bubble.

1:06:31Alex Heath:And maybe a company like Meta will be okay, because you guys do have a core business that makes a lot of money. But how do you think about this bubble talk that has been going on for the last few months, especially?

1:06:45I mean, I think it's quite possible. I mean, I think basic, if you look at most other major infrastructure buildups in history, whether it's railroads or fiber for the internet, you know, in the dot-com bubble, these things were all chasing something that ended up being fundamentally very valuable. In most cases, it ended up being even more valuable than the people who were kind of pushing the bubble thought it was going to be. But in at least all of these past cases, the infrastructure gets built out, people take on too much debt, and then you hit some blip, whether it's some macroeconomic thing or Or maybe you just have like a couple of years where the demand for the product doesn't quite materialize.

1:07:31And then a lot of the companies end up going out of business. And then the assets get distressed. And then it's a great opportunity to go buy more. So I think that it's obviously impossible to predict what will happen here. There are compelling arguments for why AI could be an outlier. And basically just, you know, if the models keep on growing in capability year over year and demand keeps growing, then maybe there is no collapse or something. But I do think that there's definitely a possibility, at least empirically, based on past large infrastructure buildouts and how they led to bubbles, that something like that would happen here.

1:08:21from meta's perspective you know i i think the strategy is actually pretty simple it's um you know it's at least in terms of building out the infrastructure you know it's no one knows when super intelligence is going to be possible is it going to be three years gonna be five years eight years whatever is it never going to happen but i don't think it's never going to happen i i I'm more ambitious or optimistic. I think it's going to be on the sooner side. But let's say that you weren't sure if it was going to be three or five years. Like in a conservative business situation, maybe you'd hedge building out your infrastructure because you're worried that if you build it out, assuming it's going to be three years and it takes five, then you've lost maybe a couple hundred billion dollars or something.

1:09:08I mean, my view is that - That's a lot of money. Well, no. Well, I was going to say, in the grand scheme, it is objectively a huge amount of money. Yeah. Right?

1:09:17Alex Heath:I mean, didn't you just tell Trump you were going to spend like$600 billion? I mean, that's - I did. Yeah, through 2028, which is - That's a lot of money. It is. And if we end up misspending a couple of hundred billion dollars, I think that that is going to be very unfortunate, obviously. But what I'd say is I actually think the risk is higher on the other side. If you build too slowly and then super intelligence is possible in three years, but you built it out assuming it would be there in five years, then you're just out of position on what I think is going to be the most important technology that enables the most new products and innovation and value creation and history.

1:09:57So, I don't know. I mean, I don't want to be kind of cavalier about it. I mean, obviously, these are very large amounts of money and we're trying to get it right. But I think the risk, at least for a company like Meta, is probably in not being aggressive enough rather than being somewhat too aggressive. But part of that is we're not at risk of going out of business or something like that, right? If you're one of these, you know, companies that like an open AI or an anthropic or something like that, where, you know, they're raising money as the way that they're funding their build out. And, you know, there's obviously this open question of to what extent are they going to be able to keep on raising money?

1:10:45And that's dependent both to some degree on their performance and how AI does, but also all these macroeconomic factors that are out of their control. I mean, the market could get bearish for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, maybe something bad happens internationally. And then it could just be impossible to fulfill the compute funding, like the compute obligations. So I think that's, it might be a different situation if you're in one of their shoes. But I think for us, I think the clear strategy is it's just, I think it creates more value for the world if we kind of assume pretty aggressive assumptions about when this is going to be possible and take some risk that maybe it takes a little bit longer.

1:11:32Alex Heath:Do you feel like the US is in a better place now to help with this and to help American companies succeed? I think you've done a lot of work with this new administration. And when we were here last year, you were saying you wanted to kind of stay out of it. But it seems like you realized, Was the realization that this is just so important that I have to play ball with this? Oh, well, I mean, the thing that I want to stay out of is partisan politics. Okay. So, but I mean, we will always want to work with and have a good partnership and collaboration with governments, right? And that's going to be especially true in our home country, but it's also true in other countries around the world where we serve large amounts of people.

1:12:22So, yeah, but I'd say yes. I mean, I think this administration, for a number of reasons, is definitely more forward-leaning on wanting to help build out infrastructure. And that has, I think, been positive. And I think that that aspect of this is, I think the next few years are going to be very important for the AI build out and the AI infrastructure build out. And I think having a government, which it's important both at the federal level and in the states where you work, that want that build out to happen is fundamentally a helpful thing. Yeah.

1:13:01Alex Heath:There was a line in your super intelligence memo that you wrote where you said, over the last few months, we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. Yeah. I was really interested in that line. What specifically did you see that made you write that? Well, I mean, one of the early examples that we saw was a team that was working on Facebook that took a version of Llama 4 and made this autonomous agent that could start to improve parts of the Facebook algorithm. and it basically checked in a number of changes that are the type of thing that like a mid-level engineer would get promoted for really so yeah so i think that's like very neat it's like you basically have built an ai that is building ai that makes the product better um that improves the quality that people observe.

1:14:05To be clear, this is still a low percentage of the overall improvements that we're making to Facebook and Instagram. But I think it'll grow over time. So that's one of the things that I was talking about when I said glimpses, right? I mean, this isn't like, okay, the AI is improving itself at an exponentially fast rate or something like that. I think that what we're seeing are early examples of AIs autonomously improving AI in ways that are having a positive impact on the experience that people get to. And that's how

1:14:39Alex Heath:to think about superintelligence broadly is that when you're there, it's AI that is rapidly improving itself. That's what it means? Or is that too simple? Yeah, I think AI that can improve itself. And that's beyond human level. I think that there's this dynamic today where all the AIs are trained on data and knowledge that people have produced. So a lot of the systems seem to be kind of very broad and have all the knowledge of humanity. So maybe that's in some dimensions, it might feel like it is smarter than any one given person and kind of the breadth of what it knows. But I still think today, the systems are basically gated on human knowledge.

1:15:26and um there is a world beyond that right where i think you're starting to get into that with some of the thinking models where they can go out and solve problems in the future that no person can solve and then can learn from having solved that problem and and um the pace of that improvement to me is somewhat less important than um than just the process of it i'm not like a super fast takeoff believer because um in the sense that i don't think it's like going to be okay one day it can improve itself and then the next day it's going to take over everything um i mean i think that there's like way more physical constraints like it takes time to build data centers like if you a lot of frontier human knowledge comes from empirical experimentation right so you um Um, you know, if you're, you develop some new drug, you want to see a, if it works and B, if it's safe for people, how do you do that?

1:16:28You run a test where you give it to a handful of people, um, maybe more than a handful, but some, some statistically significant group of people. And you observe how that goes for a while to see both whether the positive effects are kind of long lived and whether there's any negative effects. It's, okay, well, if you're trying to run a six-month or a 12-month trial, you can't do that in less than six or 12 months. I mean, maybe you can get a negative result sooner, but you're not going to be able to validate that you can get the positive result that you're looking for without having done that test.

1:17:05So I think that's also going to be true with AI. right there are going to be some things that maybe something that's like a super intelligent system can just intuit or reason from first principles using the knowledge that we already have but i think a lot of learning is going to be experimental and i i do just think these things take time right it's you have to run long-term experiments if you're trying to make long-term changes in the world and that i think is going to be true for the ai too now maybe it'll on average run smarter experiments. So per experiment, maybe it'll learn more.

1:17:40I think it will probably be able to figure out some things from first principle. It will definitely be able to figure out a bunch of things from first principles. But I don't know. I'm not like, I'm not on the camp of people who think it's going to be like overnight this changes. I think it's going to be this very steady progression where just making our lives better. All right.

1:17:59Alex Heath:Well, it's going to be a wild few years. Yeah. Yeah, Mark, I appreciate you doing this. Yeah, happy to. Yeah, congrats on the new show. Thank you, appreciate it. Alex, I enjoyed that interview, but I have to ask, how does it feel to have Mark Zuckerberg in your neuro band? I hope he's not actually in the band, but I guess we don't know for sure. But seriously, thanks to Zuck for taking the time to be the first guest on Access. You can read more about what we talked about in my newsletter, sources.news. And Ellis, what are you plugging? Yeah, you could find me on Twitter, which I will continue to call Twitter at at hamburger and at meaning.company.

1:18:39Alex Heath:Access is produced in partnership with Vox Media. Please follow us. We're a new show. We need your support. We need your follows. Hitting that notification button to get new episodes. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, all the other podcast apps that I don't know about. We're also on YouTube and video. please check us out there at access pod. You can also find us on all of the socials at access pod. Smash that like button. Smash it. All right. I can't wait to tell my grandkids. Alice, that's our first episode. We'll see everyone next week.

1:19:20Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com slash vox. That's odoo.com slash vox.

1:19:56That refresh you've been putting off until the right deal came along? It's here! Wayfair's Black Friday in July sale is happening now, so you can finally get the style you've been waiting for for less. Get up to 80 % off area rugs and up to 60 % off outdoor and bedroom furniture. Shop Wayfair's huge selection of styles and find the piece to fit your style, budget, and space. Plus, free shipping! Black Friday in July ends July 27th. Shop today at Wayfair.com.