Mark Zuckerberg’s 'Superintelligent' AI Future That No One Wants

0:01Emanuel:This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Sam Altman earlier this month heard from parents who were generating personalized podcasts to like listen to with their kids on the drive to school.

0:34Emanuel:The drive to school is like when you should be actually talking to your kid. How about you try talking to your kid versus having an AI podcast do it.

0:46Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co Also, do remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel where you can watch all of our episodes, including this one. Subscribe at youtube.com slash at 404mediaCO. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the other 404 Media co-founders, the first being Sam Cole.

1:31Emanuel:Hello. Emmanuel Mayberg. Hey, what's up? And Jason Kebler. Hello, hello. All right. We're starting with the sporadic, maybe regular Mark Zuckerberg manifesto. You know, he'll regularly, what's every six months or something, maybe every year, he'll write something like this, or he'll post some insane new video. A ton of people read this, and obviously you had some thoughts about it, Jason. So the headline of your piece, Mark Zuckerberg posts deranged 6 ,500 word essay about giving everyone AI super intelligence. Let me just read the lead or rather the second part of it, because I think we'll sum up what you're trying to say, is that he posts this.

2:20He's describing a future that he says is for everyone, but which really sounds less social than ever. There's a lot to get into here, Jason. Don't drill into the specifics yet, but when you read this, what was your immediate reaction to this deranged essay?

2:37Emanuel:Yeah, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg, again, does this every so often. Like he did a huge one for the metaverse. He's done several different ones for AI. And it's basically like a big long post on his own Facebook or on like Meta's blog. And again, this one is called The Future is for Everyone. And it is essentially his vision for AI super intelligence, which he has been talking about maybe even more than Sam Altman and Dario Amadei, like more than the other kind of like like AI tech mavens. And I feel like he's been doing this maybe in part because Meta feels like it has fallen behind in AI. And so he's like really leaned into like, we are pitching a future where AI is going to change your life.

3:27Emanuel:There's a lot in this essay about how the other AI companies are building AI for businesses and enterprises, whereas Meta is building like personal AI for individual users. And so he's trying to really differentiate himself or Meta's product as being this one that's like designed for the common person and how it's going to change your life and all this sort of thing. Yeah, definitely a lot of talk with all of Meta's massive AI hires and then people immediately leaving the company, offering people in the AI industry bucket loads of money, and some of them being like, no, I'm good. I don't want to go work at Meta.

4:12It does seem pretty desperate in a lot of ways. So more specifically on the agents, what is he saying that Meta is going to offer people? You're going to have your own agent, and so what? What is Zuckerberg saying we're going to do here?

4:29Emanuel:Yeah, I mean, I think the big thing is that there's a lot going on in this essay. So the broad majority of it, like the beginning talks about personal agents, like super intelligent agents that will work for you. But then he later gets into like, data centers and why the United States needs to lead the AI revolution. And he talks about China, and he talks about open weights, which we can talk about. But like, I think the core thing to understand is that this essay is all over the place. It's not very coherent. It has tons of platitudes that are about nothing. And so like with that kind of backdrop, let's talk about agents.

5:07Emanuel:For people who don't know, an AI agent is like a personalized AI that you give access to like act on your behalf, more or less. And so you would give it, you know, access to your accounts, your messaging, maybe your bank, like all sorts of things. And then it would like theoretically learn about your life and go on and do things for you. and what Mark Zuckerberg is saying is that like you will have this personalized AI agent that will free up all sorts of time for you and then he sort of like gets into specifics I think it's best to just like read a quote here so this is how he like introduces it he says everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you your goals and everything you care about your agent will work 24 7 on your behalf to improve your relationships health career finances home management, hobbies, and more.

5:58Emanuel:It will free up time for the things you enjoy and help you accomplish more than you could otherwise. It will have strong privacy and security options so you can trust to handle all of your personal content, knowing that no one else can access your information. You'll be able to interact with your agent through any device, including your glasses, which is funny, to keep you present in the moment with the people you care about. So, I mean, this is like the pitch for all sort of like agents where it's like, oh, well, isn't buying a flight so annoying. You can just tell your agent that you want to buy a flight and it will find the best flight for you and it will buy it for you.

6:33Emanuel:Or it will just know that you need to go somewhere and it will proactively buy a flight for you. He goes on to sort of like explain how his own agent that he's made is like developing recipes for him to make with his daughter and things like this, like kind of outsourcing things that normal humans enjoy doing. Part of the point is to spend time and show that you care. It's like, oh, well, the agent did it for me. Yeah, so he simultaneously says that our AI agents will go on your behalf and they will free up time for what really matters. And presumably that will be something like crafting a recipe to make with your daughter or something like that.

7:15But no, no, he's having the AI do that. I mean, yes, he's still doing the cooking, but I don't know, he's outsourced half of it to the AI, I thought the whole point was to do that thing with your family. So, I mean, I don't really know is, does he not enjoy that part or like, is that a theme you keep saying in this essay?

7:33Emanuel:Uh, I mean, that's a, that's a theme in this essay. It's a theme in like, uh, you know, Sam Altman last week or earlier this month said that he had heard from parents who were generating personalized podcasts to like, listen to with their kids on the drive to school. And everyone's like, well, Well, the drive to school is like when you should be actually talking to your kid. How about you try talking to your kid versus having an AI agent or like an AI podcast do it? The real thing here is that like Zuckerberg is pitching a future that he says is for everyone, but that sounds a lot like the present in some ways.

8:06Emanuel:And then also is not a future that like necessarily everyone wants or that really many people at all want. And so he sort of like talks about AI job loss, for example, or he's like, well, automation is happening. But then he's like, but your personal AI agent will allow you to do your own scientific research and to make your own inventions and all of these sorts of things and to start your own business. And it's like, not everyone wants to become an inventor. Not everyone wants to cure cancer. Not everyone. I mean, people want to cure cancer, but like people don't want to like. Not everybody. Not everyone.

8:43Emanuel:It's basically, he's basically like everyone will be able to do everything all the time. And like your AI agent will be doing it for you. He's talking about how like people at meta are using AI to discover like new crystal structures that can go into the meta glasses. And like, you may be able to do your own. And it's sort of, it reminds me of vibe coding. Yeah, it reminds me a bit of vibe coding where it's like, oh, like you can, uh, with vibe coding, you can like code your own email client and your own chat client and your own like calendar app and all of this. And it's like, or if that's not something I'm passionate about, I can just use someone else's and I shouldn't have to become a coder just because that's what we've found AI is good at doing at the moment.

9:28Yeah. Just on the work thing, when Zuckerberg is saying your AI will do all these things so you can go and make your own business or make that very, very straightforward. Just the other day, I was listening to an interview with Gary Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator on the Verge's Dakota podcast. And he said something to the effect that was very much the same, like AIs are going to mean you can go make your own business. And it's very, very straightforward. Actually, I'm sorry. I think it was the Wall Street Journal. I'll double check that. But he brings up that point. And of course, it's in the discussion of labor.

10:03And I think the interviewer says, well, look, people are going to lose their jobs. But Tan just replies, well, yeah, but those people should now go become entrepreneurs. But not everybody wants to do that. And there's that through line, I think, in that Tan interview. And then in this Zuckerberg essay that, as you say, Jason, it kind of just assumes that this is what people want. And probably a ton of them don't actually.

10:30Emanuel:Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, he also says like repeatedly, like the future is for everyone. This AI future is for everyone. And he then describes like what this means and how like Meta is working on making like free AI tools of which, you know, there's a lot of free AI tools out there, at least free for the user. And then he describes like this future system where he was like, it has to be accessible to everyone. And then he explains, quote, for everyone to be part of the future, everyone must have the ability to use super intelligence to improve their lives and shape the world. We will offer free versions that will be accessible to billions of people.

11:09Emanuel:For those who want to pay to use more compute, there will be a dynamic auction mechanism that will guarantee that everyone gets the lowest price possible for the intelligence and compute they're using, while also ensuring the capacity is used for whatever people collectively find most valuable. And that's just like the system we already have, where some of it is free and some of it you have to pay for. And if you pay for it, you get more and better. And if you have more and better, it's going to be a tiered system. It sounds like he's recreated the concept of just paying for AI compute. And then, you know, there's tons of just like drivel and like weird thought experiments and just like platitudes out there.

11:50Emanuel:Like these are real sentences from this essay. quote, humanity is not a monoculture. People's diverse values represent different trade-offs that they would make on important issues. That means nothing. Thanks, Matt. People have an infinite demand for new experiences and have always found new problems to tackle. It's just like a lot of it is, I don't want to say it was written by AI because it is so weird that I don't think that it was. But it is basically like this just big manifesto. And I think it's just worth remembering that, you know, this is like a top 10 most rich person in the world. I don't know where he is at the moment, but he's just like wildly wealthy.

12:36Emanuel:He is driving this innovation or rather he's like pushing this product on people. He's, you know, the metaverse was a gigantic failure. And now he's saying, well, like this is going to be the thing that we do. And it's this kind of like hubris and an ego trip that Silicon Valley CEOs have where they say like, here is what humanity is going to do. And we're going to be the ones to take us there. It's like you see in Mark Andreessen's like, it's time to build. You see it with Elon Musk being like, we're going to colonize Mars. We're going to have driverless cars. We're going to have all this stuff.

13:14Emanuel:And some technological progress is quite good. But in order to do all of this, it's like there's a huge capital expenditure, like all of the products are, you know, inshittifying in a way that is really annoying and changes how people have like lived and worked for a long time. In the case of Elon Musk and also Mark Zuckerberg, there's like tons of tax breaks involved. There's lots of government lobbying involved. There's lots of, you know, handouts associated with it. And so, you know, these people are quite successful at getting like government buy-in for their vision. But it's not clear that this is like something that the masses are interested in.

13:57Emanuel:Yeah, absolutely. So, Sam, you've probably interacted with Meta's AI products, I think, more than anyone here. Well, also the metaverse as well, because I think you have a quest, right? And I think you went in and saw how garbage that was. And then you did a bunch of investigations into Meta's AI chatbot around, you know, them pretending to be licensed therapists and that sort of thing. um that's a little bit different to the agentic ai they're promising here like a chatbot is not exactly the same as agentic ai blah blah blah whatever but like just based on your experience of actually interacting with and using meta ai tools like do you think meta could pull this off in any sort of convincing way no definitely not i mean like the assessment that you guys have already discussed is I agree with completely.

14:53Emanuel:It's like, I guess it was last year, Zuck was like, you guys don't have enough friends. So our chatbots will be the answer to that. He just is so detached from the actual experiences of most people that I think he thinks that the things that he feels is what everyone feels which is obviously like ceo brain tech exec brain to a t and you know he has a lot of people around him who are like sick fence and are telling him that that's a great idea and yes manning his way to these crazy screeds but yeah i mean he this is so classic, as you guys already said, of the scrambling that he does before something totally shits the bed.

15:44It was before the metaverse fell apart and that dream died that he was pushing it

15:52Emanuel:the hardest and saying, this is the future that everyone's going to have. And we're all going to be in the metaverse and won't it be wonderful and lovely. And we're going to be floating around with no legs um it's it's such a clear pattern at this point that i i don't know why he i don't know who lets him continue to publish these things i don't know why someone around him isn't like hey maybe let's not post this right now maybe let's have an edit of this before we say it completely but i'm glad no one is stopping him because it's very um revelatory of his mindset and what he thinks is happening is where the company goes, whether it works or not.

16:35Emanuel:Yeah, I mean... It's good content. It's great. I feel bad for this country, but it's fantastic content. So to take it back even further, and I know there's sort of an obvious historical timeline, but, you know, with Facebook, he was like the leader in social media or social networking. And obviously that is how Facebook and then Meta became this corporate giant, right? And then through acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram, okay, we've acquired that. So now we're increasing, we're keeping our relevance and increasing it as well, of course, because those platforms were a threat. But now you can't really acquire stuff in the metaverse because it had to be made.

17:17So we tried to make that and that fell apart, obviously just fell straight flat on his face there. Now in the AI stuff, you can't just go and acquire anthropic or open AI. So you try to do this hiring spree, which is get some people. And as I said, some people quit. And sort of, as you alluded to in the start, Jason, like meta is not an open AI or an anthropic. Like they're nowhere near that, it seems. So they do have to start to say, oh no, we're focused on the thing that comes after super intelligence. And it's like, it's just words. Like we haven't seen any results. And that is a pattern with Zuck since Facebook way back when.

17:58Emanuel:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we didn't even talk about and the ostensible like reason for posting this, which I think the reason that he posted this now is that Meta released new open weights, uh, AI models. And there there's a fair part of this. That's like open weights. AI is the future. And that's like what we need to be doing. And for people who don't know, it's like, it's just open source. It's not fully open source, but it's basically like, you can see what these are AI models where you can see sort of like, well, what is favoring and this sort of thing. Like it is more open source than open AI has right now than Anthropic has right now.

18:39Emanuel:And if I didn't get the specifics of that correct, I'm sorry, I cover more like the political side of, of this rather than the technical aspects of it. But in any case, this is like him sort of like making the argument for more open AI. Sorry for that. But and I think a lot of the commentary has been like, he doesn't actually believe this stuff. They're releasing open weights models because they are behind. And so they need to differentiate themselves in some way. And by saying like, AI should be more open, more accessible, you should be able to see the code. You should be able to see sort of like what, uh, it's doing under the hood.

19:23Emanuel:Like you should be able to fork it, et cetera. Like this is meta's way of differentiating itself from its competitors that are, that are way far ahead of it. It's like anyone who's used meta AI and meta claims, it's like billions of people at this point, it's like not a good product. You can't use it for serious work. You can't use it for like, you can use it to make slop, But, you know, people are not like turning to Meta AI for their day to day AI use. They're using either Claude or they're using ChatGPT or they're like using, you know, Gemini sort of like because it's just in all of the products they're already using.

20:05Emanuel:So to the extent that people are using Meta AI, like maybe they're engaging with it on Facebook or on Instagram, but it's not their like daily AI driver, you know, for the people that are using it. And so this is him trying to just sort of be like, oh, we're an AI company also, even though, you know, to the extent that meta is an AI company, it's like done very well with ad targeting. And it's done really well with using AI to generate ads on its own platforms. But like it's not on the verge of super intelligence by any stretch. And the other thing that it's, you know, quote unquote, like good at it is the meta glasses, the AI glasses.

20:49Emanuel:And it's like, that's a widely hated product, if not by the people using it by society at large, because it's like these creepy surveillance glasses. But they made them and they're out there, you know, so that does differentiate it a little bit from open AR. So because they don't have like a wearable. It's just that Meta did make a wearable that some people do buy. It's just that the vast majority of people fucking hate it. But hey, they made something. Well done. Right. And so, I mean, he leans into it like he mentions the glasses several times in this. He's like, oh, yeah, we'll be able to use your AI assistant on your glasses.

21:20And it's like, OK, that's because you have glasses.

21:24Emanuel:That's not because he's selling it. Yeah, you don't hear of anybody personally or in an enterprise talking about token maxing with meta AI or, whoa, guys, we need to clamp down on the meta AI use inside of our company because you're burning through because nobody's using it in any serious capacity. Yeah. I think just super briefly before we go to the next session, does he say anything about data centers? Does he touch on that at all? Yeah, I mean, he talks about how, you know, we need data centers. And he talks about one in Richland Parish, Louisiana, which we've written about a few times. We have a freelancer named Roshan Abraham, who's covered that.

22:04Emanuel:And basically, it's like the Manhattan sized data center that Meta is building in Louisiana. and he's basically like we need to make sure that our data centers are helping the local community that we're paying taxes that uh he's like we need to own the power infrastructure which is like super interesting that he says that because one they don't own the power infrastructure there at the moment and the power infrastructure that they're building is all fossil fuels it's like quite bad fossil fuels like in that specific one um and so i mean he nods at it i think because he just knows that this is like a really hot button political issue.

22:43Emanuel:And I do think that Meta has been leaning into this idea that basically teachers in Richland Parish got a pay raise because of the tax money flowing in there. And that's like a political win or at least the way that they're painting it. They've been like, look, we built a data center here and then teachers got paid more. Like data centers are good actually. we need to reclaim kind of like the argument there. Um, I don't know, your mileage may vary on that one. It's like a lot of the people there don't like it. I think the teachers there have, or some of them have changed their tune because they did get this like quite large pay raise, but like that, who knows how long that lasts.

23:28Emanuel:The, the big thing that, I mean, you know, we've talked about it various times, but it's like, yes, there are jobs that come to town that are construction jobs when you're building a data center, but like how many jobs will be there once this thing is fully up and running and there's no construction needed anymore. So yeah, he does talk about it. All right. We'll leave that there. When we come back after the break, we're going to talk about a company that offers a hundred percent human written, never AI papers, but there's something interesting under the hood. We'll be right back after this.

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