Outlining what he sees going forward for the future of AI, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview published Thursday that he deeply believes there won’t be “just one AI.” Touting the value of open source in putting AI tools in the hands of many people, Zuckerberg took a moment to weigh in on the efforts of unnamed competitors he sees as less open, adding that they seem to think they’re “creating God “.
“I don’t think AI technology is something to be guarded and … that a company can use it to build anything central. one product they’re building,” Zuckerberg said in a new YouTube interview with Kane Sutter (@Kallaway).
“I find it quite a departure when people in the tech industry … talk about building this ‘one true AI,'” he continued. “It’s almost like they think they’re creating God or something and … we just don’t do that,” he said. “I don’t think it happens that way.”
“I can see why, if you’re in some kind of AI lab…you want to feel like what you’re doing is super important, right? … It’s like, ‘We’re building the only true thing for the future.’ But I just think realistically, that’s not how things work, right?” Zuckerberg explained. “It’s not like there’s one app on people’s phones that people use. There is no single creator that people want all of their content from. There is no single business that people want to buy everything from.”
In the conversation, Zuckerberg said that there should be many different AIs to be created to reflect the different interests of people. The company also on Thursday announced early tests of its AI Studio software in the US, which will allow creators and others to create AI avatars that will be able to reach people through Instagram’s messaging system. AIs will be able to answer questions from their followers and converse with humans in a fun way, but will be labeled as “AI” to avoid confusion.
When talking about companies building closed AI platforms, Meta’s CEO said he doesn’t believe that’s the way to create the best experiences for people.
“You want to unlock and … unleash as many people as possible to try different things,” he continued. “I mean, that’s the culture, right? It’s not like one group of people is dictating everything for the people.
His comments seem a bit sour grapes, as they arrive shortly after reports emerged that Meta tried to negotiate with Apple to integrate its AI into operating systems instead of just running OpenAI at launch, but was shot down. According to Bloomberg, Apple has decided not to pursue formal discussions with Meta because it doesn’t believe its privacy practices are strong enough.
Without a deal, Meta loses access to potentially billions of iPhone users worldwide. But Meta’s plan B seems to be to build technology that expands beyond the smartphone.
In the interview, Zuckerberg touched on the progress the company is seeing with the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, for example, saying his path will one day converge with the work being done now on full holographic displays. However, the former will have more appeal in the near future, he said.
“I actually think you can create a great experience with cameras and microphone and speakers and the ability to do multimodal AI before you even have any display on those glasses,” he noted. In addition, the lack of a display reduces costs. Meta’s smart glasses are around $300 and the Meta Quest Pro is $1000 for comparison.
Zuckerberg said there will be three different products before the convergence: smart glasses without a display, a heads-up type display and full holographic displays. Ultimately, he said, instead of neural interfaces connected to their brains, people might one day wear a bracelet that picks up signals from the brain communicating with their arm. This will allow them to communicate with the neural interface by barely moving their arm. In time, this may allow people to write as well.
Zuckerberg cautioned that these types of AI inputs and experiences may not immediately replace smartphones. “I don’t think in the history of technology, the new platform — it doesn’t usually make people stop using the old one.” You just use it less,” he said.
For example, people now use smartphones to do things they might have done on their computers 10 to 15 years ago.
“I think that will happen with glasses as well,” he said. “It’s not like we’re going to stop having a phone. It’ll just stay in your pocket and you’ll pull it out when you actually need to do things with it. But more and more I think people will just start saying, “Hey, I can take this picture with my glasses on. I can ask that question to an AI or I can send a message to somebody — it’s just so much easier with glasses,” Zuckerberg said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if 10 years from now we’ll probably still have phones, but they’ll probably be much more intentional in use, rather than just reflexively reaching for them and grabbing for whatever technological thing you want us to do,” he said .
