Mark Zuckerberg on Muse, Meta's biggest AI bet yet

Mark, last time we spoke,

you called me. It was on the weekend. Well, you called me through the glasses, which was the interesting part. Was it loud in the background?

You were

going to fish.

I wasn't going to say it. All right. Yeah, it was on the weekend. The noise cancellation actually is pretty good.

Oh, it's great. Yeah, it's pretty good. Yeah, I mean,

yeah. But you wanted to talk about this essay manifesto. I don't know what you call it. Manifesto, we'll say. that you published recently, and it's long. I mean, I'll caveat that there's a lot in it. And I wanted to start there, because there's a lot of big ideas in there, and they'll connect to kind of the main thing we're talking about today. Yeah. I'm curious, like, why write that? Because it's long. There's a lot in there.

Well, I feel like if you're going to invest so much in building AI, then it's important that people understand what your lab stands for and what your values are. And basically, AI has so many opportunities, but there are also all these real risks. So I think it's very important that everyone who's working on it has a well-thought-out theory for how the work that they're going to do is going to lead to a positive future. It's interesting because the different labs have some different philosophies on this. And there's a lot of things that I think have become conventional wisdom in the industry that I just strongly disagree with. And my view on this is that the path to have a positive future for everyone is to make sure that we distribute the technology as widely as possible. And that's based on three major principles that we have. One is that empowering people is the source of prosperity in the world, and it has been throughout history. Two is that the primary purpose for AI is going to be invention of new things, not automation. And then the third principle is that the foundation for safety for the future is basically establishing the right checks and balances and balance of power rather than restricting access. And these are all things that I think oddly are kind of very different from, I think, a lot of the conventional wisdom, especially in Silicon Valley. A lot of people think, hey, this technology is very powerful. We must restrict it so that way not that many people have access to it. I personally am much more worried about a small number of labs or people having control of something that is so capable. And I think that throughout history, what we've found is that when you put power in people's hands, most advances don't come from the incumbents or the establishment. They come from people on the periphery whose ideas aren't taken seriously. But when they get enough tools to basically be able to prove out what they're working on, that ends up being very powerful. In Western society, the way that we've established governance and basically having a well-balanced society is through a set of checks and balances and this balance of power. It's very ingrained in kind of our society that you don't want to have, you know, one lab or two labs having access to a thing. For some of the most recent concerns that have come up, like some of these cybersecurity concerns, I think the