Mark Zuckerberg wrote 6,500 words this week about how AI will empower you, and the loudest response was a shrug followed by a question: coming from him?
That’s the gap Meta can’t close with prose. The essay, titled “The Future is for Everyone,” promises that “everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about.” What people remember is what the last big Zuckerberg promise turned into.
The messenger problem
We got into this on the latest episode of the Equity podcast, with Kirsten Korosec, Rebecca Bellan and me. Our colleague Russell Brandom had already written that the manifesto is “exactly why people don’t like AI.”
Rebecca Bellan put the Meta history directly against the pitch. “You look back to the social media days, [Zuckerberg] was saying that he wants to make sure that everyone has an outlet for talking to their friends and having a social network,” she said. “And what do we have instead? We have ragebaiting and advertisements, and not connection.”
That’s the whole problem in two sentences. A vision document only works if the person holding it has a record of shipping the thing they described.
Meta isn’t in the frontier conversation, so it’s changing the conversation
Bellan read the essay as a repositioning move. “Cynically, I think that this is an attempt for Meta to win in a different way,” she said. “They’re not winning in the frontier, closed-model space. They’re not necessarily even winning in the open space. But when it comes to personal empowerment, as Mark Zuckerberg talks about in his letter, ‘The Future Is for Everyone,’ that’s where he’s trying to win. He’s trying to provide the models that people will use for their own personal AI on their own personal devices.”
Last year’s version of this letter, “Futures for Everyone,” pointed the AI at glasses and wearables. This one doesn’t commit. “It’s not really clear what the final hardware form factor for this would be, and I guess he’s like leaving it up to the individual to choose,” Bellan said.
The pitch for Meta’s new AI model, Glimmer: “you’re using Glimmer for managing your schedule, drafting messages, organizing files, it’s always on, it can operate anytime, anywhere, with or without an internet connection,” she said. Muse Spark stays behind the curtain as the paid path. “So that maintains a way for them to have some level of control over, still, its most capable models, and provide a revenue outlet for people who want to scale their compute, and people who want to like do larger projects, or companies that might want to do larger projects.”
I asked whether this is a land grab. The answer was yes
Here’s how I framed it on the show. Meta has made some serious investments in AI, and last year there were all those stories about how much money it was trying to pay AI scientists. But when people list the frontier labs, Meta doesn’t come up. Same with consumer chatbots. People do interact with Meta AI tools inside Instagram and Facebook, but Meta isn’t the company you think of when you go looking for a personal assistant.
Bellan agreed, with a caveat about the pattern. “Mark Zuckerberg loves to put out a vision of what his companies will do for people and how they will empower people,” she said. “Of course, Llama is great; it’s a great tool and open source, but I think that on a consumer level, how are people using Meta AI? Well, there’s like a lot of creepy-ass chatbots.”
Then she tried to actually download it
This is the detail that stuck with me, because it’s the only hands-on data point in the whole conversation and it cuts against the title of the essay.
“I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll try to download Muse Glimmer and see what I can do with it,'” Bellan said. “Can I download it to my MacBook? No. You need specific hardware. I forget what the hardware is. It’s not actually that accessible to the average person.”
Korosec’s response was the shortest verdict of the episode. “It’s not for everyone. Not yet.”
Pollyannish, and priced accordingly
Korosec’s read on why the backlash spread so fast: “the manifesto didn’t strike the right note for a lot of people.” She pointed at Brandom’s column again, saying it’s what’s “making people hate AI or hate on AI.”
“It is coming from Zuckerberg, and I do think also it feels very Pollyannish in a way,” she said. “He’s put these thoughts out there in the past, and it really doesn’t provide what I think is a more realistic picture, but instead casts AI as this great tool for humanity. That might be the case, but there will also be extreme costs to that, and I think that’s why the negative reaction to it has been so widespread.”
The anti-Dario positioning
Bellan sees Zuckerberg staking out the opposite corner from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who spent the weekend pushing back on being called an AI doomer. Zuckerberg is “almost like an anti-Dario,” she said.
Her description of the frontier-lab mood: “‘We’re pacing the frontier, pulling back, focus on safety. We need to slow down development.’ They’re not doing any of that, of course, but they’re talking about it, and because of all these recent cybersecurity incidents that we’ve had.”
Zuckerberg’s counterposition, in her words: “No, no, we do not slow down. We cannot afford to give an inch to China, and slowing down would only hurt the individual, who can be empowered by this technology.”
One line in the manifesto I’ll defend
The essay runs longer than almost anything we’ve published. But there’s one sentence worth keeping: “If you are an AI doomer and you believe that that’s the future that AI is going to bring, why are you building this stuff?”
Fair question. My takeaway isn’t that the AI future is great, though. It’s that you have to wonder about people who make these predictions and then push ahead anyway.
“Who wants this?”
Part of the resistance is the messenger, and people have plenty of reasons to be suspicious of Zuckerberg and Meta. That could get louder over the next few months as the new Facebook movie comes out.
But part of it is the future itself. It explains the viral pile-ons every time Sam Altman or Zuckerberg or someone else describes life with AI and the reply is a flat “Who wants this?” The reference case: Altman floating the idea that you could use ChatGPT to make podcasts about your kids’ interests to listen to while driving to school. Everyone’s answer was, “Why don’t you just talk to your kid?”
Half the manifesto is abstraction about unleashing creativity and invention, and abstraction converts nobody who’s already skeptical, because it doesn’t sound real. The concrete half, the personal coaches and assistants, has pieces that appeal. And plenty that don’t.
If you want to test the empowerment claim yourself, try what Bellan tried. Open the download page for Glimmer on the laptop you already own and see how far you get.
