Mark Zuckerberg is back, and still talking bollocks about AI

On paper, this should be an important document. Zuckerberg’s companies reach around half of humanity every month, and his control of them means he has sway over how billions of us interact online – whose content we see, what gets spread, what gets banned, and more. He is a tech founder and one of the world’s richest men. Meta is trying to build major AI projects of its own.

The problem is that Zuckerberg’s essay rarely moves beyond platitudes and the kind of Silicon Valley boosterism most of us got tired of decades ago. “Everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about,” Zuckerberg promises.

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“Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more. It will free up time for the things you enjoy, and help you accomplish more than you could otherwise.”

Sure, Mark. Maybe it will. We’ve heard this kind of boosterism for a long time now, though: Elon Musk has promised his cars would fully drive themselves within a year for more than a decade now, and promised he’d have landed men on the moon and Mars by now. He has not. 

A few years ago, Zuckerberg himself said we’d all be living in virtual reality worlds – known as the metaverse – and changed his company’s name to Meta to mark that, before making almost everyone who worked in that division redundant when the idea failed to catch on. Now, he says, Meta has always been “focused on putting power in people’s hands”. Really?

It’s less than five years since every tech boss told us the future was NFTs, an idea that combined GIFs with the blockchain, allowing mugs across the world to pay tens of thousands of dollars for ugly online images no one wanted to buy from them.

The era of even the media, let alone the public, hanging off every word that comes out of the mouth of a tech CEO ended long ago, even if Zuckerberg failed to notice that. Perhaps if he had, he might have tried harder to make his own essay make basic sense.

Take his sentence about the AI agent we will all supposedly have working “24/7 on your behalf” – a sentence obviously written by a CEO, used to having staff working on his behalf, who assumes everyone likes the way that sounds. To many of us, this idea doesn’t sound appealing so much as annoying or exhausting.

That’s before you look at the specifics: the agent will be working on our “relationships” and our “hobbies”, he promises, to “free up time for the things you enjoy”. Aren’t my relationships and my hobbies supposed to be the things I enjoy? Why is the agent working on those bits, then? 

Zuckerberg’s lengthy essay reads mostly like badly thought-out technobabble because it doesn’t really contain a big idea. Instead, it reads like something he’s published because he didn’t want to be left out. 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman put out an essay in early June promising AI would be “built to benefit everyone”. A few days later, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an extensive policy paper on AI, covering its relationship with state power, proposals for AI regulation, and its civil liberties implications.

Clearly, a trend was underway: less than a week after that, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took his turn to post a lengthy think piece, this time arguing that “there is no societal permission for an AI future that hollows out entire industries”. This was followed in July by Jensen Huang – the CEO of Nvidia, the company that makes the chips that power AI models – arguing about AI and open source.

After all of that, it looks an awful lot like Mark Zuckerberg published an essay on AI because everyone else had published one and he didn’t want to be left out. Never mind that his company is largely missing from the cutting-edge AI race, nor that he didn’t particularly have anything to add to the debate.

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The truth is that Facebook (or Meta) hasn’t built a product anyone actually wanted since the late 2000s, when Facebook launched the News Feed. Zuckerberg bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, buying up potential rivals rather than launching products of its own.

Since then, he has bet the future of the company on the metaverse, only to sharply reverse course when everyone got into AI instead, and on glasses that can surreptitiously record people around the wearer – almost universally referred to as “pervert glasses”, which are getting banned from ever more locations in the UK and beyond, even Wetherspoons

Zuckerberg wrote his essay because he wanted to look like the man who knows what’s coming next; what the future is going to be. Instead, he has spent 6,500 words reminding us that he hasn’t really got any of those calls right since he had the foresight to buy WhatsApp in 2014. 

And pointing that out, even at some length, has taken 5,600 fewer words than he used. Keep up, Zuck.