Mark Zuckerberg: commitment

Transcript context

…Speaking of value to be unlocked, what do you think the right way to monetize AI will be? Obviously digital ads are quite lucrative. But as a fraction of total GDP, it's small compared to all remote work. Even if you can increase productivity without replacing work, that's still worth tens of trillions of dollars. Is it possible that ads might not be it? How do you think about this? Like we were talking about before, there's going to be all these different applications, and different applications tend toward different things. Ads are great when you want to offer people a free service. Because it's free, you need to cover it somehow. Ads solve this problem where a person does not need to pay for something. They can get something that is amazing for free. Also by the way, with modern ad systems, a lot of the time people think the ads add value to the thing if you do it well. You need to be good at ranking and you need to have enough liquidity of advertising inventory. If you only have five advertisers in the system, no matter how good you are at ranking, you may not be able to show something to someone that they're interested in. But if you have a million advertisers in the system, then you're probably going to be able to find something pretty compelling, if you're good at picking out the different needles in the haystack that that person is going to be interested in. So that definitely has its place. But there are also clearly going to be other business models as well, including ones that just have higher costs so it doesn't even make sense to offer them for free. By the way, there have always been business models like this. There's a reason why social media is free and ad-supported, but then if you want to watch Netflix or ESPN or something, you need to pay for that. The content that's going into that, they need to produce it, and that's very expensive for them to produce. They probably could not have enough ads in the service in order to make up for the cost of producing the content. Basically, you just need to pay to access it. The trade-off is fewer people do it. Instead of billions, you're talking about hundreds of millions of people using those services. There's a value switch there. I think it's similar here. Not everyone is going to want a software engineer, or a thousand software engineering agents, or whatever it is. But if you do, that's something you're probably going to be willing to pay thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars for. That just speaks to the diversity of different things that need to get created. There are going to be business models at each point along the spectrum. At Meta, for the consumer piece we definitely want to have a free thing. I'm sure that will end up being ad-supported. But I also think we're going to want to have a business model that supports people using arbitrary amounts of compute to do even more amazing things than what it would make sense to offer in the free service. For that, I'm sure we'll end up having a premium service. But I think our basic values on this are that we want to serve as many people in the world as possible. How do you keep track of all these different projects, some of which we've talked about today. I'm sure there are many I don't even know about. As the CEO overseeing everything, there's a big spectrum between going to the Llama team and saying, "Here are the hyperparameters you should use," versus just giving a mandate like, "Go make the AI better." And there are so many different projects. How do you think about the way in which you can best deliver your value-add and oversee all these things?…

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