Mark Zuckerberg: prediction

Transcript context

…On this point about AI-generated content and AI interactions, already people have meaningful relationships with AI therapists, AI friends, maybe more. This is just going to get more intense as these AIs become more unique, more personable, more intelligent, more spontaneous, more funny, and so forth. People are going to have relationships with AI. How do we make sure these are healthy relationships? There are a lot of questions that you only can really answer as you start seeing the behaviors. Probably the most important upfront thing is just to ask that question and care about it at each step along the way. But I also think being too prescriptive upfront and saying, "We think these things are not good" often cuts off value. People use stuff that's valuable for them. One of my core guiding principles in designing products is that people are smart. They know what's valuable in their lives. Every once in a while, something bad happens in a product and you want to make sure you design your product well to minimize that. But if you think something someone is doing is bad and they think it's really valuable, most of the time in my experience, they're right and you're wrong. You just haven't come up with the framework yet for understanding why the thing they're doing is valuable and helpful in their life. That's the main way I think about it. I do think people are going to use AI for a lot of these social tasks. Already, one of the main things we see people using Meta AI for is talking through difficult conversations they need to have with people in their lives. "I'm having this issue with my girlfriend. Help me have this conversation.” Or, "I need to have a hard conversation with my boss at work. How do I have that conversation?" That's pretty helpful. As the personalization loop kicks in and the AI starts to get to know you better and better, that will just be really compelling. Here’s one stat from working on social media for a long time that I always think is crazy. The average American has fewer than three friends, fewer than three people they would consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's something like 15 friends or something. At some point you're like, "All right, I'm just too busy, I can't deal with more people." But the average person wants more connection than they have. There's a lot of concern people raise like, "Is this going to replace real-world, physical, in-person connections?" And my default is that the answer to that is probably not. There are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them. But the reality is that people just don't have as much connection as they want. They feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like. So I think a lot of these things — things that today might have a little bit of stigma around them — over time, we'll find the vocabulary as a society to articulate why they are valuable, why the people who are doing them are rational for doing it, and how it is actually adding value to their lives. But also the field is very early. There are a handful of companies doing virtual therapists, virtual girlfriend-type stuff. But it's very early. The embodiment in those things is still pretty weak. You open it up and it's just an image of the therapist or the person you're talking to. apists, virtual girlfriend-type stuff. But it's very early. The embodiment in those things is still pretty weak. You open it up and it's just an image of the therapist or the person you're talking to. Sometimes there's some very rough animation, but it's not an embodiment. You've seen the stuff we're working on in Reality Labs, where you have the Codec Avatars and it actually feels like a real person. That's where it's going. You'll be able to have an always-on video chat with the AI. The gestures are important too. More than half of communication, when you're actually having a conversation, is not the words you speak. It's all the nonverbal stuff.…

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