Mark Zuckerberg is CEO of Meta.

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:28 - Jiu-jitsu competition
17:51 - AI and open source movement
30:22 - Next AI model release
42:37 - Future of AI at Meta
1:03:15 - Bots
1:18:42 - Censorship
1:33:23 - Meta's new social network
1:40:10 - Elon Musk
1:44:15 - Layoffs and firing
1:51:45 - Hiring
1:57:37 - Meta Quest 3
2:04:34 - Apple Vision Pro
2:10:50 - AI existential risk
2:17:13 - Power
2:20:44 - AGI timeline
2:28:07 - Murph challenge
2:33:22 - Embodied AGI
2:36:29 - Faith

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The following is a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, his second time on this podcast.

He's the CEO of Meta that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, all services used by billions of people to connect with each other.

We talk about his vision for the future of meta and the future of AI in our human world.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and now, dear friends, here's Mark Zuckerberg.

So you competed in your first Jiu-Jitsu tournament, and me as a fellow jiu-jitsu practitioner and competitor, I think that's really inspiring, given all the things you have going on.

So I gotta ask, what was that experience like?

I don't know, yeah, I mean, well, look, I'm a pretty competitive person.

Doing sports that basically require your full attention, I think is really important to my like mental health and, and the way I just stay focused at doing everything I'm doing.

So I decided to get into martial arts and it's, um, it's awesome.

And I guess 1 of my friends was like, hey, we should go do a tournament.

I'm not gonna shy away from a challenge like that.

Well, so for people who don't know, jiu-jitsu is a martial art where you're trying to break your opponent's limbs or choke them to sleep and do so with grace and elegance and efficiency and all that kind of stuff.

It's a kind of art form, I think, that you can do for your whole life, and it's basically a game, a sport of human chess, you can think of.

There's a lot of strategy, there's a lot of sort of interesting human dynamics of using leverage and all that kind of stuff.

And it's kind of incredible what you could do.

You can do things like a small opponent could defeat a much larger opponent, and you get to understand the way the mechanics of the human body works because of that.

To compete, I needed to get around the fact that I didn't want it to be like this big thing.

So I basically just, I rolled up with a hat and sunglasses and I was wearing a COVID mask.

And I registered under my first and middle name, so Mark Elliott.

And it wasn't until I actually pulled all that stuff off right before I got on the mat that I think people knew as me.

Right, the thing you're partially afraid of is not just the losing, but being almost like embarrassed.

It's so raw, the sport, in that like, it's just you and another human being.

For a lot of people it can be terrifying, especially the first time you're doing the competing and it wasn't for you.

I see the look of excitement in your face.

I mean, I just think part of learning is failing.

Right, so I mean the main thing, like people who train jiu-jitsu, it's like you need to not have pride because I mean all the stuff that you were talking about before about, you know, getting choked or getting, you know, a joint lock, it's you only get into a bad situation if you're not willing to tap once you've already lost.

But obviously when you're getting started with something you're not going to be an expert at it immediately so you just need to be willing to go with that.

But I think this is like, I don't know, I mean maybe I've just been embarrassed enough times in my life.

I do think that there's a thing where like, you know, as people grow up, maybe they don't wanna be embarrassed or anything.

They've built their adult identity and they kind of have a sense of who they are and what they wanna project.

And I don't know, I think maybe to some degree, you know, your ability to keep doing interesting things is your willingness to be embarrassed again and go back to step 1 and start as a beginner and get your ass kicked and, you know, look stupid doing things.

And, you know, I think so many of the things that we're doing, whether it's, whether it's this, I mean, this is just like a kind of a physical part of my life, but, um, but running the company, It's like we just take on new adventures and you know, all the big things that we're doing, I think of is like 10 plus year missions that we're on where, you know, often early on, you know, people doubt that we're gonna be able to do it.

And the initial work seems kind of silly.

And our whole ethos is we don't want to wait until something is perfect to put it out there.

We want to get it out quickly and get feedback on it.

I mean, there's probably just something about how I approach things in there.

But I just kind of think that the moment that you decide that you're going to be too embarrassed to try something new, then you're not gonna learn anything anymore.

But like I mentioned, that fear, that anxiety could be there, could creep up every once in a while.

Do you feel that in especially stressful moments sort of outside of the jiu-jitsu mat, just at work?

Stressful moments, big decision days, big decision moments, how do you deal with that fear?

The thing that stresses me out the most is always the people challenges.

You know, I kind of think that, You know, strategy questions, you know, I tend to have enough conviction around the values of what we're trying to do and what I think matters and what I want our company to stand for that those don't really keep me up at night that much.

I mean, I kind of, you know, it's not that I get everything right.

I mean, we make a lot of mistakes, but I at least have a pretty strong sense of where I want us to go on that.

The thing in running a company for almost 20 years now, 1 of the things that's been pretty clear is when you have a team that's cohesive, you can get almost anything done and You can run through super hard challenges.

You can make hard decisions and push really hard to do the best work, even, and kind of optimize something super well.

But when there's that tension, I mean, that's when things get really tough.

And you know, when I talk to other friends who run other companies and things like that, I think 1 of the things that I actually spend a disproportionate amount of time on and running this company is just fostering a pretty tight core group of people who are running the company with me.

And that to me is kind of the thing that both makes it fun, right?

Having friends and people you've worked with for a while and new people and new perspectives, but like a pretty tight group who you can go work on some of these crazy things with.

But to me, that's also the most stressful thing, is when there's tension, that weighs on me.

I mean, we're like a very people-focused company and it's the people is the part of it that weighs on me the most to make sure that we get right.

But yeah, that I'd say across everything that we do is probably the big thing.

So when there's tension in that inner circle of close folks, So when you trust those folks to help you make difficult decisions about Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, the future of the company and the metaverse with AI.

How do you build that close-knit group of folks to make those difficult decisions?

Is there people that you have to have critical voices, very different perspectives on focusing on the past versus the future, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, I mean, I think for 1 thing, it's just spending a lot of time with whatever the group is that you wanna be that core group, grappling with all of the biggest challenges.

And that requires a fair amount of openness.

And, you know, so I mean, a lot of how I run the company is, you know, it's like every Monday morning we get our, it's about the top 30 people together.

And we, and this is a group that just worked together for a long period of time.

And I mean, people, people rotate in, I mean, New people join, people leave the company, people go to other roles in the company.

We spend a lot of times a couple of hours.

A lot of the time it can be somewhat unstructured.

I'll come with maybe a few topics that I that are top of mind for me, but I'll ask other people to bring things and people raise questions, whether it's OK, there's an issue happening in some country with with some policy issue.

There's like a new technology that's developing here.

You know, there's a design trade off and WhatsApp between 2 things that that end up being values that we care about deeply and we need to kind of decide where we want to be on that and I just think over time when you know by working through a lot of issues with people and doing it openly, people develop an intuition for each other and a bond and camaraderie.

And to me, developing that is like a lot of the fun part of running a company or doing anything, right?

I think it's like having people who are kind of along on the journey that you feel like you're doing it with.

Are there people that disagree often within that group?

So this is making decisions on design, engineering, policy, everything.

I have to ask just back to Jiu Jitsu for a little bit.

What's your favorite submission now that you've been doing it?

What's, how do you like to submit your opponent, Mark Zuckerberg?

Well, first of all, do you prefer nogi or gi jiu-jitsu?

So gi is this outfit you wear that maybe mimics clothing so you can choke.

It's like the traditional martial arts or kimono.

And so I think no gi more closely approximates MMA.

And I think my style is maybe a little closer to an MMA style.

So like a lot of jiu-jitsu players are fine being on their back, right?

And obviously having a good guard is a critical part of jiu-jitsu, but in MMA, you don't want to be on your back, right?

Because even if you have control, you're just taking punches while you're on your back.

My style is I'm probably more pressure and yeah, and I'd probably rather be the top player.

So from that perspective, I think like, you know, it's especially because, you know, if I'm doing a competition, I'll compete with people who are my size, but a lot of my friends are bigger than me.

So back takes probably pretty important, right?

Because that's where you have the most leverage advantage, where people, their arms, your arms are very weak behind you, right?

So being able to get to the back and take that, pretty important.

But I don't know, I feel like the right strategy is to not be too committed to any single submission.

But That said, I don't like hurting people, so I always think that chokes are a somewhat more humane way to go than joint locks.

Yeah, and it's more about control, it's less dynamic.

So you're basically like a Habib Nurmagomedov type of fighter.

So let's go, yeah, back take to a rear naked choke.

What advice would you give to people looking to start learning jiu-jitsu?

Given how busy you are, given where you are in life, that you're able to do this, you're able to train, you're able to compete and get to learn something from this interesting art.

Why do you think you have to be willing to to just get beaten up a lot?

mean, it's, but I mean, over time, I think that there's a flow to all these things.

And there's, you know, 1 of the, 1 of, I don't know, my experiences that I think kind of transcends, you know, running a company and the different different activities that I like doing are I really believe that like if you're going to accomplish whatever anything a lot of it is just being willing to push through right and having the grit and determination to to push through difficult situations.

I think for a lot of people that ends up being sort of a difference maker between the people who kind of get the most done and not.

I mean, there's all these questions about how many days people want to work and things like that.

I think almost all the people who start successful companies or things like that are just working extremely hard.

But I think 1 of the things that you learn both by doing this over time or very acutely with things like jujitsu or surfing is you can't push through everything.

And that's, you learn this stuff very acutely doing sports compared to running a company, because running a company, the cycle times are so long, right?

It's like you start a project and then, you know, it's like months later or you know, if you're building hardware, it could be years later before you're actually getting feedback and able to, you know, make the next set of decisions for the next version of the thing that you're doing.

Whereas you, 1 of the things that I just think is mentally so nice about these very high turnaround conditioning sports, things like that is you get feedback very quickly, right?

It's like, okay, like I don't counter something correctly.

So not in Jiu-Jitsu, you don't get punched in Jiu-Jitsu, but in MMA.

There are all these analogies between all these things that I think actually hold that are like important life lessons, right?

It's like, you know, sometimes you can't go in the other direction on it, right?

It's like there are limits to kind of what, you know, it's like foil, you can, you can pump the foil and push pretty hard in a bunch of directions.

But like, yeah, you know, it's at some level, like the momentum against you is strong enough, you're that's not going to work.

And I do think that that's sort of a humbling, but also an important lesson for, I think, people who are running things or building things.

It's like, yeah, you you, you know, a lot of the game is just being able to kind of push and work through complicated things, but you also need to kind of have enough of an understanding of which things you just can't push through and where the finesse is more important.

Well, I think you did it, you made it sound so simple and were so eloquent that it's easy to miss.

But basically being okay and accepting the wisdom and the joy in the getting your ass kicked in the full range of what that means, I think that's a big gift of the being humbled.

Somehow being humbled, especially physically, opens your mind to the full process of learning, what it means to learn, which is being willing to suck at something.

And I think Jiu-Jitsu just very repetitively, efficiently humbles you over and over and over and over to where you can carry that lessons to places where you don't get humbled as much, whether it's research or running a company or building stuff, the cycle is longer.

And you just, you can just get humbled in this period of an hour, over and over and over and over, especially when you're a beginner, you'll have a little person, just somebody much smarter than you, just kick your ass repeatedly, definitively, where there's no argument.

And then you literally tap, because if you don't tap, you're going to die.

You could have killed me just now, but we're friends, so we're gonna agree that you're not going to.

And that kind of humbling process, it just does something to your psyche, to your ego that puts it in its proper context to realize that everything in this life is like a journey from sucking through a hard process of improving or rigorously day after day after day after day.

Yeah, jujitsu, more than a lot of sports, I would say, because I've done a lot of them, it really teaches you that.

Like, I'm okay, you know, it's okay, it's part of the process, you just get humble, get your

I've just failed and been embarrassed so many times in my life that like, you know, it's a core competence at this point.

Well, yes, and There's a deep truth to that, being able to, and you said it in the very beginning, which is that's the thing that stops us, especially as you get older, especially as you develop expertise in certain areas, not being willing to be a beginner in a new area.

Because that's where the growth happens, is being willing to be a beginner, being willing to be embarrassed, saying something stupid, doing something stupid.

A lot of us that get good at 1 thing, you wanna show that off, and it sucks being a beginner, but it's where growth happens.

Well, speaking of which, let me ask you about AI.

It seems like this year, for the entirety of the human civilization, is an interesting year for the development of artificial intelligence.

Meta has developed Lama, which is a 65 billion parameter model.

There's a lot of interesting questions I can ask here, 1 of which has to do with open source.

But first, can you tell the story of developing of this model and making the complicated decision of how to release it?

I think you're right, first of all, that in the last year there have been a bunch of advances on scaling up these large transformer models.

So there's the language equivalent of it with large language models.

Um there's sort of the image generation equivalent with these large diffusion models.

Um there's a lot of fundamental research that's gone into this and meta has taken the approach of being quite open and academic in in in our development um of of AI.

Part of this is we want to have the best people in the world researching this and a lot of the best people want to know that they're going to be able to share their work.

So that's part of the deal that we have is that, you know, we can get, you know, if you're 1 of the top AI researchers in the world and come here, you can get access to kind of industry scale infrastructure.

And part of our ethos is that we want to share what's invented broadly.

We do that with a lot of the different AI tools that we create.

And LLAMA is the language model that our research team made.

And we did a limited open source release for it, which was intended for researchers to be able to use it.

But responsibility and getting safety right on these is very important.

So we didn't think that for the first 1, there were a bunch of questions around whether we should be releasing this commercially.

So we kind of punted on that for V1 of Llama and just released it from research.

Now, obviously, by releasing it for research, you know, it's out there, but companies know that they're not supposed to kind of put it into commercial releases.

And we're working on the follow-up models for this and thinking through how exactly this should work for follow-on now that we've had time to work on a lot more of the safety and the pieces around that.

That it would be good if there were a lot of different folks who had the ability to build state of the art technology here.

You know, it's not just a small number of big companies.

To train 1 of these AI models, the state of the art models, just takes hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure, right?

So there are not that many organizations in the world, um, that can do that at the biggest scale today.

And now it gets, it gets more efficient every day.

So, um, so I, I do think that that will be available to more folks over time.

But I just think there's all this innovation out there that people can create.

And I just think that we'll also learn a lot by seeing what the whole community of students and hackers and startups and different folks build with this.

And that's kind of been how we've approached this.

And it's also how we've done a lot of our infrastructure.

And we took our whole data center design and our server design, and we built this open compute project where we just made that public and part of the theory was like, all right, if we make it so that more people can use this server design then that'll enable more innovation.

It'll also make the server design more efficient and that'll make our business more efficient too.

So that's worked and we've just done this with a lot of our infrastructure.

So for people who don't know, you did the limited release, I think in February of this year of Lama, and it got quote unquote leaked, meaning like it escaped the limited release aspect, but it was, you know, that something you probably anticipated given that it's just released to researchers.

Right, so it's just trying to make sure that there's like a slow release.

But from there, I just would love to get your comment on what happened next, which is like, there's a very vibrant open source community that just builds stuff on top of it.

There's a Lama CPP, basically stuff that makes it more efficient to run on smaller computers.

There's combining with reinforcement learning with human feedback, so some of the different interesting fine-tuning mechanisms.

There's then also fine-tuning in a GPT-3 generations.

There's a lot of GPT-4ALL, Alpaca, Coalossal AI, all these kinds of models just kind of spring up, like run on top of it.

No, I think it's been really neat to see.

I mean, there's been folks who are getting it to run on local devices, right?

So if you're an individual who just, you know, wants to experiment, you know, with this at home, you probably don't have a large budget to get access to like a large amount of cloud compute.

So getting it to run on your local laptop, you know, is is is pretty good, right?

And then there were things like Lama CPP re-implemented it more efficiently.

So now even when we run our own versions of it, We can do it on way less compute and it just way more efficient, save a lot of money for everyone who uses this.

I do think it's worth calling out that because this was a relatively early release.

Llama isn't quite as on the frontier as, for example, the biggest OpenAI models or the biggest Google models, right?

I mean, you mentioned that the largest Lama model that we released had 65 billion parameters.

And no 1 knows, I guess, outside of OpenAI, exactly what the specs are for GPT-4.

But I think my understanding is it's like 10 times bigger.

And I think Google's Palm model is also I think has about 10 times as many parameters.

Now, the Lama models are very efficient, so they perform well for something that's around 65 billion parameters.

So for me, that was also part of this because there was this whole debate around, you know, is it good for everyone in the world to have access to the most frontier AI models?

And I think as the AI models start approaching something that's like a super human intelligence, that's a bigger question that we'll have to grapple with.

But right now, I mean, these are still very basic tools.

They're powerful in the sense that a lot of open source software like databases or web servers can enable a lot of pretty important things.

But I don't think anyone looks at the current generation of llama and thinks it's anywhere near a super intelligence.

So I think that a bunch of those questions around like, is it is it good to to kind of get out there?

I think at this stage, surely you want more researchers working on it for all the reasons that that open source software has a lot of advantages and we talked about efficiency before but another 1 is just open source software tends to be more secure because you have more people looking at it openly and scrutinizing it and finding holes in it.

So I think at this point, it's more, I think it's generally agreed upon that open source software is generally more secure and safer than things that are kind of developed in a silo where people try to get through security through obscurity.

So I think that for the scale of what we're seeing now with AI, I think we're more likely to get to, you know, good alignment and good understanding of kind of what needs to do to make this work well by having it be open source.

And that's something that I think is quite good to have out there and happening publicly at this point.

Meta released a lot of models as open source.

So the massively multilingual speech model, the image-buying model.

I mean, I'll ask you questions about those, but the point is, you've open sourced quite a lot.

You've been spearheading the open source movement.

Where's, that's really positive, inspiring to see from 1 angle, from the research angle.

Of course, there's folks who are really terrified about the existential threat of artificial intelligence.

And those folks will say that, you know, you have to be careful about the open sourcing step.

But where do you see the future of open source here as part of meta?

The tension here is, do you wanna release the magic sauce?

And the other 1 is, do you wanna put a powerful tool in the hands of bad actors, even though it probably has a huge amount of positive impact also?

Yeah, I mean, again, I think for the stage that we're at in the development of AI, I don't think anyone looks at the current state of things and thinks that this is superintelligence.

And the models that we're talking about, the Lama models here, are generally an order of magnitude smaller than what OpenAI or Google are doing.

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Mark Zuckerberg: Future of AI at Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp | Lex Fridman Podcast #383