The Future Mark Zuckerberg Is Trying To Build

so i'd love to start with these let's do it ten years of work right there i got to demo them a little bit earlier today i heard someone on your team call these the real life tony stark glasses we're getting there but i'd love to just hear in your voice what are these well are the first full holographic augmented reality glasses i think that exist in the world we've made i think it's a few thousand or something right very hard to make each one of these but this is the culmination of ten years of research and and development that we've done to basically miniaturize all the computing that you need to have glasses not a headset but glasses that can put full holograms into the world with a wide field of view so you can imagine sort of in the future we'd be having a version of this conversation where know maybe i or or you are not even here it's like one of us is physically here and the other one is here as a as kind of a full body hologram and it's not just a video call you can actually interact you can do things i mean in the the demo we had the you know ping pong and games and things like that but i mean you could you could interact you could work together you can you know play poker play chess whatever like the holographic cards holographic board game i i just think it's gonna be wild it's gonna remake

is there a current set of methods that seem to be scaling very well right so with past ai architectures you could kind of feed an ai system a certain amount of data and and use a certain amount of compute but eventually it hit a plateau mhmm and one of the interesting things about these new transformer based architectures over the last you know five to ten years is that we haven't found the end yet so that leads to this dynamic where lama three you know we could train on you know 10 to 20,000 gpus lama four we could train on you know more than a 100,000 gpus lama five we can plan to scale even further and there's just an interesting question of how far that goes it's totally possible that at some point we just like hit a limit and just like previous systems there's an asymptote and it doesn't keep on growing but it's also possible that that limit is not gonna happen anytime soon and that we're gonna be able to keep on just building more clusters and generating more you know synthetic data to train the systems and that they're just gonna keep on getting more and more useful for people for quite a while to come and it's a really big and high stakes question i think for for the companies because we're basically making these bets on how much infrastructure to build out for the future and this is like hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure so like i'm clearly betting that this is gonna keep scaling for a while but it's one of the big questions i think in the field

should we still teach our kids to program computers even though you're gonna have these these tools in the future that are just so much more powerful than anything that we have now to produce incredibly complicated pieces of software i think the answer to that is probably yes because i think teaching someone how to code is teaching them a way to think rigorously and that even if they're not doing most of the code production i think it's important that you kind of have the ability to think in that way and i think it's gonna just make you generally a better thinker and better person so yeah maybe that's like this generation's version of calculators it's like so you'll you'll wanna you wanna use the calculator but you'll also wanna be able to generally do without it

at a high level i look at the vision that a bunch of companies have right so openai google they're building an ai right like one ai that i think in general they're like this is gonna be you know it's like you're gonna use they think you're gonna use gemini or chatgpt for like all the different things that you wanna interact with and at a high level that's just not how i think the world is gonna go i think we're gonna have a lot of different ai systems just like we're gonna have we have a lot of different apps i think in the future every business just like they have a website and a phone number and an email address and a social media account is also going to have an ai that can interact with with their customers to help them sell things to help them do support i think a lot of creators will have their own ais right i i i i think like a lot of people will will interact with with a bunch of different things there's a question of okay do you want a future that's fundamentally kind of very concentrated and where you're interacting with kind of one system for everything or do you want one where a lot of different people are building a lot of different ais and systems just kind of like you probably didn't want there to be you know just one app or just one website it's like a richer world when there's a diversity of different things

we only have so many hours in the day so people need to prioritize what they're gonna learn and it may be that okay in a world with perfect translation which by the way basically just announced on the ray ban metas that now you're gonna be able to just like you go to different countries we're starting out yeah we're we're starting out with just a few languages but we'll roll it out to more and you know you'll be you could be traveling anywhere and you have your glasses and they just translate in real time in your ear so it's wild

why build these well i think it's gonna be the next major computing platform so if you look at like the grand arc of computing over time you've you've gone from like mainframes to computers that basically like live on your desk or on a tower to phones that you have in your hand that you basically like you know can take with you everywhere that you want but it's it's pretty unnatural right it takes you away from the world around you and i think that the trend in computing is it gets more ubiquitous it gets more natural and it just gets more social so you want to be to interact with people in the world around you and i think that this is probably going be the next major platform after phones

whenever you're talking about building digital types of connection one of the first questions that you get is is that gonna replace the physical connection and my answer to that especially in the case of something like this is that no because people already don't have as much connection as they would like to have it's not like this is replacing some sort of better physical connection that they would have otherwise had it's that the average person would like to have 10 friends and they have two right or three and there's just more demand to socialize than what people are able to do given the current construct and giving people the ability to be present with people who are in other places physically just seems like it will unlock more it's not gonna make it so if i have glasses it's not gonna make it that i spend less time with my wife it's gonna make it so that i spend more time with you know my sister who lives across the country and that's i i think that that's that's good i think people need that

i actually think that there are gonna be a bunch of different of these paths that we've taken are going to be kind of permanent product lines that people will choose i think you'll see display less glasses like the ray ban metas continue to get better and better great for ai no display but you can talk to it it can talk back i think that there's gonna be something in between these that's basically a heads up display so it's not a 70 degree field of view maybe it's a 20 degree or a 30 degree field of view so that's not gonna be what you want for putting kind of a full hologram of a person or interacting with the world around you but it's gonna be great for you know when you're talking to ai not just having voice but also being able to see what it's saying yeah or being able to text someone with your wrist based neural interface and then have their text show up rather than having it read to you which is it's we read faster than we can listen or getting directions right or just being able to search for information and get all that so there's a lot of value for a heads up display that will be somewhat more expensive than the displayless glasses but somewhat cheaper than this then i think you're gonna get this it's going to be probably the most premium and and expensive of the glasses products but hopefully still something that you know like a computer is generally accessible to most people in the world but i think that there are gonna be all of those and i i i think people will like them

i know there are gonna be ai creators as well as creators building ai versions of themselves i mean that's a thing that we just showed too at at connect is is basically i mean the if you're a creator one of the big challenges is like alright there are only so many hours in the day and your community probably has a nearly unlimited demand to interact with you and you wanna interact with them because you're trying to grow your community i mean that's both socially and from a business perspective that's sort of you know growing the community is an important part of of whatever creator does so okay if we can make it so that each creator can basically make an like an ai artifact that their community can interact with people will be clear that it's not the actual creator themselves but it's almost like a piece of digital art that you're producing like an interactive sculpture or something that it's like it's like you train it to here's the context that i wanted to have here's the topics i wanted to communicate on here's stuff that i wanted to stay away from you're giving your community something to interact with when you can't be there to to kind of answer all the questions and i know that's gonna be super compelling

if everything goes according to you and the team's wildest dreams i'd for you to just begin to describe what that feels like i mean i think that there are two primary values that we're trying to bring mhmm on the ar and kind of mixed reality side the main value we're trying to bring is this feeling of presence right so there's something that i think is just really deep about being physically present with another person that you don't get from any other technology today and i think that's the thing when people have a very visceral reaction to experiencing virtual or mixed reality what they're really reacting to is that they actually for the first time with technology feel a sense of presence like they're in a place with a person and that's super powerful like focused on designing social apps and experiences for twenty years that's sort of like the holy grail of that is being able to build a technology platform that delivers this like deep sense of of social presence the other big track is around personalized ai and for that and that's sort of where lama and medai and all those things are going there's all this development that's going into making the models smarter and smarter over time but i think where this is gonna get really compelling is when it's personalized for you and in order for it to be personalized for you it has to have context and understand what's going on in your life both kind of at a global level and like what's physically happening around you right now and in order to do that i think that glasses are going to be the ideal form factor because they're positioned on your face in a way where they can let them see what you see and hear what you hear which are the two most important senses that we use for for kind of taking an information and context about the world i think that this is all gonna be kind of really deep and profound stuff but it's basically those two things it's this feeling of presence and this capability of really personalized intelligence that can help you

what is the piece of that that you feel most interested in that you keep coming back to in your mind this has the frustrating property to develop that the sense of presence is almost like when you're designing something that that's sort of trying to artificially deliver it you're delivering an illusion to a person and more than any one thing that provides a sense of presence it's actually more the case that any one thing done wrong breaks the sense of presence you you kind of know that you're interacting with technology but it's so convincing that that you just kind of go along with it you're like okay yeah no this person feels like it feel like they're there right when i did that ping pong demo i like at the end of it i dropped the ping pong paddle on the virtual table and it shattered so that was not the best for for for our internal development but but like that's winning in in our in our development right it's like when when you when you feel like something is is kind of so realistic that you you're just convinced that that it's there

my question is about that it's about this feeling of like it's hard for me to imagine a future where real physical presence mhmm is not different and special in some way where i where i don't miss literally hugging my mom yeah and i'm curious how you think about the parts of human connection that are eye contact and physical touch and things that our eight brains value for connection with other people mhmm yeah well eye contact i think we're gonna get to a lot before the the touch part for haptics i i do think we'll make progress on that but it's it's obviously there's a spectrum there too from kind of hands which is where you if you draw the kind of like homunculus version of a person in terms of what are our sensory what's the majority of what we're sensing yeah fine yeah i think being able to do that for your hands is probably the most important place to start and you have a rough version of that with controllers today i think that that'll get even more over time we have this demo playing ping pong where you have a controller where as the digital ball hits the ping pong paddle you feel it hit the as if it's hitting the ping pong paddle wherever it is so you actually have a sense of like where it's it's hitting the the the paddle so i i think that that was that was just a a wild demo so i think we'll get some of that the most extreme version of this is wanting force feedback right so i mean like for doing a lot of sports right it's it's like okay we can kind of do a good approximation of like boxing today where you get like good feedback on your hands but it would be hard to do a virtual reality version of jujitsu where you're like yeah grappling with someone and you need like real kind of force feedback on it so that's probably like the hardest thing right to to go do but i think we'll get there