RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger, and Andy Greenberg on Bluesky at @agreenberg. Write to us at [email protected].
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Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Brian Barrett: Leah, how did you like The Odyssey?
Leah Feiger: I really liked it. I thought it was fun. The dialog was kind of whatever, beautiful shots of the Sicilian ocean. And I went with my husband who loves to remind me that he studied Latin and Greek in high school, and he actually liked it too. So frankly, 10 out of 10 from our family.
Brian Barrett: Good. Yeah, I agree. I think everyone who is complaining about it needs to stop. Anyway, welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I am Brian Barrett, executive editor.
Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.
Brian Barrett: Today on the show, we're going to be talking about Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto on AI, which weighs in at over 6,500 words. We will be talking about it for less time than it would take to read it, so you're welcome for that. But most importantly, we'll discuss what it says about Meta's strategy as it continuously tries to catch up in the AI race.
Leah Feiger: We'll also get into the rise of the 1 am job interview. As more people talk to a bot instead of a human for their first interview rounds, some job seekers are choosing to schedule theirs very late at night. We're going to look into that and how it's far from the only way that AI is changing job interviews as we know them.
Brian Barrett: And later in the show, we'll be joined by WIRED's Andy Greenberg to dive into some of the most exciting research that came out of Black Hat and Defcon, two of the world's biggest cybersecurity events. So on Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a roughly 6,500-word essay on AI titled "The Future Is for Everyone." And doesn't that sound nice? It's the latest entry in the unfortunate genre of philosophical manifestos from tech CEOs. They've all got one. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei. Everyone's got a manifesto these days.
Brian Barrett: Some people have multiple manifestos. Even Zuckerberg's manifesto was an expansion of a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he wrote. Anyway, they all want to lay out their views for the industry, for the world, why their companies are best positioned to tackle the future, why you shouldn't be scared of their products, right? The core argument of Zuckerberg's manifesto is that concentrating AI power in a few institutions is dangerous, and broad access to these models is what you need to diffuse that power. He didn't name specific names, clearly taking jabs at OpenAI and Anthropic, which favor tighter control over their private models. At one point he writes, and I quote, "Historically hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes."
Leah Feiger: I think it's a pretty Philosophy 101 way to say I just wasn't invited to play at the sandbox with the big kids. I mean, we can't divorce this from Meta's desperate attempts to stay relevant in the AI industry and race. And also we have to talk about the fact that they laid off so many people on this team just a few months ago. It was so all over the place. So there's something very funny to me about Mark Zuckerberg being like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, let's rein in OpenAI and Anthropic." But I'm like, "You wish that you were them. That feels very obvious."
Brian Barrett: I wanted to get on that a little bit, Leah, too, in terms of the layoffs you mentioned and Meta's overall AI strategy, which has been so all over the place. They were all in for the longest time on open-source, open-weight models, because that was a way to counteract and undercut people who were trying to more directly profit off of closed models, OpenAI, Anthropic. That wasn't working. So they spent billions of dollars on this massive hiring spree to create this superintelligence lab that has not produced anything that has caught up to where the bigger labs are yet. So now he's saying, actually, maybe open is better, right? It's like when you can't win a race and so you say, "Actually, we shouldn't be racing at all. This race is dumb. Why aren't we just all sharing everything?" The other thing about this manifesto we haven't talked about yet is—and God, I hate that we call it that. Like manifesto makes it sound—
Brian Barrett: It's marketing. What his marketing screed said, it's very "Hey everybody, don't worry. AI's just fine and it's going to be great for you. Why is everybody so upset about all this stuff? Don't you trust us to make your life better?" And this is coming from Meta, a company that I just have to say a week ago-ish, not even, was ordered by a court to pay $567 million for failing to do enough to protect kids' mental health online. Why are we trusting Meta with anything, much less AI and its impacts on society?
Leah Feiger: 100 percent. I also just can't help but think about almost like last summer when the massive hiring spree and competition was going on between OpenAI's and Meta's superintelligence labs, the insane salaries and competition. And again, it just felt like we're just grabbing. We're grabbing onto the hottest, flashiest thing, even if we don't have the systems backing it up right now. And especially Meta just announced a new open-weight system called Muse Glimmer on Monday, where users are able to download and alter the model as they wish. It's a lot of pivoting. I will be totally honest...
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