Mark Zuckerberg held a wide-ranging interview with Rowan Cheung coinciding with Meta’s latest Llama release, which is the company’s open-source AI model. During the interview some of Zuckerberg’s most interesting comments were in regard to his frustrations of working with Apple, and his thoughts on how AI will be of use to content creators.
Apple and Meta have had a contentious partnership at times, as Apple has looked to block Meta from gathering data on users in its ecosystem. As expected, Zuckerberg has a different point of view on the situation. Zuckerberg said that “it’s a little bit soul crushing when you build features that are what you believe is good for your community and then you’re told that you can’t ship them, because some company wants to put you in a box so that they can better compete with you.”
When it came time to discuss what newer models such as Llama 3.1 will enable, Zuckerberg brought up a use case for content creators. Zuckerberg said that “I think there’s going to be a huge unlock where basically every creator can pull in all their information from social media and train these systems to reflect their values and their objectives,” to create an AI agent followers of that content creator can interact with.
While the idea makes sense on the surface, it’s difficult to see content creators being able to viably use AI agents as stand-ins. A big part of content creators’ appeal is that fans are interacting with real people, not some organization or entity. The moment you shift this interaction over to an AI agent, the risk for losing fan interest exists. A more likely scenario is AI that helps smooth out the production process itself, allowing time for more real interactions with the audience.
It’s an interesting interview and well worth watching to learn more about Meta’s Llama model and Zuckerberg’s views on the current stare of AI and what awaits in the future.