Who will end up paying for Zuck's AI vision?

I'm diving into the brain of the most influential voice of a generation. This week, can Meta meet its mission for AGI and keep us safe?

Welcome to new subs the past two days from News Corp , the UK Telegraph , media giant Warner Bros , India’s largest news network Zee , as well as Yahoo News , innovative AI reporting start-up Nota (built by a team out of the LA Times ), and WordPress specialists XWP . Hey all.

I’ve had a flood from the marketing industry since the Google antitrust trials , including M&C Saatchi , Upaid in Boston, GPGenerate in Los Angeles, social specialists Adform , and Canadian ad sales house Stingray , among others.

There are newcomers too from the Australian Federal Government , which is pondering whether to force Meta to pay publishers and were most likely prompted by this , and from the Belgian City of Brussels which is working on AI regulation.

Thanks to today’s sponsor for your support... Much appreciated.

OK, gloves on, we’re going back inside Zuck’s brain…

I’ve chatted to execs who’ve worked with him. I’ve read his manifesto. I’ve watched dozens of interviews, past and present. I’ve even spoken to a psychological profiler.

Zuck’s in a new phase. He’s on the front foot, telling people he’s no more Mr Nice Guy, and warning he’s over apologising for the evils of Meta, of which there are a few.

He’s toughing it out and wearing his mid-life crisis like a badge of honour.

Quarter-million-dollar watch , shaggy new hairdo, and sassy slogan tees. It might be hilarious were he not so dangerous.

Because the guy showing the Matterhorn -sized chip on his shoulder is also the one who says he’s about to unleash artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The dorm genius who cyber-stalked college girls, before addicting teens and using Section 230 to platform terrorism , wants to do that. What could possibly go wrong?

But the broken economics of Big Tech mean that what might be catastrophic for the world is hugely beneficial for Zuck and his investors. Dollars v sense .

Meta’s stock has been Big Tech’s top performer, up ~94 per cent this year. Its market cap now stands at $1.47 trillion.

For context, that’s roughly 43 times more than the combined market cap of today’s two largest new subscribers, News Corp and Warners.

And Zuckerberg’s personal 13 per cent stake has passed $200 billion for the first time, making him the fourth-richest person in the world after:

• Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX): $270 billion
• Larry Ellison (Oracle): $208 billion, and
• Jeff Bezos (Amazon): $204 billion

But as Zuck gets richer, it might be the world that has to pay.

I’m plotting Zuck’s personality shift by plotting it against a 6,000-word manifesto he wrote to friends and execs back in 2017, during the fallout from Cambridge Analytica.

I’m going through it over six chapters. The first three are done:

Part one: Zuck’s descent to his Oh f*** it phase

Part two: If Zuck’s over apologies, who needs friends?

Part three: Scion’s journey from social to self-made Caesar

Meta’s capital only rose this week when California governor, Gavin Newsom, blocked an AI safety bill which would have slowed Zuck down.

Newson also killed the California journalism preservation bill last month, after Google promised to invest in a sketchy AI initiative that no-one understands.

Might it be that Newsom intends to run as the Democratic nominee in a future Presidential race? The odds are high .

Are Big Tech figures now among the largest donors to both sides of US politics? The answer is yes .

Could these two things be connected? Wow, what a toughie...

Friend of Future Media, and fellow Substacker Katie Harbath, worked with Zuck for a decade co-ordinating the teams running Meta’s election coverage .

She’s just researched his political flip-flops , and stack-ranked the tech companies on their strengths and weaknesses around the upcoming US election, just 30 days away.

Whatever you think, Zuck has clout, public and political influence. He now has a free run at AGI, and investors are backing him with billions.

So can we feel safe?

Well, let’s allow Zuck to tell us what he thinks in his own words, because this is the latest chapter from his 2017 manifesto.

By Mark Zuckerberg

As we build a global community, this is a moment of truth.

Our success isn’t just based on whether we can capture videos and share them with friends.

It’s about whether we’re building a community that helps keep us safe - that prevents harm, helps during crises, and rebuilds afterwards.

Today’s threats are increasingly global, but the infrastructure to protect us is not.

Problems like terrorism, natural disasters, disease, refugee crises, and climate change need co-ordinated responses from a worldwide vantage point. No nation can solve them alone.

A virus in one nation can quickly spread to others. A conflict in one country can create a refugee crisis across continents.

Pollution in one place can affect the environment around the world. Humanity’s current systems are insufficient to address these issues.

Many dedicated people join global non-profit organisations to help, but the market often fails to fund or incentivise building the necessary infrastructure.

I have long expected more organisations and startups to build health and safety tools using technology, and I have been surprised by how little of what must be built has even been attempted.

There is a real opportunity to build global safety infrastructure, and I have directed Facebook to invest more and more resources into serving this need.

For some of these problems, the Facebook community is in a unique position to help prevent harm, assist during a crisis, or come together to rebuild afterwards.

This is because of the amount of communication across our network, our ability to quickly reach people worldwide in an emergency, and the vast scale of people’s intrinsic goodness aggregated across our community.

To prevent harm, we can build social infrastructure to help our community identify problems before they happen.

When someone is thinking of committing suicide or hurting themselves, we’ve built infrastructure to give their friends and community tools that could save their life.

When a child goes missing, we’ve built infrastructure to show Amber Alerts - and multiple children have been rescued without harm.

And we’ve built infrastructure to work with public safety organisations around the world when we become aware of these issues.

Going forward, there are even more cases where our community should be able to identify risks related to mental health, disease or crime.

To help during a crisis, we’ve built infrastructure like Safety Check so we can all let our friends know we’re safe and check on friends who might be affected by an attack or natural disaster.

Safety Check has been activated almost 500 times in two years and has already notified people that their families and friends are safe more than a billion times.

When there is a disaster, governments often call us to make sure Safety Check has been activated in their countries. But there is more to build.

We recently added tools to find and offer shelter, food and other resources during emergencies. Over time, our community should be able to help during wars and ongoing issues that are not limited to a single event.

To rebuild after a crisis, we’ve built the world’s largest social infrastructure for collective action.

A few years ago, after an earthquake in Nepal, the Facebook community raised $15 million to help people recover and rebuild - which was the largest crowdfunded relief effort in history.

We saw a similar effort after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando when people across the country organised blood donations to help victims they had never met.

Similarly, we built tools so millions of people could commit to becoming organ donors to save others after accidents, and registries reported larger boosts in sign-ups than ever before.

Looking ahead, one of our greatest opportunities to keep people safe is building artificial intelligence to understand more quickly and accurately what is happening across our community.

There are billions of posts, comments and messages across our services each day, and since it’s impossible to review all of them, we review content once it is reported to us.

There have been terribly tragic events - like suicides, some live streamed - that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realised what was happening and reported them sooner.

There are cases of bullying and harassment every day, that our team must be alerted to before we can help out. These stories show we must find a way to do more.

Artificial intelligence can help provide a better approach.

We are researching systems that can look at photos and videos to flag content our team should review.

This is still very early in development, but we have started to have it look at some content, and it already generates about one-third of all reports to the team that reviews content for our community.

It will take many years to fully develop these systems.

Right now, we’re starting to explore ways to use AI to tell the difference between news stories about terrorism and actual terrorist propaganda so we can quickly remove anyone trying to use our services to recruit for a terrorist organisation.

This is technically difficult as it requires building AI that can read and understand news, but we need to work on this to help fight terrorism worldwide.

As we discuss keeping our community safe, it is important to emphasise that part of keeping people safe is protecting individual security and liberty.

We are strong advocates of encryption and have built it into the largest messaging platforms in the world - WhatsApp and Messenger.

Keeping our community safe does not require compromising privacy. Since building end-to-end encryption into WhatsApp, we have reduced spam and malicious content by more than 75 per cent.

The path forward is to recognise that a global community needs social infrastructure to keep us safe from threats around the world, and that our community is uniquely positioned to prevent disasters, help during crises, and rebuild afterwards.

Keeping the global community safe is an important part of our mission - and an important part of how we’ll measure our progress going forward.

Mark

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