At the same time, Zuckerberg officially launched AI Studio, which will allow users to build virtual characters and chatbots with custom personalities. Meta's ultimate vision is to enable everyone to create personalized AI agents for themselves.
Despite their age difference of over 20 years, as senior founders who are still on the front lines of their companies in the tech industry, Jensen Huang and Zuckerberg have always had mutual respect. Zuckerberg didn't forget to tease Huang, saying: "Your hair has turned white, mine has just grown longer." Huang replied: "Your hair has actually gotten curlier." But Zuckerberg clarified: "My hair has always been curly, it was just very short before!"
Compared to Zuckerberg, who created Facebook during his undergraduate years and dropped out to start his business, Huang became a co-founder of NVIDIA at the age of 30. So he mentioned: "If I had known it would take this long to succeed..."
"You wouldn't have done any of this from the start?" Zuckerberg asked.
"No, I would have dropped out of college like you and started earlier," Huang said.
1. The Future of Information Flow Recommendations
In the conversation, Huang affirmed the industry position of Meta's AI framework PyTorch, as well as Meta's achievements in computer vision, language models, and real-time translation over the past few years. His first question was how Zuckerberg would view Meta's progress in generative AI.
Zuckerberg first recalled 2018, when Meta showcased early VR features and how they pushed the development of consumer-grade headsets by creating realistic avatars. Meanwhile, Meta did a lot of research to ensure the headsets were thin enough, along with advanced optical stacks and display systems, which are typically the metaverse progress Meta would showcase at SIGGRAPH graphics conferences.
However, Meta now can't be separated from the topic of artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg mentioned that Instagram and Facebook, both owned by Meta and each with over a billion users, have massive information flows, so content sorting and the recommendation systems behind them are crucial. Unlike the early days of Facebook where users only scrolled through updates from friends and family, with generative AI, Instagram now recommends content from millions of other users based on the user's interests, forming the vast majority of their information flow, regardless of whether they follow these users or not.
Zuckerberg believes ### this is the future of recommendation systems, either instantly created content or content synthesized from existing different content. This is slightly different from the current generative AI trend. Of course, it's still based on Transformer and similar architectures, but it will become increasingly universal.
Specifically, in the past, Meta would build different models for each type of content, such as one model for sorting and recommending videos, and another for sorting and recommending longer videos. But a more universal recommendation base model can cover all content, and when the pool for obtaining content is wider, it's easier to avoid the inefficiency problems of obtaining content from different pools.
"I dream of a day when you can treat Facebook or Instagram as a single AI model, with all different types of content and systems combined, these contents have different goals at different time ranges, some just show you interesting content you want to see today, but some are helping you build long-term social networks," Zuckerberg said.
From another perspective, Zuckerberg believes that the new generation of AI will enable major upgrades to all our workflows and products, and everyone will have their own universal AI assistant to complete different tasks. ### "When we move from the Llama 3 series models to Llama 4 and beyond, I think it won't be like a chatbot anymore where you give it a prompt and it responds. It will quickly evolve into: as long as you give it an intent, it can complete tasks over different time frames, such as some computational work that might take weeks or months, and then the results will return to you, just like something happened elsewhere in the world."
Huang also gave a similar human logic, pointing out the development direction of AI: "Today's AI is turn-based. You say something, it replies to you. But when we think, when we're given a task or problem, we consider multiple options, simulate a decision tree in our minds, and imagine different outcomes for each decision."
2. Personal Creation of Agents
Zuckerberg also mentioned that other companies are building central Agents, but Meta's vision is to allow all users to create Agents for themselves. "Whether it's millions of creators on the platform or hundreds of millions of small businesses, we ultimately hope to be able to collect all your content and quickly build a business Agent for you to interact with your customers."
So Zuckerberg announced on the spot, ### Meta will provide people with a tool called AI Studio for building virtual characters with custom personalities, traits, and interests. Creators can also use such digital avatars to interact with fans in private messages.
Meta stated in a press release that AI Studio will start rolling out to Instagram Business account users today and will be available to all Meta users in the US in the coming weeks.
"There's not enough time in the day," Zuckerberg said. Creators have limited time, so they need to train Agents to represent themselves. Obviously, this is no longer interacting with the creator themselves, but Zuckerberg believes this will be another fun way, and users will create their own Agents for various different purposes.
Zuckerberg noted that the main application of Meta AI is ### that people will use it in difficult social situations. For example, "How should I ask my manager for a promotion or raise? Or I had a fight with a friend, or I'm having some trouble with my girlfriend, how should this conversation go, etc." But the problem is that many people don't want to interact with just one Agent, whether it's Meta AI, ChatGPT, or other applications. Users want to create their own things, and that's the goal of AI Studio.
"Just like every business has an email address, website, and social media accounts, in the future every business will have an Agent to interact with customers. And if consumers have problems with what they bought, they just want to find a place to solve the problem, interacting with businesses in different ways through Agents. I think this applies to creators as well," Zuckerberg said.
3. Open Source Philosophy Comes from Microsoft
During the conversation, Huang didn't forget to praise Meta, saying: "I think Llama 2 might be the most important event in the AI field last year." Zuckerberg responded: "I thought (the most important event) was the H100."
Huang believes that Llama 2 activated all industries. Suddenly, every large, medium, and small company is developing AI. So he asked Zuckerberg where Meta's open source philosophy comes from.
Zuckerberg first admitted, ### Meta built distributed computing infrastructure and data centers later than other tech companies: "When we were building these things, it was no longer a competitive advantage. Well, then we might as well open it up, so we'll benefit from the surrounding ecosystem."
And the biggest project Meta participates in is the Open Compute Project: "By making it some kind of industry standard, basically the entire supply chain is organized around it, the benefit of doing this is to save money for everyone, basically saving billions of dollars."
On Facebook's 20th anniversary, Zuckerberg believes that ### one of the most difficult things in the past 20 years has been having to release apps through competitors' mobile platforms, and he subtly criticized Apple's closed system. "Everyone thinks this should be a closed ecosystem because Apple is basically the only one (dominating). Of course, there are more Android phones in the market, but Apple basically owns the entire market and all the profits, and Android basically follows Apple in development. So I think Apple obviously won this generation of competition."
However, going back to the previous era, Microsoft, although not a completely open company, could run Windows systems on different hardware and software, which was a more open and leading ecosystem. In other words, open ecosystems have existed since the PC era. ### "For the computing platforms that the entire industry is building, if the software is open, its value will be great, and this has shaped my philosophy. I'm optimistic that in the next era, open ecosystems will win," Zuckerberg said.
At the same time, he admitted that Meta is not doing this because they are altruists, but because it will indeed benefit the achievements Meta builds from a strong ecosystem. Huang also echoed that there are hundreds of people within NVIDIA alone dedicated to making Meta's PyTorch better. But he also raised a mild objection: "I probably don't want to make this jacket myself, I prefer to have someone else make this jacket for me. ### The concept of open-sourcing leather is not useful to me. Of course, you can still have incredibly open services."
Regarding the diversification of models, Zuckerberg