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It has been another busy week. GPT-5 appears to be just around the corner…
This week, I decode the meaning behind Mark Zuckerberg’s “personal superintelligence” manifesto, and what it means for the broader AI race. Keep reading for my chat with a Figma exec on the company’s IPO day, a bunch of good links, and some feedback from last week’s issue.
Meta has given up on trying to beat ChatGPT at its own game.
If you read between the lines, that’s the message behind Mark Zuckerberg’s “personal superintelligence” manifesto. For the past year, he pushed the Meta AI assistant on nearly every surface he owns in an attempt to kneecap ChatGPT’s growth. It didn’t work. Now, as Zuckerberg spends heavily to reboot Meta’s AI strategy, he is honing the company’s focus on what it has historically managed to dominate: winning your attention.
In his Nat-Friedman-stylized blog post, Zuckerberg lays out how he thinks this will work in the AI era: “If trends continue, then you’d expect people to spend less time in productivity software, and more time creating and connecting. Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful.”
While ChatGPT’s goal is to become a “super assistant” that increasingly does more work on your behalf, Meta’s goal is to fill the free time you will theoretically get back. This strategy, while potentially dystopian, plays more to Meta’s core strengths: maximizing engagement and monetizing that engagement better than anyone else. This idea — that Meta wants to fill the free time created by productivity-focused AI — is what Zuckerberg and his deputies have been pitching more directly both internally and to recruits.
“We need to differentiate here by not focusing obsessively on productivity, which is what you see Anthropic and OpenAI and Google doing,” Meta CPO Chris Cox told employees during an all-hands meeting last month. “We’re going to go focus on entertainment, on connection with friends, on how people live their lives, on all of the things that we uniquely do well.”
There’s a lot Meta can and will do to help creators more easily publish different kinds of content and reach more people. But going forward, I expect the company to use AI to make its apps more engaging via more personalized ads, surfacing better Reels to watch (or generating them from scratch), and encouraging interactions with AI personas. It’s probably not a coincidence that “personal superintelligence” was first coined by Character.AI co-founder Noam Shazeer, who discussed joining Meta before he rejoined Google last year….
The Verge’s Hayden Field and I discussed the AI talent wars this week on Decoder. We dropped some reporting during the podcast pertaining to Meta that I’ll expand on here: Yes, Zuckerberg is making huge, above-market offers to hire AI talent. But the offers aren’t as simple as the headlines have made them out to be.
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