Inside Zuckerberg’s AI Playbook: Billions in Compute, a Talent Arms Race, and a New Vision for Meta

Jessica Lessin: Mark, thanks for joining TITV. We’re happy to have you here. Already this morning, [there’s] news that you’ve spent even more money with your big announcement about your new supercomputers.

We’ll get to that.

But to start, you took a huge stake in ScaleAI. You have been on a blitz of AI hiring. Why, and why now?

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, it’s been busy. You know, I think the most exciting thing this year is that we’re starting to see early glimpses of self-improvement with the models, which means that developing super intelligence is now in sight, and we just want to make sure that we really strengthen the effort as much as possible to go for it. Our mission with the lab is to deliver personal super intelligence to everyone in the world, so that way we can put that power in every individual’s hand. And I’m really excited about it. It’s a different thing than what the other labs are doing.

And my view is that this is going to be something that is the most important technology in our lives. It’s going to underpin how we develop everything at the company, and it’s going to affect society very widely. So we just want to make sure that we get the best folks to work on this, from entrepreneurs to researchers to engineers working on the data and infrastructure.

And then, of course, we want to back up with just an absolutely massive amount of compute which we can support, because we have a very strong business model that throws off a lot of capital.

Did you feel like you were behind coming out of Llama 4? It seems like this summer, in particular, you switched gears a little bit.

I think the field is accelerating, you know, we keep on having goals for where we want to be. And then the field keeps on moving faster than we expect.

So you know, look, I’m not a person who’s ever particularly happy with where we are. I always want to be better. But I think the thing here that I am very focused on is the technology that is going to be possible to develop over the next period of time. It is going to be super fundamental, and I just want to make sure that we position ourselves.

There is this big debate in the industry today. All right, is super intelligence going to be possible in three years, five years, seven years?

But I don’t think anyone knows the answer. I just think that we should bet and act as if it’s going to be ready in the next two to three years.

I believe there’s a shot at that. And if that is what you believe, you are going to invest hundreds of billions for whatever it takes to build out the strongest team.

And what about reports that you’ve been spending up to $100 million or $200 million on packages for recruits. Can you comment? Are those numbers accurate? And just how do you think about the price for talent in this war that’s underway?

So look, I mean, a lot of the specifics that have been reported aren’t accurate by themselves. But it is a very hot market. I mean, as you know, and there’s a small number of researchers, which are the best, who are in demand by all of the different labs. So I think that it certainly is quite competitive.

You know what I’d say. I think in perspective, if you’re going to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars on compute and building out multiple gigawatt of clusters, then, you know, it really does make sense to compete super hard and do whatever it takes to get that, you know, 50 or 70 or whatever it is, top researchers to build your team.

I think that the physics of this is you don’t need a massive team to do this. You actually kind of want the smallest group of people who can fit the whole thing in their head. So there’s just an absolute premium for the best and most talented people.

So it kind of makes sense when you kind of think about it that, from that perspective, the amount that is being spent to recruit the people is actually still quite small compared to the overall investment and all when you talk about super intelligence.

Obviously, you’ve got Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and many of them have big enterprise businesses. How do you think about the Meta opportunity? Is it the same kind of vision around productivity or something else?

I think personal superintelligence is a different vision than what the others are going for. It is kind of like when the internet was first getting to scale, people were like, all right, is the internet going to be for productivity?

Is it going to be for entertainment, or is it going to change how we work at our companies? And the answer is, all.

I think the same is going to be true for AI, and there are going to be different companies that focus on different parts of it. So far, I think that, you know, you hear a lot from the other labs around wanting to automate all of the economically productive work in society.

And, you know, certainly, I think that economic automation and economic progress, there’s a lot of potential there to do great work that’s very helpful to a lot of people. But there’s another side of this, which is like, what are the things that people care about in their own lives?

And some of that is productivity. But a lot of it is relationships and culture and creativity and having fun and enjoying life. And my guess is that, there’s a lot of the folks at the other labs kind of talk about, OK, we want to develop this central superintelligence and direct it at grand problems.

And I think the reality is that there’s a lot of great stuff to do there, and I’m excited about that. And I think when you put personal super intelligence in people’s hands, some of what they’re going to want to do is direct it at grand problems. But I actually think a lot of what people care about are just relatively simpler things in their lives.

And part of our ethos and values have always just been to try to put that power into people’s hands directly.

And that’s what we’re going to try to do with personal super intelligence. So it is a bit of a different focus, you know?

I think this is also going to shape how we build the company, and how we write all the software and all the technology and products. So that’ll probably be pretty similar to a lot of the other places, and a lot of the fundamental methods are similar.

But I think the products that we’re going to build are going to be, are going to be pretty different, and I think are just going to touch billions of people’s lives.

We’re kind of the premier company at developing products and scaling them to billions of people. And we’re, of course, leading in the next generation of computing platforms with the glasses that are doing exceptionally well.

And I continue to think that that’s going to be the best form factor for AI, because, you know, they can see what you see and hear what you hear, and you can talk to them throughout the day.

And once we get a display and the holograms in there, it’ll be able to generate a UI for you. So I think there’s just going to be this incredible connection between those things.

So I’m picturing my Meta, super intelligence glasses, companion, friend, doing things for me. Am I on the right track?

Yeah. I think we’re going to reach a point where you’re going through the world and you’re having conversations.

One thought experiment that I like to do is in almost every conversation that I have, there’s like, five things I want to follow up on, but I almost don’t ever follow up on all five, right?

Just because I go do something else, maybe I’ll follow up on one, if I’m lucky. And, in the future, we’re gonna have glasses and they’re gonna be able to, if you want, observe what’s going on in your life and be able to go follow up on things for you and and either, follow up with you later, or give you information in real time in the glasses.

And it’s, it’s almost gonna be like, look, if you need vision correction and you don’t have glasses, just optical glasses, you’re sort of at this cognitive disadvantage.

I think in the future, if you don’t have AI glasses, you’re basically going to be at a cognitive disadvantage too.

So yeah, I mean, that’s part of what we’re going to do. But we’re also very focused on the entertainment, the culture, the kind of personal relationships with people. I think that, like having an AI that can help you with that, is going to be super valuable.

So anyway, there’s a ton to do. There’s no shortage.

And in addition to the direct products, super intelligence is also obviously going to really change how we develop things at the company, and how all of our software development goes.

And I think our engineers are just gonna be way, way, way more productive than they are now. So I know that’s gonna be really exciting and is just something that we really want to focus on, especially the self-improvement loop.

We are already seeing glimpses of the models, even based off of Llama, for improving the Facebook algorithm and other AI systems across the company autonomously. So, I mean, I think that it’s pretty exciting to see glimpses of that.

And I know you have to go, but I do want to ask you about your news. But first, different question, how do you come up with your data center names?

So, you know, I love Titans, and now we’re into Hyperion and whomever.

Is there a limit to what you’ll spend on capex?

I think we’ll see how the technology trends, and we’ll see what the results are. In running the company, I’m sort of always looking for ways that I can convert capital into a higher-quality service for people.

And one of the benefits of reinforcement learning is it gives you a venue to, you know, potentially convert very large amounts of capital into a better and better service, and potentially a better service than other less well-funded or less bold competitors will be able to do so.

I view that as a competitive advantage. If we can get this to work well, and that’s why we are basically all in on this. We’re building, you know, we’re building multiple, multigigawatt data centers, and we can basically do this all funded from the cash flow of the company. We have a very strong business model that supports this. We have a very strong infrastructure team that is doing novel work to build up data centers.

You know, I wanted them to not just take four years to build these concrete buildings.

So we pioneered this new method where we’re basically building up these weatherproof tents and building out the networks and the GPU clusters inside them in order to build them faster. They are hurricane-proof tents.

We have people working around the clock on Prometheus and Hyperion, which are our first two Titan clusters that are going to be greater than a gigawatt.

Hyperion is going to scale up to five gigawatts over the coming years. And I shared this image of it, but the size of the site covers a significant portion of the footprint of Manhattan in terms of space. That thing is just massive.

You have a large amount of the energy—of people’s energy—in the area where it is getting built, going towards constructing it. It’s great for the community.

These are really exciting projects that you can tell I get very excited about building them in an interview.

I’m very excited that I think we’re going to have the largest compute fleet of any company, and focusing on that on being powered by a small and talent-dense team, I think we’re gonna have by far the most compute per researcher to do leading edge work. And I think that it’s just gonna be a really exciting, big few years coming.

That was what jumped out at me about your announcement on Facebook. You have the capital to do this. It made me think it was maybe a slight jab at competitors who might have to still raise the capital to build that out. Do you see that as an advantage?

In my reading, I think it’s an advantage. I think it’s an advantage.

I’m obviously spending a lot of time on recruiting and a lot has been written about money and all that. Like I said before, a lot of the numbers specifically have been inaccurate, but I think it discounts the other key reasons why people are super excited to come work on Meta Superintelligence Labs.

And one of the biggest is that you can just have more leverage as a researcher. You have more compute right? I mean, basically historically, when I was recruiting people to different parts of the company, you know, people are like, OK, what’s my scope going to be?

And, you know, here, people say, I want the fewest number of people reporting to me and the most GPUs. And so having basically the most compute per researcher is definitely a strategic advantage, not just for doing the work, but for attracting the best people.

And I actually think that has been underreported as one of the main reasons why people are excited to come do this. The other is just having a clean slate is fun, right? I mean, a lot of times people refer to building up the infrastructure for these things.

Someone gave me this analogy that it’s like, it’s like building a house. The first one you build for your enemy, the second one you build for your friend, the third one you build for yourself. And you know, I think the ability to start from a clean slate, you know, where you’re not just at another company working on some other infrastructure, and you get the opportunity to build a new lab from scratch. It’s going to be, I think it’s just really appealing to a lot of people. Anyhow, yeah, I’m out there very focused on this.

You’re obviously having success in recruiting now. I think it’s going to be a long, long game and exciting to watch. Oh, I got to ask. Did you run into Sam Altman at Sun Valley last week and post hiring all those OpenAI people, and if so, what was the conversation?

Yeah. I mean, I think part of the fun of Sun Valley is you run into all your friends and colleagues. So yeah. I mean, I saw Sam, said hi. I also saw Dario and Sundar and Satya and everyone who’s kind of in the space working on this stuff.

And look, I mean, what would I say? We’re building up this new team from scratch, and there’s like, five or six places in the world that have a lot of great researchers. You know, Meta, of course, is one of them. And part of what we’re doing is pulling over a lot of the key folks into the new efforts as well.

But we’re also doing a big recruiting push, so we’re not trying to target anyone individually. I want to make sure that I personally get to know all of the top researchers in the industry.

So that way, whether it’s now or in the future, if there’s a good opportunity to work together, then we can, we can make that happen.

Well, it’s the hot AI summer, Mark, and you’re at the center of it. Thank you for joining TITV. And we’ll be watching.