Mark Zuckerberg Touts Coming AI Friends

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone on a rare publicity tour to share the new underlying philosophy of the company — people are lonely and want more friends than they have, so Meta wants to give them a group of AI besties.

The Big Picture: It’s true that people are lonely — 30% of adults say they feel lonely once a week, 32% of people under 30 say they have fewer than five close friends, and the US Surgeon General even determined that loneliness is a national epidemic. Whether AI can fill the gap in genuine human connection is a Silicon Valley pipe dream that may not work in practice… but will likely generate a lot of engagement in trying.

Behind the Bots: In 2006, Zuckerberg said, “Facebook is about real connections to actual friends.”

Much has changed in nearly two decades.

• Across interviews, Zuck says he imagines a near-future world where people turn to chatbots as friends, therapists, and customer-service reps — essentially anyone who can help you.
• He told Stripe president John Collison, “I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do” (aka knows every data point about them).
• That’s why Meta is aggressively rolling out new AI features such as chatbots with the likeness of celebrities, a dedicated AI social feed, and an always-on mode on smartglasses called “super sensing” that constantly records your interactions with others.

Future Hangs: Meta, of course, is not the first platform to want to mainstream AI friends — startups like Replika and Character.AI have controversially caught on with people. But Meta has the broadest reach of any social media company by a large margin. The problem is that calling these chatbots “friends” is tricky in and of itself — can AI really be your friend if it doesn’t have wants and desires? Could these chatbots actually be closer to the imaginary friends we had as kids, especially as they turn out to be pretty sycophantic?

Prediction: While AI may be better than nothing for those who truly are in need of someone to converse with, we may see a counter-trend emerge where younger generations, increasingly disenchanted with constant digital immersion, gravitate toward in-person experiences as a more meaningful and intentional way to connect.