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.
What “personal superintelligence” really means to Meta
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.
People who have seen the offers tell me they are structured more like executive pay with specific performance targets (they are paid out through performance stock units, not the restricted stock units that most Big Tech employees get) and the ability to claw back money, including the hefty signing bonus, if you leave early. Given the strings that are attached, it’s easier to see why Zuckerberg hasn’t managed to hire everyone he has gone after.
“Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab. We will make the investment to do it.” – Apple CEO Tim Cook talking about AI during an employee all-hands meeting.
“Base model startup companies splitting into 1. Winners competing at the soon-to-be 13-digit level [new rounds, new investors, high valuations] 2. Laggards kept alive in hopes of finding [a] niche or buyer [new rounds, same investors, not yet punitive valuations] 3. Sovereign-supported local plays” – Hunter Walk
“I wouldn’t say research iterates on product. But now that models are at the edge of the capabilities that can be measured by classical benchmarks and a lot of the long-standing challenges that we’ve been thinking about are starting to fall, we’re at the point where it really is about what the models can do in the real world.” – OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki
”Two decades ago, design was lipstick on a pig. Design now is how you win or lose.” – Figma CEO Dylan Field
A quick chat with Figma’s CPO
A question surrounding Figma’s blockbuster IPO this week is whether AI will ultimately abstract away the need for a tool like Figma, or make it more useful.
Figma thinks its focus on team collaboration will help it withstand the rise of ‘vibe design’ tools like Lovable. After he helped ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, I caught up with CPO Yuhki Yamashita. “When I think about the future, I think about where the highest value activity is going to happen,’” he told me. “And for me, it’s all around aligning as a team on what you’re building, and the other activity is taking an idea and really refining it.”
Like his boss, Dylan Field, Yamashita sees design as a key differentiator in a world full of AI-generated software. “If you decide it’s an exciting enough idea to pursue, to keep iterating on, that’s what is going to differentiate that product, especially in a world where more and more people are creating more and more products. And I think being that platform where people are gonna do that is increasingly important.”
I buy that argument, but I can also see more of Figma’s core use cases being replaced by AI-native startups. Luckily for Figma, Field is one of (if not the) most well-connected angel investors in AI startups right now. Given his openness to M&A, I’d expect Figma to make some acquisitions to help it get ahead in the coming quarters.
Interesting career moves this week:
- TikTok has moved Adam Presser, its head of operations and safety, to run the USDS entity it set up with Oracle to sequester American data. I expect him to play a key role in the separate, US version of TikTok that is being built for when the Trump administration and China can agree on a deal to permanently avoid a ban.
- Margit Wennmachers, the tech founder-whisperer who built Andreessen Horowitz’s marketing muscle from scratch, announced that she’ll be moving to an advisor role at the firm in the coming months.
- Well, that’s awkward. News broke that Lee Brown, Spotify’s ads chief, was going to DoorDash the same week that his old boss, chief business officer Alex Norstrom, told investors that “we need to see more progress within ads.”
Responses to last week’s issue about Google:
- “Their swag was lost when they laid people off by the thousands and made their employees fear management, not when people started using ChatGPT.” – @surco
- “Reminds me of the times when Mobile Search post Android and iOS was becoming popular and the concern was if Google can switch to the new platform that well. It delivered and how. I see a similar narrative shaping up in the AI space. Google’s foundation is quite deep and agile to navigate this change.” – Anshuman Mishra, operations lead, Google
- “Personally, I don’t prefer when Google works like ChatGPT. A lot of my queries are either a.) simple enough that there’s really no need for AI to do anything, or b.) complex enough that I’m not looking for something easily summarized into a paragraph or two of text. I’m not boycotting Google, but I do use DuckDuckGo as my default these days, in part because it lets you disable the AI search assist feature.” – @Wraithtek
- “I love it when the media tell me things that i’ve known for a while 🙂 but always great to see the validation!” – Marvin Chow, VP of marketing, Google
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