Meta bet on personal agents while rivals crowded into coding

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 9:12

   between your other competitors. Yeah, well, this is kind of... That's actually really interesting. Yeah, it's actually useful to go back to the moment because if you go back to the start of the year, February, Opus and Claude were way ahead in coding, way ahead of anyone else, and they were exploding. It was the beginning of the sort of like, you know, anthropic takeover in the whole industry. And it was a very scary moment, I think, generally speaking, which is like, oh, wow, this is, you know, they're so ahead on coding.

2. 9:39

   And then obviously they had Mythos, and they had this clear lead. I think the conventional wisdom in the industry was that coding agents were the only form factor that mattered or maybe the only technology that mattered or the only capability that mattered for advanced AI. There was this incredible force in the industry to just go and crowd that use case and compete with Anthropic on coding agents.

3. 10:04

   Because of our experiences and our convictions I think formed around this idea of personal agents and the sort of taking a step back. I think the reason why we did personal super intelligence in the first place was that it was also what we believed Meta was uniquely positioned to do. And we can talk more about that. But I think because of that... Well, let's talk about that now. Okay, we'll just do the weave.

4. 10:26

   I think one of the first things I told Mark, even before the whole scale and Meta deal happened and everything, one of the first things I told him was, I think Meta is actually a really special company if we have AGI or ASI or whatever you want to call it. Because part of the promise of AI is that for all of us, we have a mix of things that we want to do and things that we have to do. And the promise of AGI is that we're going to spend almost none of the time doing things that we have to do because the AIs will just start doing a lot of that for us.

5. 11:02

   And we can spend all of our time on things that we want to do. And for me, Meta's products represent the things that we all want to do. Like my use of Instagram or WhatsApp or Facebook, like these are products that represent what I, you know, I follow my interests. I follow my hobbies. I follow people that I like, my friends and the people I care about. Like the product span of Meta encapsulates the sort of like what we want to spend our time doing sort of realm.

6. 11:31

   I think on a long arc, Meta is an incredible winner through all this. That's like one of the first things that I believed about Meta and superintelligence. And then ultimately, a lot of those ideas made its way into this concept of personal superintelligence. You know, you can kind of look at it a few ways. One is, what's the heritage of the company? The heritage of Meta is connecting people with their friends and family, helping them discover their interests.

7. 11:59

   These are things that are very human. And then there's also this sort of like, you can take the business lens, which is Meta has distribution to three and a half billion people using the apps every day. And the natural area where Meta was going to be successful is consumer AI. It's not work, it's not coding, it's personal. Yeah, exactly. So personal agents and personal AI and consumer AI, broadly speaking, were always the zones where we always felt that Meta was going to be able to do something very special.

8. 12:34

   So that brings us to, okay, early 2026. Now you have the prototype, you have the buy-in, everybody knows, Mark's on board,