Mark Zuckerberg wants you to trust Meta with your personal AI. Good luck with that

The useful part

Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, dropped a 6,500-word essay Monday arguing that AI is safest and most beneficial when it's distributed widely and not controlled by a few leading AI labs. Zuckerberg and company have already burned through most of the public's trust. During Meta's last obsession, the "metaverse," I argued that the company would never dominate the AR/VR space because of the immense amount of personal data users (and people they interact with) would be asked to give up.

How it works

• The problem is that Zuckerberg's vision requires users to trust Meta.
• Meta's AR glasses are now facing a privacy backlash severe enough that some people have taken to calling them "pervert glasses.") That distrust extends well beyond Meta.
• Americans have consistently expressed deep skepticism about social media companies' handling of personal information.

Details worth keeping

Meta wants to present itself as the responsible, democratizing force in AI, and Zuckerberg as a serious thinker about the technology's social consequences—territory more often associated with people like Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei. Unless people have very short memories, that will be a difficult sell.