Zuckerberg Says His AI Will Solve ‘Simpler Things’ Than Its Rivals

Before we get to today’s column about Cognition buying Windsurf, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday spoke to Jessica Lessin, our editor in chief, for the inaugural episode of TITV, a new daily tech show, about the question on everyone’s mind these days: Why exactly would an AI researcher come to Meta? (Other than the $100 million pay packages, of course.)

Zuckerberg drew a connection between the hundreds of billions of dollars he’s planning to spend on AI data centers and Meta’s ability to attract talent. While many firms such as OpenAI are sometimes constrained by the amount of Nvidia chips they can access to develop new models, Zuckerberg implied Meta can offer more compute per researcher. Zuckerberg also made the argument that paying high amounts for the best AI researchers “is actually still quite small compared to the overall investment” in data centers.

Zuckerberg also has a unique perspective when it comes to his vision of superintelligence. In contrast to the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, who wax poetic about the difficult business, scientific and medical problems AI is going to solve—colonizing the light cone, anyone?—Zuckerberg isn’t as interested in applying AI to “grand problems.”