today, Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger break down Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s 6,500-word AI manifesto and why it ultimately rings hollow. Plus, why are job seekers scheduling bot-run interviews at 1 am? WIRED’s Andy Greenberg also joins to unpack the best findings from Black Hat and Defcon, from a hacked kids’ smartwatch to a coin-sized device that can hijack a Boeing 737.
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: I really liked it. I thought it was fun. The dialog was kind of whatever, beautiful shots of the Sicilian ocean. And I went with my husband who loves to remind me that he studied Latin and Greek in high school, and he actually liked it too. So frankly,
: Good. Yeah, I agree. I think everyone who is complaining about it needs to stop. Anyway, welcome to WIRED’s
: And I’m Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.
: Today on the show, we’re going to be talking about
manifesto on AI, which weighs in at over 6,500 words. We will be talking about it for less time than it would take to read it, so you’re welcome for that. But most importantly, we’ll discuss what it says about Meta’s strategy as it continuously tries to catch up in the AI race.
: We’ll also get into the rise of the 1 am job interview. As more people talk to a bot instead of a human for their first interview rounds, some job seekers are choosing to schedule theirs very late at night. We’re going to look into that and how it’s far from the only way that AI is changing job interviews as we know them.
: And later in the show, we’ll be joined by WIRED’s Andy Greenberg to dive into some of the most exciting research that came out of Black Hat and Defcon, two of the world’s biggest cybersecurity events. So on Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a roughly 6,500-word essay on AI titled “The Future Is for Everyone.” And doesn’t that sound nice? It’s the latest entry in the unfortunate genre of philosophical manifestos from tech CEOs. They’ve all got one. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei. Everyone’s got a manifesto these days.
: Some people have multiple manifestos. Even Zuckerberg’s manifesto was an expansion of a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he wrote. Anyway, they all want to lay out their views for the industry, for the world, why their companies are best positioned to tackle the future, why you shouldn’t be scared of their products, right? The core argument of Zuckerberg’s manifesto is that concentrating
in a few institutions is dangerous, and broad access to these models is what you need to diffuse that power. He didn’t name specific names, clearly taking jabs at OpenAI and Anthropic, which favor tighter control over their private models. At one point he writes, and I quote, “Historically hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.”
: I think it’s a pretty Philosophy 101 way to say I just wasn’t invited to play at the sandbox with the big kids. I mean, we can’t divorce this from Meta’s desperate attempts to stay relevant in the AI industry and race. And also we have to talk about the fact that they laid off so many people on this team just a few months ago. It was so all over the place. So there’s something very funny to me about Mark Zuckerberg being like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s rein in OpenAI and Anthropic.” But I’m like, “You wish that you were them. That feels very obvious.”
: I wanted to get on that a little bit, Leah, too, in terms of the layoffs you mentioned and Meta’s overall AI strategy, which has been so all over the place. They were all in for the longest time on open-source, open-weight models, because that was a way to counteract and undercut people who were trying to more directly profit off of closed models, OpenAI, Anthropic. That wasn’t working. So they spent billions of dollars on this massive hiring spree to create this superintelligence lab that has not produced anything that has caught up to where the bigger labs are yet. So now he’s saying, actually, maybe open is better, right? It’s like when you can’t win a race and so you say, “Actually, we shouldn’t be racing at all. This race is dumb. Why aren’t we just all sharing everything?” The other thing about this manifesto we haven’t talked about yet is—and God, I hate that we call it that. Like manifesto makes it sound—
: It’s marketing. What his marketing screed said, it’s very “Hey everybody, don’t worry. AI’s just fine and it’s going to be great for you. Why