Andrew Bosworth on AI, wearables, and mixed reality

The evolution of AI is changing the way we interact with the physical world, not just in how we use this technology, but also where and how we access it. In this episode, Reid and Aria sit down with Meta’s Chief Technology Officer, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, who is pioneering wearables for the company. Boz’s journey in the tech sector has taken him from working on Microsoft Visio to founding Reality Labs, Meta’s AR and VR division. Now, he’s focused on the next frontier in mixed realities with his latest project, Orion, a pair of AR glasses. Boz offers an Orion demo and shares his vision for wearables as an equalizing technology that can unlock superpowers for every person. Plus, they check-in on the state of AI as it relates to open source software, safety, hyperscalers, and startups. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/ Topics: 1:03 - Episode introduction 3:36 - How Boz’s farm upbringing influenced his career and perspective on the digital world 7:02 - How will wearables influence how we navigate the physical and digital worlds? 9:46 - Meta's AI philosophy 11:27 - Pi explains Norbert Wiener's construct of information theory 14:28 - What would it take to build AI world models? 15:09 - What are the most significant use cases for Orion? 19:01 - Can Orion accommodate monocular vision? 20:00 - Boz's response to Orion skeptics 22:29 - Boz gives predictions on our AI future 25:09 - What would it look like to have a compatible system of wearables? 27:30 - Unexpected discoveries from Orion testing 29:33 - What is Meta's focus in the AI space for the years to come? 30:48 - How do we ensure that AI innovation is used for good? 35:28 - Boz responds to Meta's changes in fact checking policy 37:11 - How will hyperscalers and start-ups flourish in the AI game? 40:06 - Boz shares his review on “The Wild Robot” 42:24 - Rapid-fire questions Select mentions: The Martian by Andy Weir Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter J. C. R. Licklider, psychologist and computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, engineer and computer science pioneer Norbert Wiener, computer scientist and mathematician Yann LeCun, computer scientist and Chief AI Scientist at Meta Michael Abrash, Chief Scientist, Reality Labs, Meta Garry Kasparov, Russian chess grandmaster 4-H, a youth development program from the USDA The Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) Qualified Business Income Deduction (QBI) Possible is an award-winning podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Tune in for grounded and speculative takes on how technology—and, in particular, AI—is inspiring change and transforming the future. Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with an ambitious builder or deep thinker on a topic, from art to geopolitics and from healthcare to education. These conversations also showcase another kind of guest: AI. Whether it's Inflection’s Pi, OpenAI’s ChatGPT or other AI tools, each episode will use AI to enhance and advance our discussion about what humanity could possibly get right if we leverage technology—and our collective effort—effectively.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Every person, superhuman vision, superhuman hearing, superhuman memory, superhuman cognition. That is the vision that we have for these wearables. A tremendous equalizing technology. Who has incredible memory, incredible vision, incredible hearing. Some people are born that just have those talents. The vagaries of the bell curve and the ranges of human capabilities are beyond just the demographic ones. They exist in terms of fundamental capabilities. And how interesting will we be as a society if everyone has the full access to those facilities?

• 0:39Reid Hoffman?

  Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:40Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finger.

• 0:42Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know how together we can use technology like AI to help us shape the best possible future.

• 0:49Aria Finger?

  We ask technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers to help us sketch out the brightest version of the future. And we learn what it'll take to get there.

• 0:59Reid Hoffman?

  This is possible.

• 1:03Reid Hoffman?

  It's no surprise that innovations in tech are changing the way we interact with each other. But now, we're living in an era where devices and programs are changing the way we interact in the physical world. And they're doing so through advancement in augmented reality, virtual reality, and of course, AI.

• 1:23Aria Finger?

  The future is already here, and it is quickly redistributing more evenly. And while we talk a lot about software, it's happening increasingly with wearables. Namely, electronic devices designed to blend seamlessly into our everyday lives, like watches, clothing, and glasses. However, these aren't just fun gadgets, but devices that could refactor how we navigate our world.

• 1:45Reid Hoffman?

  Our world is soon to be one where glasses don't just help you see, but where they enhance what you see. Now, add AI to the equation. The glasses could potentially guide you. Talk to you and troubleshoot your problems while keeping you rooted in the physical world. The possibilities and applications in this space continue to grow.

• 2:06Aria Finger?

  One of the key figures shaping the future of this technology is Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer and the head of Reality Labs. Bos has spent nearly two decades at the forefront of digital innovation. He joined Facebook back in 2006, where he developed pivotal features like the News Feed, Messenger, and Groups. Those functions playing a crucial role in transforming Facebook into the tech giant that it is today. But his influence doesn't stop there.

• 2:37Reid Hoffman?

  Boz's journey in tech runs deep. From his early days as a teaching fellow for an AI course at Harvard, working on Microsoft Visio, and later founded Meta's AR and VR division, which became Reality Labs. Today, as Meta builds towards the metaverse, Bos is focused on the next frontier in mixed realities. His latest project, Orion, a next-generation pair of AR glasses still in development, aims to revolutionize how we interact with the digital and physical world while striving to make this groundbreaking technology accessible to a wider audience.

• 3:16Aria Finger?

  In this episode, we'll be diving into the intersections of Bos's career, Meta's ambitious AI hardware projects, and the broader implications of having AI and mixed reality in our day-to-day lives.

• 3:28Reid Hoffman?

  So let's get into it. Here's our conversation with Bos.

• 3:35Reid Hoffman?

  So you were part of the California program where you raised livestock and essentially grew up on a farm, which, by the way, I went to a high school on a farm, so I'm very sympathetic. I'm curious, how did that experience influence the person you are today?

• 3:52Speaker 00

  People are often surprised by the fact that, you know, I grew up on a farm and my family's farming from way back and still is farming to this day. But actually, really, if you know about farmers, three things that are important to know about farmers. Number one is they're governed by time, daylight and seasons. They have X number of daylight hours to which they get their work done and they gotta get it done because the seasons are moving forward. And that forces two other things. The first one is every one of them's an engineer. You gotta fix that tractor now because you gotta get that crop done. You gotta mend that fence today. You don't have time to be dealing with getting these livestock back in the pen. So they're all engineers, not scientists. I mean, real, like, get it done with what you have on hand kind of engineers. And the second one is they're entrepreneurs. You know, my family runs a horse ranch.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Well, a horse ranch means you got a lot of manure. Well, you got two ways to handle that. The one is you can pay someone to pick that manure up and haul it off and that's gonna cost you money. The second one is you can market that manure as fertilizer and you can make a little money. That's a, you know, two for one swing. And so my cousins who are still farming and my uncles who are still farming, it's either a cost or an opportunity. Then the margins are slim. So you gotta make those opportunities work. You know, in my experience at least, it's not as big a stretch as people thought. But I do wanna shout out National 4H Organization and California State 4H. I learned how to program in 4H. It's not just cows and cooking, as we like to say. The first person who taught me to program was a fellow 4H-er and got me into computers that way.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  So it's a great program, not just from a entrepreneurial and engineering standpoint, but also directly programming computers.

• 5:24Reid Hoffman?

  Was there anything in addition in the kind of farming that also shaped how you think about the interface between the digital and physical worlds?

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Well, it's interesting. I think the point that humans are busy, they got a lot of things on their plate and the tool either has to work for them or it's just not worth it. I really think that when we think about how we build these tools... A lot of times, we're beset by the tremendous value that we see. Especially in our industry, we see how great it could be. And this isn't new. This goes back Douglas Engelbart, right? Who invented the mouse. To some degree, his vision at SRI failed because he had such a complex idea. He wanted humans to do a ton of work to get skilled enough to unlock the full power of the machine. And my understanding is even in his retirement, you know, late in the 90s, he lamented the fact that we took the easy exit. We took the computer mouse and we ran with it and just did this point and click stuff.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Whereas he wanted to replace the keyboard with the cord set. He had all these ideas. And I think that's a lesson we keep relearning, which is like, it has to be so easy. Like, the big pot of value at the end is great, but it still has to be so, so easy to get at it that you can lead people down that path. If they have to take a course to learn how to do it, they're not going to do it. It doesn't matter how valuable it is. And that's not, nothing to do with anything but just how humans are. But that's like, that's true in a wood shop. That's true in an auto shop. The tool that you can pick it up and you're like, yep, I see it. I get it. I use it. It works. That's the tool people reach for time and time again, not the super elaborate, complex one. I think about that all the time. That was the truth growing up on a farm, is you just, you had to get it done. You didn't have time to be trying to learn a new thing. You had to get it done.

• 7:02Aria Finger?

  So I love that way to start because when people think about technology, at least lately, they think so much about the digital world. And it feels like there's nothing more real world than like working on a farm and using tools to fix your equipment and making sure the cows get milked and sort of all that stuff that's in the real world. But we're in this new era, this new ecosystem of device wearables and smartphones and of course, classes. And so how do you think about sort of this new world where we're actually going to navigate and engage with the physical world through digital in a way that we used to interact with digital spaces?

• 7:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is the construct of the metaverse, which I think has been pretty broadly misunderstood, or at least is understood differently by different people, is this idea of blending of the digital and the physical together. Actually, let's keep with the farming thing because it's great. Farmers are pioneering some amazing work. You know, autonomous driving is not as far along as autonomous farming is. You know, tractors that are able to plow the fields automatically, drones that are out there doing reconnaissance on what fields need what kind of treatment. That is actually pretty advanced technology and it really is. Very much about blending the physical and the digital capabilities together. And so we had this amazing explosion with the internet and software. And I think we took software as far as it could go

• 8:20Speaker 00

  within the construct of a phone, a laptop. It's like, we just took it to the absolute limit. And what's exciting me now is these really physical manifestations where through advanced sensors, whether it be audio, mechatronics, whether it be drones or robotics, automation. And then ultimately, I think through wearable devices, we're getting to a new plateau of hardware that can further allow software to breathe and expand. AI is such a fun example because it's so vogue right now. And if people have had a chance to ignore all the hype and really try to use these tools in their daily lives, there are some areas where it's mind-blowingly useful.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  You know, I'm doing a little home automation project and I'm debugging. And there's these obscure, you know, Internet of Things devices that have unlisted APIs. And it would take me a long time to build a fuzzer to discover those. Man, you can do it in minutes with these tremendously useful AIs. Of course, there's a ton of things they're not good at. But I still find the interface to them very awkward, where I'm going to my phone or I'm going, whether it's voice or text, it's this very transactional thing. And what's so funny, I find myself, I'm like the cut and paste machine suddenly. Like I'm doing a coding project here and I'm like, okay, I gotta cut this result, the debugger output into here. And then it gives me the answer and I'm cutting and pasting back into the thing. This should all be integrated.

• 9:46Reid Hoffman?

  So let's broaden out to AI generally. I mean, like, I'm enough of a geek and the interface with kind of the the digital and the physical world and how that transforms what it is to be human and homo technic. I could spend the entire discussion on this, which will be amazing. But there's also AI more broadly. So what's the meta view of AI and in use in products, use in the world? What is the AI philosophy?

• 10:13Speaker 00

  So there's three layers to this in my mind. The first one is we're building these very exciting models. And I find myself actually sometimes at war with both sides of the AI discussion. I have a profound belief that these are hugely important, meaningful things that will meaningful advance human capability. I kind of liken it to a word calculator, right? In the year 1960, a calculator was a person. In the year 1970, it was not a person anymore. It was a different thing. And at first they like ban them from school and get rid of them. And I grew up in the, you won't have a calculator with you at all times. I have three calculators with me at all times. My high school teachers were wrong about that. I think of the AIs that we are building as word calculators. I really mean that word image, like visually, they're really complex calculators that have moved beyond the simple symbolic space of mathematics into this higher order space.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  I also don't think it is even the kind of thing that is human intelligence as we understand intelligence and agency and consciousness and thought. And so I have to fight both sides. Like AI is both a huge deal and also not that kind of a huge deal. So that's like my first kind of belief about it, which gives me tremendous confidence in how I use the tool. The second one is we're running into the information theoretic limits of it. If you go all the way back to like Norbert Wiener and in cybernetics of the first constructs of information theory.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  Hi there, I'm Pi and I'm here to add some context. Norbert Wiener's construct of information theory can be explained in simple terms as the study of how information flows and is used to control systems, including mechanical, biological and social systems. His work on feedback loops and data processing laid the foundation for modern control systems.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  This idea of how many bits can we pull out of something that are sufficiently generalizable bits? And we're finding out that for all the corpus of human media ever produced, it's not enough. It's not enough. We're finding that in robotics. You know, robotics is an effort that we picked off recently inside of Meta in partnership kind of as kind of an adjunct to our Lama program. And no matter how many videos you have of somebody grabbing a coffee cup, you're actually not getting the data you need because you don't know the proprioception of how much force is applied and how we detected, okay, this is a plastic cup. It's going to deflect to a certain point. And there's condensation on it, so I need to apply a little bit more force to counter the loss of friction that I'm experiencing.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  We do that autonomically. There's not a single conscious thought in our head when we're doing those things. Aria, when you're taking your phone out of your pocket, you don't know what the angle of your second digit is or how much force you're applying with your thumb to avoid getting the keys.

• 12:44Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  To some degree, the things that we think of as intelligence, we're talking about the higher order functions of the human brain. That's arguably the less impressive part of intelligence. The deep brain, the mammalian, the amygdala, that lizard brain intelligence, that is wildly hard for us to capture in the modern era. So as much as I'm excited about the word calculator, I really do believe in Jan LeCoon's vision that you have to do this pioneering work to break through to a world model that has common sense, that understands causality in a more substantial way, not in a statistical kind of soup way, but in a model-based way. And then my third layer of this stuff is I want it to be embodied. It almost goes back to like JCR Licklider, who was one of the first computer scientists to sit down at a terminal

• 13:30Speaker 00

  and do a live programming. And he believed in that vision. He really was the one who then funded what would become SRI, found Doug Engelbart funded a bunch of DARPA, the ITO at DARPA. Like, I feel like we're in that era. We're in the terminal era of AI, and it doesn't want to be like that. It wants to be everywhere. It wants to be ubiquitous. It wants to be in full context of what your life is and with history of who you are and what your life is. I think about Douglas Hofstadter's book, I Am a Strange Loop, and how we all have little mini versions of each other's consciousness, simulations of each other's consciousness running in our brains that allow us to collaborate effectively. And my AI obviously doesn't have that. It has no idea what I want, what I'm about. It can't infer anything from context. So for me, like, I love where we are.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  I am a huge believer in it. I also want us to invest in these world models, and I want to free it from the terminal.

• 14:21Reid Hoffman?

  And is the world models and the free from the terminal, are those fundamentally new, different technologies from the kind of scale transformer? What's the kind of looking through a glass darkly, thinking about how this would be done?

• 14:33Speaker 00

  I think the embodied part can do both. The embodied part will benefit a lot and maybe help a lot with world modeling. Once you have these sensors out there and you have better, richer data, when you have robotics data, which will give you proprioception, which will give you friction. Like, I think that is going to be a big unlock. It benefits the current models a huge amount to get that data and to be in that context. And also, it probably is some of the data that you need to start to understand what it takes to build a world model, which we appear to be born with.

• 15:01Reid Hoffman?

  Tell me about the Orion project. I had the pleasure and honor of coming by, you know, Meta HQ and playing with it and getting some of the detailed exposures. Tell me about like, kind of what you see as the significant use cases and where the metaverse is moving towards with Orion.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  So we've got the Orion glasses are on right now. I've also got this wristband, this neural interface wristband. It's got these little kind of metal bumps on the back of it, all down the band. EMG sensors, electromyography. They're measuring electrical impulses going down my hand. And what I'm able to do, I've got a screen in front of me, so I can do my email. I can do Instagram. We have little games that you can play. I have been caught playing the games in meetings before. They weren't my meetings, to be fair. I was just listening in, but I have been caught. And I can do it with my wrist at rest by using a small number of gestures, but I'm using eye tracking to try to direct things. And so we had to do a lot of tough problem solving on photonics and optics. Some of the stuff we understand. We understand how to build apps. We understand how to do these things.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  And there's some novel interaction design here with the wristband and eye tracking. But I think we've made that pretty straightforward. Doing the neural interfaces was super hard. You're building an AI model of what the hand is doing based on these electrical impulses that you're able to observe from the surface. And so you just need a lot of people to build a generalized model that works so that anybody can put this on. And I think we had success with you, Reed. Like, I think it's, we're well into the 95th percentile, I think, of people who put this on and can right away, we know what shape the hand is in. And that allows us to do these gesture-based controls, even with your hands in your pocket behind your back. These need to be regular glasses first and foremost. When they're powered off, I have to be able to see your eyes to see my eyes. And like, that has to be a, that human connection that we have is important, otherwise I wouldn't use the glasses.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  You have to do all of this in a comfortable, all-day wearable form factor. It's a lot of challenges. You know, this was 10 years in the making, and we thought when we started this program that we had less than 10% chance of being able to build it. So the fact that it exists is a true testament to a vision that Mark Zuckerberg had, that the research team, Michael Abrash, our chief scientist, and his team had for a long, long period of time. Now, we always thought, to your point about the metaverse, that the first thing would happen would be these holograms in the world. And at first, they'd be just referenced to you, so this is your personal interface. And then, over time, they would be attached in the world, and then eventually, you would have an AI that was doing it. What's been surprising to us is the AI came first. We had the sequencing wrong. The AI showed up earlier than expected.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  So what's been so exciting is, there's a lot of products now that are totally valid products, that are easy to use between full AR glasses, which are spectacular, but will be expensive, and the Ray-Ban Metas, which are super affordable, but like, are a little bit more limited in their functionality. That entire spectrum is now open to us, and it's really, really exciting. And we have demos internally in our wearables, and with the Ray-Ban Metas that are in-market today, through our early access program, you can use this tool called Live AI. 30-minute session until the battery runs out, because it was kind of bolted on after the fact. But for 30 minutes, it can see what you're seeing, it hears what you're hearing. And the difference in how useful it is to me as I go about my day in the world,

• 18:13Speaker 00

  I was doing a film development project and film developing is a real fussy business with what kind of chemical at what temperature for how long. Usually I'm doing it with like a laptop next to me and I'm trying to type into the laptop. Okay, what's the thing? Doing it with the live AI session was incredible. It just sees what you're doing. It's like, okay, you got 20 more minutes of doing that. And then you're going to do this other thing. And why don't you go ahead and prepare this now? It's stunning. So for me, it is about blending the physical and digital together in both directions. You have to give the AI access to the physical context in which you operate and the digital context in which you operate on your desktop or on your phone. And conversely, you want to be able to bring those digital constructs into reality through robotics, through automation.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  So I see really a very, very exciting kind of decade ahead of us in that synthesis.

• 19:01Aria Finger?

  So I am someone who sees 90% of my vision out of one eye. Will I be able to use these?

• 19:08Speaker 00

  Yes, so these are binocular. You'll experience the same limited depth perception that you would experience normally. That's right.

• 19:15Aria Finger?

  But I have now, yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  So you'll still be able to use these.

• 19:18Aria Finger?

  Okay.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  Over the future of time, I do expect a, one of the real option spaces here is what if you go to monocular? What if you just had the display in one eye?

• 19:27Aria Finger?

  Yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  And there's some challenges there. It creates some binocular rivalry. So for people who have full vision in both eyes, they might struggle sometimes to know, hey, my eyes are seeing different things, looking at the same space.

• 19:39Aria Finger?

  Where should I look? Yeah.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  You would actually be better off.

• 19:42Aria Finger?

  Oh, I love it. Can't wait. I finally have a superpower.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  You would have a little superpower. That's right. You'd have a little advantage. The monocular displays would probably be great for you, cheaper, lighter and probably just as good. So I think you've got maybe a little inside opportunity on the rest of us.

• 19:57Aria Finger?

  I love it. I love it. Okay, so for some of the skeptics out there, I feel like this is especially a good question for you because you were essentially the person who created the newsfeed. And for those of the youngs among us, they might not remember this, that the newsfeed came out and everyone was like, no, this is horrible. What are we doing? And now we're like, oh, a newsfeed. This makes so much sense. This is perfect. They can't imagine a world without it. And so some people might be saying the same thing. They might be saying, why are you creating these things that we don't need? Like, what would you say to the skeptics? And then also, as you see people using it, what do you think some of the mainstream adoptions are going to be?

• 20:34Speaker 00

  Things like AI are different kinds of things. These are different types of innovations. These are truly new tools. This is a new space. The smartphone was a kind of a disruptive thing where it was like, hey, you have a phone and you have an iPod and you have like, you like the web. We're going to put all those in one place. Right? That was like, that was the pitch. This will be similar to that. This will be like, hey, look, you already have a phone that you like doing this. You already like, you already like Instagram. This is a better way of doing a thing that you already do. And then, once you've established that beachhead through comfortable paths, then the huge opportunity presents itself. You know, you talked, Arya, about having superpowers. That is the vision that we have for these wearables.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Every person, superhuman vision, superhuman hearing, superhuman memory, superhuman cognition. That's what I'm talking about. That's what I really believe is going to happen here. A tremendously, tremendously equalizing technology. You know, we talk often in our society today about the vagaries of the birth lottery, and we're rightly doing so. We usually talk about the birth lottery in the context of whether it be race and gender or, or physical geography. And those are hugely important factors in how our lives play out. But we don't talk about the other parts of the birth lottery. Who has incredible memory, incredible vision, incredible hearing? Some people are born that just have those talents. Incredible ability to, to think creatively, to pattern match. And there's no reason we couldn't all be Garry Kasparov in chess if we have the wearables. You know what I'm saying?

• 21:59Speaker 00

  Now, it probably takes the fun out of chess, so I'm not recommending anti-competitive performance. But my point is, like, the vagaries of the bell curve and the ranges of human capabilities are beyond just the demographic ones. They exist in terms of fundamental capabilities. And how interesting will we be as a society if everyone has the full access to those facilities? That is the future I see. And I think that's a pretty compelling pitch to people, to get them to try a new thing.

• 22:23Reid Hoffman?

  Exactly. And I'm going to take this moment to ask you a question that I hate getting, so it's kind of entertaining to be the asker of it, which is, you know, if you're predicting out, call it three years, you know, and with kind of wearables and AI and everything else... What kinds of things do you see in the future that will be the kind of thing that people will be doing? Is it kind of like a, it's giving me a constant scan on my life? It's doing the proactive search of, oh, you're looking at like film developing or you're looking at this thing. Oh, let me tell you some stuff about this. What is your future prediction that might cause, call it semi or non-technologists to go, oh, my God, that's coming in three years?

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think what's interesting, the hard part of this question is the timeline of it. I think you and I probably would do better in one year and 10 years.

• 23:09Reid Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Three years is, is the most awkward time because, you know, you can kind of, I know one year, I have a good sense of 10 years. Three years is tough. I don't think we'll be at the proactive place in three years quite yet. Early adopters will probably have always on systems that are capable of it. The degree to which I think it's going to be reliable enough for the average consumer. I think we're probably a little further out from that from a world modeling and cognition standpoint. But for a decent portion of people, you know, tens of millions, we're going to have people who are in regular conversation with AIs. Everything from, I cook all the time, I'm the cook in my family. Hey, like, you know, how many quarts is it in a gallon? How many, you know, what's the, what's the conversion tablespoons to ounces of water?

• 23:54Speaker 00

  To, hey, what did my wife say? I need to get the grocery store, remind me, she told me yesterday, hey, when I opened the fridge earlier, did we have, did we have that cheese that I like? You know?

• 24:03Aria Finger?

  That's the best one.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  And listen, and there's stuff that I really want to push for, but we have to advocate for regulatorily. I mean, I think one of the classic ones is the cocktail party problem. And Reed, you must run into this all the time. You know, you, you see somebody coming up to you, you recognize them, you know, you know them. You don't remember why you know them or how you know them. And right now we're just like, hey, guy, good to see you, you know, friend, like, and you're just like looking for clues to try to remember. I'd love to be able to have your AI whisper to you like, hey, you know, this is who, this is this person. The last time you saw him was here, they, you know, and you're like, oh, right, right, right, right. And that kind of thing, but that one we need to help with, right? You need, right now, there's, there's regulations in Illinois and Texas, BIPPA and QB that make that kind of thing. Tenuous at best, if it's doable. So there's a bunch of very human problems where we could be a little bit more proactive,

• 24:49Speaker 00

  and I think comfortably so, in a totally privacy way. We've got to do work. So, so three years from now, I do think you'll be in this kind of, people at the leading edge, but not the earliest adopters, not the bleeding edge, just the leading edge, just the early adopters, will be having tremendous usefulness, kind of cognition and memory help from their assistants.

• 25:09Reid Hoffman?

  And where do you see the panoply of wearables? Like, is the glasses going to work with a watch, work with a phone? Or will there be some like, well, once you have the glasses, you don't need the watch as much anymore?

• 25:21Speaker 00

  No, I think they want to work together. I mean, we, we probably are more than 10 years away from having the efficiency of compute from a thermal perspective to have the glasses stand alone. I think for the foreseeable future, you do want this to be a constellation of devices. And there's a lot of value in being on the wrist. You know, the neural interfaces that we've developed here show that there's a tremendous amount of incremental signal and control we can give consumers without having to hijack their eyes or make them reach up and tap something on their, on their temple arm. I, I think there's also a huge opportunity for the range of glasses. So if you have glasses that have no display, you want to pair them with a watch that has a display or with a phone that has a display. If your glasses do have a display, okay, now maybe you just have a simpler band on

• 26:05Speaker 00

  your wrist and you're wearing maybe a conventional wristwatch on your other wrist. We're in this space of wearables. So a thing that we actually haven't had to grapple with in the industry for a while is the, the luxury presentation, the identity that people want to bring to the world about themselves. They want to look a certain way. And so if I'm somebody who wants to look a certain way, I have to have the options to maintain that vision of myself while also being a part of the, of the modern era. It's funny, there's been a lot of discussion about the app stores on Google and Apple devices. I really don't have a problem with those. That's, that's not the issue I see. What worries me more is the degree to which these devices, which are the natural center

• 26:48Speaker 00

  of compute for a constellation of wearables, are locking down the access to third-party wearables manufacturers, to things like critical Bluetooth channels. You know, the famous example I'll use is, is the AirPods. There are better headphones that you can get than the ones happening manufactured by Apple. AirPods are great, it's a great device. They have 70% of the market share and they don't have that because they have the best product. It's really not the best value product. They have it because they have a proprietary Bluetooth channel that makes it super easy to pair. And also because I think they're easy to lose, you have to buy a lot more. But it really bothers me. Like, that shouldn't be that way. And I'm a 90s guy, so I'm an old school, you know, I'm an old school computer construct guy.

• 27:31Aria Finger?

  Right, absolutely. I mean, I think about that all the time. I bought non-AirPods, but it just, they were too hard to use. And so I was like, forget it. It's like, this is not working for me. One thing you said earlier is that you, you know, you tell your team over and over again, like, what human life will be better? Like, what human on this earth will be using this? So can you talk about a time, it could be for the Orions or a different product, that you really saw, like, user testing, got you, ah, this is the aha. You saw something interesting, it made you have a new leap. Like, it's just such a great way to operate.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  There's quite a few, but I'll tell you one that surprised me recently, which makes total sense in retrospect. One of the most popular demographics purchasing our Ray-Ban Meta Glasses are blind people.

• 28:11Aria Finger?

  Uh huh.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  If you watch them in the user research sessions, it makes total sense. And we have, you know, members of the team who are blind. We have a partnership with Be My Eyes, which is a great service. You know, in my head, as a seeing person, I have no problem. I'm like, oh, I wonder if they have problems navigating to the restaurant or getting across the street. They don't. They have solutions for that. They've got Google Maps, it's reading directions into their ears. They've got a stick or a dog or they, you know, there's a bunch of systems they have. They can get to the restaurant. You know what they can't do? They can't find the door. And so what they do is they ask the glasses, hey Meta, uh, look and tell me where the door is. And it's like, oh, okay, like, you know, it's to your left. And if they can't get that kind of thing done, they can call in to Be My Eyes.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  And now they've got a live video stream going to an AI agent at first. If it fails, over to a human who helps them out. And so there's these moments where you know it's gonna happen. Because you yourself are a human and you're like, yes, I as a human am like other humans. And I would want this, so other humans would want this. But there are also these really fascinating times where you build the capability and this stuff comes out of the woodworks that you never saw coming.

• 29:27Aria Finger?

  And so, obviously, Meta, Yann LeCun, you guys are leaders in AI space. And so, what do you think are the things additionally that set you all apart? And what are you going to be focusing on for the years to come?

• 29:41Speaker 00

  Well, we're pretty proud of our open source stance with Llama. I think we were one of the earlier ones. In my opinion, like, some of it's strategic benefit. Like, if anyone builds great AI, our products get better. But people building great AI doesn't let them replicate our products. So we have this asymmetric benefit from AI. So there's a strategically commoditized or complements construct here. But it really is deeper than that for us. And if you've spent any time listening to Yann, you've heard that. We really think that this is the best way to accelerate progress, is you open source these things and people learn from them, and you get back tenfold. You know, when we launched Llama 1, I don't think it was a matter of days before somebody had a version of it running on a laptop. And I think it was a matter of weeks

• 30:25Speaker 00

  before someone had a version of it running on a phone. Just from a resource standpoint, I'm sure we had the talent to do it. We weren't going to. It would have taken us years to get to go do that because we just had other things that we were doing. And so, wow, what a spectacular closed loop to have stumbled into almost with this powerful policy.

• 30:48Reid Hoffman?

  You know, look, it's great when the open source stuff goes to startups and goes to, you know, kind of entrepreneurs and academics and, you know, people building stuff more challenging if it goes to rogue nations, terrorists, criminals. You know, what's the way to kind of navigate that, making sure more of that kind of innovation benefit in the loop happens that way and less of it with, you know, like, North Korean hackers holding hospitals ransom or, you know, other kinds of things?

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, well, there's two parts to this. I mean, I think, again, getting back to this kind of asymmetric construct of AI. Information wants to be free, and I have absolutely zero faith that the most closed source thing that exists isn't actually widely available in the nation states that are inclined to attack those, whether it be through espionage directly or indirectly, I believe that's likely the case. But setting that aside even, I still stand by this because I think the the the opportunity that you have to try to handcuff yourself to slow the progress of your enemies, the far bigger risk is that you just get laughed by your enemies.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  The people we're discussing, especially China, are highly capable. They have a tremendously talented pool of engineers. They're looking at the same thing we're looking at. It is the race. It is, you know, this is this is our space race. This is like, this is what it looks like in our era. And there's very few secrets and there's just progress and you want to make sure that you're never behind.

• 32:14Reid Hoffman?

  I agree with, by the way, your two counterpoints as important points, Boz. But I do continue to linger on the, you know, and I get the, look, we're just accelerate and we try to accelerate to get past what might the bad actors might be doing. But it is important to also kind of to some degree, slow, contain, limit bad actors. And I tend to think that there must still be some things we can do. So I'm kind of curious about like, what what's the thought about the navigation?

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's funny. I think a lot of people in our space read have had this conversation around safety, and I think it's an important one. You know, the the ones that come up most often are bio, cyber and nuclear. I think there is a model there with bio. The the knowledge exists and a lot of times the threats that I hear ascribed to AI fail the Google test. Can I Google for this thing? And very often I can, in which case the AI isn't really the threat. The information isn't the threat. It's the fact that like you can mail order these things. And I have some friends and family who work in bio, who are pretty consistently alarmed at what they're able to acquire for their labs without any kind of control. So I think there are regulatory solutions in the bio space.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  I think on the cyberspace, I actually feel way more optimistic about AI's ability to detect cyber attacks than to generate them. Of course, it will generate more. But I actually think we have been struggling on the detection side. And there's a lot of evidence that if you look at what nation state actors have been able to do, the US with the OPM hack with the hack on some of the crypto exchanges. I think AI is a much more asymmetrically valuable tool in defense than it is in attack. I think we have been on the wrong side of that for a little while. So that one I'm more bullish on. To tell you the one that I'm actually the most worried about, it's not any of those. It's fraud, good old fashioned fraud. You know, I've already had the conversation with my parents. Hey, if somebody calls you and it looks like me and it sounds like me, but they're asking you for money, ask about a fact that only I would know.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Right? There's a real education that has to happen. I talk often with people about this one and it's a hard one to wrap their heads around. But I have to remind people that actually the period that we grew up in was very unusual historically. Before the photograph and before video, all media was presumed to be possibly fake. Right? Like letters, the newspapers were presumed. You know, you didn't know the veracity of it. There was a very unique period, never probably happened again, where you could produce a piece of media, a photograph or a video, that it was impossible to imagine faking it. It was just, it was like orders of magnitude more expensive to fake than to have it be real. And so these were presumptively true.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  That's not going to be the case anymore. So we're going to return to like a pre 1900s media relationship that we have in media. The kids are already there, by the way. The kids are already there. The kids are already, they already know. We have a generation to look after. It's us, it's our generation. We have a generation to look after who didn't have the antibodies for that. So for me, at least, I think that's a piece of education that I would put a lot of energy into as a national policy endeavor.

• 35:28Aria Finger?

  And so I think that begs the question that a lot of possible listeners have about the new AI world and how it relates to information accuracy. And sometimes that's AI created, sometimes that's user generated. Like, how do you think about this? Obviously, a lot of people have seen the new news out of Meta and your changes to fact checking and content review. Like, what's the positive case for what you guys did? And how do you think about that?

• 35:51Speaker 00

  I think community notes is just a better feature than fact checking was. It works at a larger scale. Like, do you use an encyclopedia these days or do you use Wikipedia? Like, it's just, it's not, it's not that hard of it. It's like, this is kind of my broader thought, which is like, you know, I think it's not surprising for, for us as an American company. I think it may be more surprising in other parts of the world for me to say like, yeah, people are allowed to say things, believe things that aren't true. And I think we've all learned a tough lesson that the nature of truth and what is true is also not as firm as we'd like it to be. COVID taught us some tough lessons there. We have to adjust to the fact that we grew up in this relatively golden era where, by the way, the two political parties were effectively almost the same political party. We're exiting that period into what is probably more than we'd like to admit, a normal period

• 36:34Speaker 00

  of American or global democratic upheaval of tension and different ideas about the future of where things are going. And the technology is playing a huge role in that. And I think education about these tools is hugely important.

• 36:48Aria Finger?

  Yeah.

• 36:49Reid Hoffman?

  Going back to kind of the startup landscape, one of the questions I often get is, you know, because of the importance of compute, size of data, et cetera, is AI a game that is only going to be won by the hyperscalers? And one of the things I think is, you know, kind of very helpful about what Meta is doing with the open source stuff, right? This is in the positive category, is obviously making that a much more, you know, field where a lot of different people can play. What do you think are going to be the things that the hyperscalers, you know, Meta and the others are going to be kind of like this is the areas we're going to be deploying a bunch of stuff. And what are the things that you think are some of the range of interesting things with startups? And, you know, how will that play out?

• 37:28Speaker 00

  We're super thrilled about the role that Llama has played in building up the ecosystem of startups and giving them a better shot to innovate. And we're seeing that really play out materially as hyperscalers are forced to take on innovations that came out of, you know, these little startups and obviously vice versa is happening. Listen, the wisdom at every generation, and you know, it's better than anyone read it. The wisdom of every generation is these big companies from the last generation are obviously going to win the next generation. And it almost never happens. It almost never happens and we never know why or how until it happens. And then we're like, oh, obviously that's why and how. And so I don't know why or how, but I suspect there is a lot of room for truly disruptive technologies.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  Now, I will say structurally, we actually know a lot more about the challenges the hyperscalers face. Google has a business model challenge, right? Like, are they willing to undermine and cannibalize one of the most successful business models, if not the most successful business model of all time? Boy, they've got the technology, the capability, they've got this tension that's tough. Easier for us, this is all gravy for us. All of our products just get better. Like, they just get better. Like, it's all good news for us. Microsoft, I think, is actually in a similar strong position. Their products get better. The consumers who use Office products get better. Having all the AI doesn't make you able to build Office, but having Office and with AI is better. So I feel like us and Microsoft win kind of no matter what.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  Like, you know, with respect to the haters, I'm sorry to tell you, like, we're there. I think Google's got the tension. I think Amazon's somewhere between AWS certainly could be helped tremendously. But is it a race to the bottom and they're just adding one more incremental service? So maybe it's a, it's a no up for them. They're announcing their partnership with Anthropic. They have a huge investment in Anthropic. Alexa's got a huge footprint. Can they rejuvenate Alexa with this new program? You know, Panos is there. I think he's obviously a tremendous talent. So I'm rooting for them. I think that'd be great to have these AIs in the homes and more interesting places. So ironically, what we have is a lot more visibility into the hyperscalers and the landscapes they face. The startups are a total wild card, and that's what I love about them. You know, they come out of nowhere.

• 39:35Aria Finger?

  I love that state of the state and reality check. It reminds me of that meme that's like, yeah, I knew search was going to be big, so I invested in Yahoo. And then I knew smartphones were going to be huge, so I did research in motion. And then social was obviously huge, so my space was my biggest investment, you know? It's like, it's really hard to predict what's going to hit.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  That's right. And we underestimated the last mile. We underestimate the interface design. We underestimate the use cases.

• 39:59Aria Finger?

  Absolutely. So on this podcast, Reid always gets to ask the questions about science fiction, and I'm always woefully behind. I would make a wager that since you have young kids, you've probably either seen Wild Robot or read the three books. And so I'd love to ask you a question about your thoughts on it.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  Of course, yeah.

• 40:18Aria Finger?

  You have this robot who has empathy, who is, you know, talking to the animals in the forest. Like, just talk to me about Wild Robot. And do you think it's a positive depiction of AI and robotics, negative warning? Like, how do you see it? I'm sure your kids have seen it, and that's one thing that's shaping their vision of robots.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  First of all, I'm a huge film fan, and I cried like three or four times when I watched that movie. And I watched it like again and cried again at the same points, which is unusual for me. And I'm a bit of a crier, and I got no problem with that. But, uh, but no, so it was a touching film and really a film not about robots. Really a film about motherhood, really a film about parenthood. And so touching on that. You know, if I'm being a critic here, the, I'm not exactly sure how Roz's, hey, let's all get along and not eat each other, works out more than one season, when the carnivores need to eat things. Like, I don't know, kind of unresolved in the film. Is how exactly the carnivores survive in Roz's Brave New World that she's trying

• 41:20Speaker 00

  to craft for them. So it's the, I think the morality of that part is a little heavy-handed for me, and I would have loved them to embrace more the circle of life construct of like, yep, this is like, this is the natural way of things and I've protected you as your mother. And, uh, but neither, I'm not sure that would have worked to the Fox anyways. As far as a tree of robotics go, it's a, it's an infinite magical robot that has permanent energy and has arms that extend to infinity and, and all those kinds of things. What I've been thinking a lot more about in, in science fiction is like engineering oriented science fictions. Uh, Andy Weir is the best at this, right? You know, Pride and Hail Mary, if you, you know, people are familiar with The Martian, which is a great fun one. And I do think the book is better than the movie, uh, with all respect to Matt Damon. I think

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Pride and Hail Mary is even better. It's near future science fiction, so it's tangible. It's optimistic about humanity's ability to engineer our way out of grave problems. Those I love. And those are the ones that I decided to start reading to my kids.

• 42:24Reid Hoffman?

  All right. Rapid fire. Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 42:31Speaker 00

  Oh, wonderful. You know, it's funny. One of the reasons I started getting involved with film a little bit is because I want more optimistic stories out there. I think I'm going to go with Star Trek. And you, by the way, the current series are fantastic, but you don't have to pick the current series. It really is a beacon of, of optimistic science fiction in a landscape of otherwise relatively dystopian works, which I think are just a little easier to write, frankly.

• 42:55Aria Finger?

  That's awesome. Boz, what is a question that you wish people would ask you more often?

• 43:00Speaker 00

  Well, we've gotten to some of them today. It's funny. People hear about my job and they certainly want to understand. What's happening right now? What is AI? Is it a big thing? Is it a bad thing? But they so rarely get into what is the positive vision of the future? The thing that I don't get asked often is like, paint me the picture of the beautiful future. I've spent time doing that in the mixed reality and virtual reality space. This idea of people unbounded by geography. I talked earlier about the birth lottery and where you're born is a huge factor in it. Because it limits what opportunities you have. What if you didn't have those limits? Because the metaverse enabled you to bring the full strength of your talents to bear. And how much would humanity benefit? If people, no matter where they were born, were able to bring that brilliance to the forefront? And then I talk about AR.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  And what if everyone had that memory, the cognition, the hearing, the vision, the capabilities? How does society move forward? When we all have those capabilities in equal measure and at a measure that are superior to what biology can provide us?

• 44:00Reid Hoffman?

  Well, here's another positive question. Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?

• 44:08Speaker 00

  Medicine. Man, it feels like the unlock we're getting to with cell models, the unlock that we're getting to with AI being able to take on modeling tasks that were previously incomparable. We built a custom AI at Fair to do material exploration for the optics for our glasses. It's one of those solution spaces where it's like, you know, bigger than the number of grains of sand on the earth. And you have to look at every molecule and assess what properties it has. And it was short work to build this incredibly dedicated model that narrowed us down to like 20 possible solutions, of which it looks like two are going to work for our purposes. Incredible, incredible result.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  And so you do that and you think about medicine, where you're so often trying to do a certain kind of protein folding. Like, I just think the combination of these two things is going to produce an explosion in great health outcomes for people. And I'm really looking forward to that.

• 45:07Aria Finger?

  Couldn't agree more. And Baz, you teed me up so perfectly for our final question on Possible, which is, can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity's way in the next 15 years? And what's our first step in that direction?

• 45:24Speaker 00

  Ooh. I think 15 years, we're looking at significant, shared.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  Blending of digital into physical. So people coming together, wearing wearables, wearing glasses, and having rich conversations with people who are both present and not present, collaborating on work on models with a true feeling of presence, a true feeling that they're all there. And someone, by the way, they're not on a wearable, they're on a phone, but they're being projected into three dimensional space effectively through a codec avatar. Everyone is getting the most sense they can through whatever tools they have, whatever modalities they have access to, to be present.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  We're so much more in touch with the context of our lives than we give ourselves credit for. I talked earlier about the gap between the conscious and the subconscious. You know, the context in which I consume information, I exchange information, the subtleties of facial gesture and body posture are huge portions of our brain. You know, the infratemporal cortex, just an entire area of brain dedicated to reading faces. No one thinks that video calling is that, which makes us bound for certain things by geography. You have to be there. Now, I don't think anything will ever be as good as being there. But we can get a lot closer than we have so far.

• 46:51Reid Hoffman?

  Oz, always look forward to our conversations.

• 46:54Aria Finger?

  Such a pleasure to have you on the pod. Thanks so much.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you guys both for having me.

• 47:03Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sarah Schlied, Vanessa Handy, Aliya Yates, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, and Malia Agudelo. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 47:26Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Surya Yala Manchili, Sayida Sepieva, Fanasi Dilas, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patel, and Ben Relis. And a big thanks to Meta, John Erle, and Tatian Yang.