M.G. Siegler • #meta • Jul 30, 2025

A Personal Read of 'Personal Superintelligence'

Ahead of Meta earnings and with mega offers being turned down, Mark Zuckerberg aims to change the conversation around AI...

Meta seemingly has a big earnings call today. While Wall Street has gone back and forth on their AI spend, this is the first earnings after Mark Zuckerberg kicked off his new 'Superintelligence' efforts – an implicit admission that the Llama efforts, at least this far, have largely failed. That's a tough message to try to deliver after you've been selling Wall Street on your spend for the past many quarters. The best way to handle it may be to get ahead of it and try to change the conversation.

At the same time, while you're throwing tens of millions, and sometimes hundreds of millions – and perhaps even billions – at people to try to join your new Superintelligence Labs, a number of folks are turning you down. You're making them an offer they cannot refuse and... they're refusing it. Why? In part, perhaps, because your messaging around AI is muddled at best. Further, many simply aren't inspired about the prospects of going to work for what is still very much an advertising-driven company trying to build the future of AI. So what do you do if you're Zuck? Try to change the conversation.

Also, what if there was a way to bury your open source ethos literally while doing so figuratively... To change that conversation.

Enter "Personal Superintelligence". An essay – mission statement? – posted to Meta's website in a style that's hilariously spartan. It may as well read, "how do you do, fellow AI enthusiasts?" But it doesn't read like that. It reads... well, let's break it down, shall we?

Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight.

It seems clear that in the coming years, AI will improve all our existing systems and enable the creation and discovery of new things that aren't imaginable today. But it is an open question what we will direct superintelligence towards.

This is basically the opening of a Sam Altman essay – of nearly every Sam Altman essay. It's grandiose yet vague. It intrigues. What ever could he mean? The future is in sight! Reach out and grab it!

In some ways this will be a new era for humanity, but in others it's just a continuation of historical trends. As recently as 200 years ago, 90% of people were farmers growing food to survive. Advances in technology have steadily freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits we choose. At each step, people have used our newfound productivity to achieve more than was previously possible, pushing the frontiers of science and health, as well as spending more time on creativity, culture, relationships, and enjoying life.

I am extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress. But perhaps even more important is that superintelligence has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where people will have greater agency to improve the world in the directions they choose.

If the intro was sort of like a Sam Altman essay, this part is a Sam Altman essay. Talking about "humanity", a historical reference to try to put our current technology breakthroughs in context, trying to wrap it all in a nice, hopeful blanket, etc. It's all there. Did a Sam Altman bot write this?!

As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.

Ah here we go. You establish the 'superintelligence' term to provide a base from which to launch your own talking point and brand. 'Superintelligence' isn't cool. You know what's cool? 'Personal Superintelligence'.

Meta's vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone. We believe in putting this power in people's hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives.

This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output. At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is how we have always made progress expanding prosperity, science, health, and culture. This will be increasingly important in the future as well.

This is how we're different from those other players in AI who want to own it all and automate away your personality, your work, your hope, your life. We will squeeze the shit out of this mission statement to fit into what Meta – né Facebook – has done historically to get us to this point.

The intersection of technology and how people live is Meta's focus, and this will only become more important in the future.

Ah, the "intersection of technology and..." – we've moved on from Sam Altman to Steve Jobs, I see.

If trends continue, then you'd expect people to spend less time in productivity software, and more time creating and connecting. Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful. Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices.

Let's take the high level notion that AI will free up time for everyone to do what they desire and subtly point out how this benefits Meta. Forget work – get in losers, we're going creating and connecting. (Aside: I'm skeptical that gains in productivity driven by AI will play out this way – I wouldn't be shocked if we use any time saved to do more work. Except in Europe, they'll likely do less work. But it's also unclear when they'll have access to such technology.)

The real key of this paragraph is to point to the fact that Meta has the current lead in AI devices – insofar as Ray-Ban Meta is actually an AI device. It's sort of a pair of camera/music glasses with AI tacked on. Still, Meta has the lead in this space and what they've shown off with "Orion" (now perhaps called "Artemis") – true AR glasses – should be a part of our AI future. Will they replace smartphones. Certainly not anytime soon, but Zuck smoothly doesn't give a timetable for his assertion! One day, someday, we'll move on to what's next.

After channeling Steve Jobs, to take this indirect shot at Apple is a bit harsh. But it's also Zuck's favorite pastime at this point.

We believe the benefits of superintelligence should be shared with the world as broadly as possible. That said, superintelligence will raise novel safety concerns. We'll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source. Still, we believe that building a free society requires that we aim to empower people as much as possible.

Bye bye open source.

Yeah, yeah, Meta will continue to say that nothing has changed, that they'll always open source some of their work. Come on. This is a huge mentality shift, clearly. And while it was seemingly still be debated, we can now put the debate to rest. Llama may or may not be dead, but Meta open sourcing their cutting edge work is.

Why? Safety of course. Weird that it didn't matter when most of the rest of the industry was up in arms about this when the Llama strategy started. Now it does. 'Superintelligence' I guess.

The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take, and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society.

Translation: the other guys, they are coming for you. Hide yo kids, hide yo personal AI...

Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone. We have the resources and the expertise to build the massive infrastructure required, and the capability and will to deliver new technology to billions of people across our products. I'm excited to focus Meta's efforts towards building this future.

Translation: we are not a startup that constantly burns and needs to raise money (well, aside from debt – a lot of debt – but never you mind). And we have history with infrastructure. And the track record in scaling to billions of users. Who else can say that? No – I'm talking about Meta, not Google! Yes, yes, they're in a similar position of strength – fine, maybe even a better one. But did I mention 'Personal Superintelligence'. Nothing personal about that company. Are you in?