Why people aren't buying Mark Zuckerberg's AI future

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word essay this week titled “The Future Is for Everyone,” painting an optimistic picture of an AI-powered future in which, as he put it, “everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about.” On TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Rebecca Bellan, and Anthony Ha discussed why the vision isn’t landing — echoing colleague Russell Brandom’s view that the manifesto captures much of what turns people off about AI in the first place.

Bellan argued Zuckerberg is positioning himself as something like an anti-Dario Amodei, the Anthropic CEO who has spent recent days defending his own more cautious public messaging about AI. The comparison is complicated by Meta’s own history, Bellan said: Zuckerberg once promised social media would give everyone an outlet to connect with friends, and what Meta delivered instead was ragebaiting and advertising. She framed the new push cynically — an attempt by Meta to win on personal empowerment and on-device AI since it hasn’t won in either the closed frontier-model race or the open-source one, funneling that ambition into an always-on assistant called Glimmer and a more capable, revenue-generating model called Muse Spark.

Ha noted Meta doesn’t come up in conversations about frontier AI labs or leading consumer chatbots, despite heavy investment, making the essay read as an attempt to claim ground it hasn’t won before; he added that Glimmer isn’t even available on ordinary laptops, since it requires specific hardware. Korosec said the manifesto’s tone read as overly optimistic and out of step with the real costs of AI, and all three hosts pointed to a broader pattern of skepticism toward AI executives’ grand promises — the same instinct, Ha said, that greeted Sam Altman’s suggestion that parents could use ChatGPT to generate podcasts about their kids’ interests instead of simply talking to them.

Why it matters

The reaction shows AI companies face a credibility gap that’s bigger than any single essay — grand promises about personal AI agents run into a public that’s watched the same companies’ past promises about connection and empowerment curdle into something else entirely.