Nature of reality

The following is a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, Inside the Metaverse. Mark and I are hundreds of miles apart from each other in physical space, but it feels like we're in the same room because we appear to each other as photorealistic Kodak Avatars in 3D with spatial audio. This technology is incredible and I think it's the future of how human beings connect to each other in a deeply meaningful way on the internet. These avatars can capture many of the nuances of facial expressions that we humans use to communicate and motion to each other. Now, I just need to work on upgrading my emotion expressing capabilities of the underlying human. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. And now, dear friends, here's Mark Zuckerberg. This is so great. Lighting change? Wow.

Yeah, we can put the light anywhere. And it doesn't feel awkward to be really close to you.

So you mentioned Quest Three. That's coming out. I've gotten a chance to try that too. That's awesome. How'd you pull off the mix? So it's not just virtual reality, it's mixed reality. I think it's going to be the first mainstream mixed reality device. Obviously, we shipped Quest Pro last year, but it was $1,500. And part of what I'm super proud of is we try to innovate not just on pushing the state-of-the-art and delivering new capabilities, but making it so it can be available to everyone. And we have this, and it's coming out, it's $500, and in some ways, I think the mixed reality is actually better in Quest Three than what we're using right now in Quest Pro. And I'm really proud of the team for being able to deliver that kind of an innovation and get it out. But some of this is just software you tune over time and get to be better. Part of it is you put together a product and you figure out, what are the bottlenecks in terms of making it a good experience?

So I think that there's some best practices, I think from the current digital world that will carry over. But I think that this will enable some different things. Another version of this is how this intersects with AIs because one of the things that we're really focused on is we want the world to evolve in a way where there isn't a single AI super intelligence, but where a lot of people are empowered by having AI tools to do their jobs and make their lives better. And if you're a creator and if you run a podcast like you do, then you have a big community of people who are super interested to talk to you. I know you'd love to cultivate that community and you interact with them online outside of the podcast as well. But I mean, there's way more demand both to interact with you, and I'm sure you'd love to interact with the community more, but you just are limited by the number of hours in the day.

If you could comment, this might be a bit of a very specific technical question, but Llama 2 is incredible. You've released it recently. There's already been a lot of exciting developments around it. What's your sense about its release and is there a Llama 3 in the future? Yeah, I mean, I think on the last podcast that we did together, we were talking about the debate that we were having around open sourcing Llama 2. And I'm glad that we did. I think at this point there's the value of open sourcing, a foundation model like Llama 2. It's significantly greater than the risks in my view. I mean, we spent a lot of time, took a very rigorous assessment of that and red teaming it. But I'm very glad that we released Llama 2. I think the reception has been... It's just been really exciting to see how excited people have been about it. It's gotten way more downloads and usage than I would've even expected, and I was pretty optimistic about it. So that's been great.

Well, we're talking about AI, but I'm still blown away this entire time that I'm talking to Mark Zuckerberg. And you're not here, but you feel like you're here. I've done quite a few intimate conversations with people alone in a room, and this feels like that. So I keep forgetting for long stretches of time that we're not in the same room. And for me to imagine a future where I can with a snap of a finger do that with anyone in my life, the way we can just call right now and have this kind of shallow 2D experience, to have this experience like we're sitting next to each other is like... I don't think we can even imagine how that changes things where you can immediately have intimate one-on-one conversations with anyone. In a way, we might not even predict change civilization. Well, I mean this is a lot of the thesis behind the whole Metaverse, is giving people the ability to feel like you're present with someone. I mean, this is the main thing I talk about all the time, but I do think that there's a lot to process about it. I mean, from my perspective, I'm definitely here. We're just not physically in the same place. You're not talking to an AI. So I think the thing that's novel is the ability to convey through technology a sense of almost physical presence. So the thing that is not physically real is us being in the same physical place, but everything else is. And I think that that gets to this somewhat philosophical question about what is the nature of the modern real world? And I just think that it really is this combination of physical world and the presence that we feel, but also being able to combine that with this increasingly rich and powerful and capable digital world that we have and all of the innovation that's getting created there.