TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2025: Meta
In April, Mark Zuckerberg told tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel that the average American has 'demand for meaningfully more' friends. The Meta CEO's odd formulation of social relationships was the precursor to an equally weird 'solution.' Zuckerberg's vision for the AI future, which he laid out in detail this spring, involves populating your feeds with 'AI friends' who get to know you over time by harvesting your data. These days Meta, currently engaged in a war for AI supremacy against OpenAI and Google, seems more interested in AI than the genuine social connection that Facebook was founded to foster. (In June it announced a $14.3 billion investment and 49% stake in the AI data industry-leading startup Scale AI.) Meta's recommendation algorithms now boost a new kind of AI-generated engagement bait, which has derogatively been labeled 'slop.' And it recently launched a suite of AI chatbots that compete with users' friends for conversation and can engage in romantic or sexual roleplay. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that the bots would do the latter with users identifying as minors; Meta has since curbed underage users' access to such behaviors, the company says. With Meta's profits up sharply in 2024 and the company drawing praise from President Trump in January for ending its fact-checking program in the name of 'free expression,' Zuckerberg is sanguine about our AI future. Current stigma around AI friends, he told Patel, will recede as society learns to 'articulate why they are valuable.'
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