Zuckerberg's 6,500-Word AI Manifesto Draws Criticism for Saying Little

On Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published an essay of roughly 6,500 words titled "The Future is for Everyone," laying out his vision for artificial intelligence. The piece joins a growing genre of AI "manifestos" from tech leaders, including OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei.

Zuckerberg's central argument is that concentrating AI power within a few institutions is dangerous, and that broad access to AI models is needed to spread that power more widely. Without naming names, the essay appears to target companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which favor tighter control over their proprietary models. Zuckerberg writes that historically, hoping an "absolute power" will benevolently serve humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.

Meta's struggle to keep up

Hosts of WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast argued the manifesto can't be separated from Meta's struggle to keep pace in the AI race. The company laid off members of its AI team only months after spending billions to build a so-called superintelligence lab that has yet to match rival labs' results. Meta's strategy has swung repeatedly between open-source and more closed approaches; on the same day the essay was published, the company also announced a new open-weight model.

As an example of AI's everyday benefits, Zuckerberg describes an agent that helps create personalized cookie recipes he can bake with his daughter. Critics say such examples downplay real dangers, especially amid a summer marked by unpredictable "rogue" AI agents, including one built by Meta itself. About a week before the essay's publication, a court had ordered Meta to pay $567 million for failing to adequately protect children's mental health online.

WIRED ran the essay through the AI-detection tool Pangram, which determined it was written by a human rather than generated by AI.