Mark Zuckerberg’s newest manifesto casts him as a defender of the individual against concentrated technological power. He argues that “superintelligence” should be widely distributed, enabling people to create, compete, and retain leverage against institutions. Zuckerberg presents openness, individual empowerment, invention, and balance of power as the principles that should govern AI’s future.
Those principles are appealing, but they’re also hard to separate from Meta’s immediate competitive interests.
Zuckerberg hasn’t always treated decentralization as a civic imperative. In 2017, he presented Facebook as essential social infrastructure: a platform that could build a supportive, safe, informed, civically engaged, and inclusive global community. In his World Economic Forum manifesto, the language was humanitarian, but the vehicle was a closed platform controlled by Facebook. The company would supply the tools, set the rules, measure the outcomes, and decide how billions of people encountered information and one another.
That arrangement was never merely benevolent. As Ben Thompson argued in 2017, Facebook’s power flowed from its control over the social graph and, therefore, over consumption and distribution. The platform’s stated mission to connect the world sat uneasily beside an advertising model that rewarded engagement. Subsequent years made that tension unmistakable: algorithmic systems designed to maximize attention could amplify outrage, misinformation, and division while also maximizing revenue. Zuckerberg’s concern then wasn’t that one company held too much power; it was that Facebook should wield its extraordinary power more responsibly.
Now, however, the AI landscape looks different. Meta has spent aggressively to compete in the race for frontier models, yet its models are nowhere near the leaders. The company recently delayed its Avocado model after tests showed it trailing rivals. Meta was even considering licensing Google’s Gemini while reorganizing its AI efforts. Meanwhile, its enormous infrastructure spending has spooked investors concerned about debt, cash flow, and uncertain returns, even as its core advertising business keeps humming along.
Against that backdrop, Zuckerberg’s attack on centralized AI power strikes me as strategically convenient. Openness can be a genuine public good, especially if it prevents a handful of labs from becoming gatekeepers to an essential technology. But it can also be a useful argument for a company trying to weaken better-positioned rivals, reduce regulatory barriers, and turn access to models into a competitive equalizer. His call for “personalized superintelligence” should be judged not only by its rhetoric but by who controls the data, distribution, infrastructure, and economic gains behind it.
The broader lesson extends beyond Meta. As AI expenditures swell at Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, OpenAI, and other firms, executives may frame their investments as public missions: empowerment, national competitiveness, safety, productivity, or democratization. Those claims may contain truth. But investors, regulators, and users should recognize CEO posturing for what it often is—an attempt to dress up an expensive, uncertain corporate strategy as an unimpeachable public mission.
Leave a Reply