ChatGPT Is on Fire, and a Cottage Industry of Bot Builders Is Exploding Alongside ItRead Now

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photo by Bloomberg; illustration by Mike Sullivan

Mark Zuckerberg on Mind Reading, Apple and the Race to Mainstream VR

By and  |  March 8, 2021 7:41 AM PST
Photo: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photo by Bloomberg; illustration by Mike Sullivan

Today we published a 45-minute special edition of The Information's 411 podcast featuring a recent interview we conducted with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, about his company’s growing investments in augmented and virtual reality. The following is a lightly edited transcript of that interview:

Alex Heath: Can you just set the stage here for us on why Facebook as a company cares so much about AR/VR?

Mark Zuckerberg: Why do I care about this? As you say, we’re primarily a social company. We try to build things that help people interact in all these different ways, from private text messaging to rich videos to photos that you share. The holy grail of social experiences is the ability to feel like you’re present with another person. Nothing that we have in technology today gets close to that with phones or computers or TVs, even video chats. You have technology that allows you to communicate and that can with different fidelity help you see what’s going on with the other person. But there’s just something that’s really magical about the sense of presence and feeling like you’re there with another person and everything that goes into that psychologically.

Get access to exclusive coverage
Read deeply reported stories from the largest newsroom in tech.
Latest Articles
 
The AI Age ai
ChatGPT Is on Fire, and a Cottage Industry of Bot Builders Is Exploding Alongside It
Midjourney art by Clark Miller
Joshua Browder wakes up most mornings wanting to empower the little guy. The entrepreneur, who has been deemed the “Robin Hood of the internet,” has helped people annul marriages, get out of parking tickets and file lawsuits against failed crypto platforms through DoNotPay, his robo lawyer startup. DoNotPay works by automating the slow, convoluted process of navigating bureaucracy,...
Latest Briefs
 
Accounting Firm Mazars to Pause Crypto Work For Binance, Others
Twitter Suspends Accounts of Several Journalists
U.S. Adds Major Chinese Chip Firms to Trade Blacklist
Stay in the know
Receive a summary of the day's top tech news—distilled into one email.
Access on the go
View stories on our mobile app and tune into our weekly podcast.
Join live video Q&A’s
Deep-dive into topics like startups and autonomous vehicles with our top reporters and other executives.
Enjoy a clutter-free experience
Read without any banner ads.
Eight Sleep co-founders Matteo Franceschetti and Alexandra Zatarain. Art by Clark Miller
The Big Read startups
The Co-Founders of Eight Sleep Want to Optimize Your Performance (in Bed)
Matteo Franceschetti and Alexandra Zatarain spend their nights in the bed of the future. The king-size canopy bed has gray curtains gathered at the sides and a strip of sensors that captures each sleeper’s heart rate, respiration, temperature and other vitals.
Org Charts google ai
Alphabet’s ‘Other Bets’ Come Under Pressure as Health Focus Grows
More than seven years after Google morphed into Alphabet, employees and investors are no closer to figuring out whether Alphabet can generate long-term economic value from moonshot bets such as self-driving taxis, drug discovery and deliveries via drones.
Art by Clark Miller
The New Media crypto media/telecom
How CoinDesk Lit the Fuse That Blew Up Crypto—and Might Singe Its Owner Next
Michael Casey, chief content officer of the crypto news site CoinDesk, was at his Westchester County, N.Y., home on Monday, recovering from a trip to Miami the previous week.
From left: David Sacks, Roelof Botha and Sam Bankman-Fried. Photos by Getty; Sequoia; Bloomberg. Art by Mike Sullivan.
startups venture capital
‘Moment of Panic’: FTX Collapse Deepens Fear in Silicon Valley
A month after the sudden collapse of crypto exchange FTX, Silicon Valley startup founders and venture capitalists are grappling with a new feeling: panic.
Art by Clark Miller.
Screentime
The Junior VC Who Spends Almost Every Waking Minute Online
Em Herrera, 23, earned her social media stripes the hard way: running One Direction and Ariana Grande stan Twitter accounts as a teenager.
Apple's App Store boss Phil Schiller. Photo by Bloomberg
apple
The Four Biggest Changes Apple Made to its App Store as Regulators Turned Up the Heat
For years, Apple has defended its iron grip over the way developers distribute apps in the App Store, and the 30% commission it takes from in-app purchases.
Cookies on The Information
We use cookies for a number of reasons, such as keeping The Information reliable and secure, personalizing content and ads, providing social media features and to analyze how our sites are used.