In a candid interview with Bloomberg's Emily Chang, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his thoughts on OpenAI's leadership, the scrutiny faced by tech giants, and the role of social media in the upcoming 2024 US elections.
When asked about Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Zuckerberg acknowledged his accomplishments: "He deserves a lot of credit for how that organisation has developed." He even offered words of empathy based on his own experiences: "Also, having gotten a lot of public scrutiny myself, I think, when you're going through it for the first time, you don't handle it as perfectly as you would like. But I think he's handling it very gracefully. I think he's doing better than I did."
However, Zuckerberg couldn't resist pointing out a seeming contradiction in OpenAI's approach: "And it's a somewhat ironic thing to have an organisation that's named OpenAI but is sort of the leader in building closed AI models. And it's not necessarily bad, but it's kind of a little funny."
Addressing concerns about Facebook's role in elections and the spread of misinformation, Zuckerberg emphasised the company's efforts to give users more control and reduce political content: "The main thing that I hear from people is that they actually wanna see less political content on our services because they come to our services to connect with people. So, you know, that's what we're gonna do. We give people control over this, but we're generally trying to recommend less political content. So, I think you're gonna see our services play less of a role in this election than they have in the past."
Zuckerberg also revealed he would not be endorsing any candidate in the upcoming election, stating, "I've done some stuff personally in the past. I'm not planning on doing that this time, and that includes, you know, not endorsing either of the candidates."