Things Mark Zuckerberg Has Said on Podcasts

“Is that Instacart account really for me, or is it for the Muse? Because I think, like, over time, I think that the question is, is the total addressable market for all of commerce just increasing dramatically?” — Mark Zuckerberg, Cheeky Pint

Zuckerberg had rarely used Instacart until he opened an account so his Muse agent could order baking ingredients each weekend. He now uses it once or twice a week, and he argues that agents will effectively hold accounts of their own.

Cheeky Pint · 2026-10-12 Permalink → Listen →

Cheeky Pint Around 00:00 into the episode

Speaker

…opportunity here isn't just, okay, it's going to be 20% more efficient on the conversion rate. Like, I am a new Instacart like subscriber, and I just wouldn't have done this before. Alexandr Wang Yes. Mark Zuckerberg So, I do think that there's this question, and then there's this question, which I think is these sort of interesting— like, this is maybe the more interesting economic question, is that Instacart account really for me, or is it for the Muse? Because I think, like, over time, I think that the question is, is the total addressable market for all of commerce just increasing dramatically? John Collison Yes. Mark Zuckerberg Because it's not just the people anymore. Like, now agents are effectively going to have accounts. John Collison Yes. Mark Zuckerberg And I think that's where this starts to, like, become a really very exciting opportunity where anyone who sits this out, I think, is going to end up feeling sad over time. John Collison And why did you have to sign up for an…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“This lane is open because everyone else seems to just be obsessed so much with just automating knowledge work, which, I mean, isn't even that charismatic version of the future, right? Because it's like, all right, like, a big part of our belief too is that the kind of highest use of superintelligence is invention and creation, not automation.” — Mark Zuckerberg, Cheeky Pint

Zuckerberg explaining why Meta needs to build its own frontier models instead of relying on others. He sees a personal, consumer-focused version of superintelligence as a lane the other labs have left open.

Cheeky Pint · 2026-10-12 Permalink → Listen →

Cheeky Pint Around 00:00 into the episode

Speaker

…can do that if you don't have the ability to build end-to-end your own superintelligence and build them into the products that people use. And I think that this is something that you just like believed from very early on, Is basically, it's like, all right, there are going to be like a handful of these. Like, it's like there's a kind of personal and consumer-oriented version of this. And like, this lane is open because everyone else seems to just be obsessed so much with just automating knowledge work, which, I mean, isn't even that charismatic version of the future, right? Because it's like, all right, like, a big part of our belief too is that the kind of highest use of superintelligence is invention and creation, not automation. And so, I don't know, it just seemed like there's like a big place in there, but you kind of need to own the stack. John Collison How is the Muse-mediated future going to shake out with businesses need to— okay, businesses variously need to build support for for Muse, where it might try to computer use its way in, but that might be janky in certain ways. So you kind of want everyone to have…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“You don't want a moralizing lecture for why you're wrong for asking it to do the thing. Obviously, if you're trying to do something that's catastrophic, it needs to gracefully, without pissing you off, not do it. But in general, we view alignment as more of a question of instruction and values alignment with the person who it's intending to serve.” — Mark Zuckerberg, Cheeky Pint

Zuckerberg on how Meta's idea of alignment differs from other labs. Because Meta is building agents that act for people, he says the priority is that the agent reliably does what its user asks, and he called this very different from how some of the others think about it.

Cheeky Pint · 2026-10-12 Permalink → Listen →

Cheeky Pint Around 00:00 into the episode

Speaker

…is a very philosophical concept, of like, who do you want it to be aligned to? I mean, a lot of our theory is we care more about it being aligned to, you know, we're trying to give people agents, right? And it needs to... If you ask it to do something, you need to have a high confidence that it's going to do what you ask it to do. You know, like, you want it to do that with high reliability. You don't want a moralizing lecture for why you're wrong for asking it to do the thing. Obviously, if you're trying to do something that's catastrophic, it needs to gracefully, without pissing you off, not do it. But in general, we view alignment as more of a question of instruction and values alignment with the person who it's intending to serve. And I think that that's kind of a different mode of thinking about it. It's very different from, I think, how some of the others do. Alexandr Wang But one of the more interesting things I think that is maybe a question related to your original question is also just how long the process of training one of these models takes. Like Muse Wonder... In general, we've planned Muse Wonder since last…

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“One is if AI works overall, plenty of other people want all our compute... So I think that you, in order for it not to work out, it's not just that we have to fail, AI overall has to fail.” — Mark Zuckerberg, Cheeky Pint

Zuckerberg on whether the $100B+ compute commitment behind Muse Wonder was as risky as it looked. His argument: if Meta's models disappoint, the gigawatt clusters can still be rented to others, so the downside only bites if AI as a whole fails.

Cheeky Pint · 2026-10-12 Permalink → Listen →

Cheeky Pint Around 00:00 into the episode

Speaker

…the numbers are big, but I think— John Collison Meta has a backstop in terms of how it can use compute. Mark Zuckerberg Yeah, so I think there's 2 things. One is if AI works overall, plenty of other people want all our compute. John Collison Right? Mark Zuckerberg So they're willing to pay, like, I mean, if like the cost is whatever, $15 billion a gigawatt, we could get like a lot more for that. So I think that you, in order for it not to work out, it's not just that we have to fail, AI overall has to fail. John Collison Yes. Mark Zuckerberg And then even if that happens, we still have all these other uses to productively use compute. So in the grand scheme of things, we were definitely building out this compute for inference ahead of knowing that the product was going to be ready. John Collison But you were AI-pilled enough that you said GPUs online and powered will be useful to someone. Mark…

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“It's, I think, a good example of how stuff is going to go in the future where basically everyone is actually going to be writing tons of code. They're just not going to know that they're writing code.” — Mark Zuckerberg, Cheeky Pint

Zuckerberg describing his favourite Muse use case: cameras in his gym, with the agent watching his MMA rounds and giving feedback in the one-minute breaks. He never sees code, but the agent is building a whole video-processing pipeline and he keeps telling it to optimise itself to answer faster.

Cheeky Pint · 2026-10-12 Permalink → Listen →

Cheeky Pint Around 00:00 into the episode

Speaker

…it's like, you know, within the agent, I'm not seeing any code, but it basically is writing this whole video processing, image processing pipeline. John Collison Yes. Mark Zuckerberg And I'm constantly telling it like, all right... Like, look you took 30 seconds to give me that feedback. I only have a 60-second break. Like, you gotta go faster. Just optimize yourself, optimize yourself. And it's, I think, a good example of how stuff is going to go in the future where basically everyone is actually going to be writing tons of code. They're just not going to know that they're writing code. John Collison What kind of MMA steers does a model give you? Mark Zuckerberg Um, you want to see? John Collison Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg Basically, let me see if I can pull some stuff out. But basically it gives me a lot of stuff about balance and, like, hip position. Or it's like when you're kind of in side control here. It's just like you didn't get this underhook in this place so you're going…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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