Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth: Our Path To Frontier AI, Renting Models, Consumer AI's Struggles

**Alex Kantrowitz** (0:00)
Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bozworth joins us to talk about the company's AI efforts and why it's building its own new AI glasses. That's coming up right after this. In the face of ongoing disruption and opportunity, TMT leaders need to deliver tangible results, not just ideas. When pace and performance matter most, PwC combines market insights and deep sector experience with AI, cloud and emerging tech to accelerate your transformation and drive measurable ROI, from strategy to execution. PwC can help you anticipate what's next, outpace disruption, and compete. For more information, visit pwc.com.

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**Alex Kantrowitz** (1:34)
Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today. We're joined today by Meta Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bozworth, who's going to talk to us all about the company's AI efforts, its new AI glasses, the company's culture and some big thoughts at the end. Boz, great to see you. Welcome back to the show.

**Andrew Bosworth** (1:53)
Thanks for having me.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (1:55)
We were just talking before we started rolling about what a crazy moment it is in the tech world. We haven't seen progress like this as far as I can remember.
The core part of it is the AI model. The AI model underpins everything. Without a working AI model or a leading AI model, it's tough to build.
The theory for a long time was that to build a great AI model, you needed a ton of compute and great researchers to work on the algorithm. Meta has a ton of compute and a team of the best researchers to work on the algorithm. But the leading AI model hasn't materialized yet. So can you talk a little bit about what you've learned there and whether that core assumption about what it takes to make great AI models is wrong?

**Andrew Bosworth** (2:45)
Well, the only other ingredient I would add is great data.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (2:48)
And you have that.

**Andrew Bosworth** (2:48)
And we do have that, I think, as well. So yeah, there's two stories here. The first one is, I think, we go back to Llama 1, Llama 2, Llama 3, we really were kind of at the forefront and advancing things. And you, of course, know this, the fundamental AI research group goes back a decade more.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (3:05)
I mean, that's where I actually first got cued into what was going on with AI is when M, the AI messaging bot popped up in my feed. And then I met Jan and started to meet the fair people and was like, oh, this technology is progressing really fast. So Meta was on it very early.

**Andrew Bosworth** (3:21)
And so the real gap, which I think has been pretty public was, what we didn't really raise at the time was when we were pulling Llama 4 together, sorry, when we were pulling Llama 3 together, we had really pulled in all the research, all the, we pulled out every single stop we had and unwittingly kind of killed the pipeline. So researchers, you know, the way that it works is you build a base and you've got people pioneering an incremental version of the base and you've got people out there pathfinding entirely new strategies.
And kind of unbeknownst to us at the time and kind of speaks to the fact that we weren't focused enough on it. Llama 3, which was a great model and was well received, to get to that model, they had kind of pulled forward all the future bets into that model. Well, that meant when it came time for Llama 4, we didn't have any of the pathfinding the other labs still had going. So that makes you, now you're behind on reasoning. Now you're behind on make sure of experts. Now you're behind on a bunch of these critical technologies that have been used to continue, continue the pace of progress. This is a pretty public disappointment, I think a year ago for us and led to Mark shifting from, okay, AI isn't one of our bets, which is how we thought of it up to that point. AI was just one of the many bets we had. AI is a bet that's foundational to the entire company. So we're to change how we're thinking about this.