What motivates Mark Zuckerberg these days? It's a question Decoder guest host Alex Heath posed at the end of his interview last week, after he and Zuckerberg had spent an hour talking about Threads, Zuckerberg's vision for how generative AI will reshape Meta's apps, the Quest 3, and other news from the company's Connect conference, which kicked off today. 

After spending the past five years as a wartime CEO, Zuckerberg is getting back to basics, and he clearly feels good about it. "I think we've done a lot of good things," he said. "But for the next wave of my life and for the company — but also outside of the company with what I'm doing at CZI [Chan Zuckerberg Initiative] and some of my personal projects — I define my life at this point more in terms of getting to work on awesome things with great people who I like working with." For Zuckerberg, "awesome things" means figuring out how to combine his company's AR, VR, and AI ambitions into new products. 

This rare interview with the Meta CEO also includes details on his ongoing feud with Elon Musk and the quest to beat X/Twitter using Threads, his perspective on open source, and his vision for decentralized social media. Okay, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Here we go.

Links:

• Mark Zuckerberg is ready to fight Elon Musk in a cage match
• The three reasons Twitter didn’t sell to Facebook
• Threads app usage plummets despite initial promise as refuge from Twitter
• Threads isn’t for news and politics, says Instagram’s boss
• You can now verify your Threads profile on Mastodon
• In show of force, Silicon Valley titans pledge ‘getting this right’ With AI
• Meta is putting AI chatbots everywhere
• A conversation with Bing’s chatbot left me deeply unsettled
• Custom AI chatbots are quietly becoming the next big thing in fandom
• Meta’s Smart Glasses can take calls, play music, and livestream from your face
• Meta’s $499.99 Quest 3 headset is all about mixed reality and video games
• The Meta Quest 3 is sharper, more powerful, and still trying to make mixed reality happen
• Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about Apple’s Vision Pro

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  

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