Mark Zuckerberg Secretly Training an AI Agent to Do CEO Job

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Taylor Hill / Getty Images

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Here’s one job we won’t be sorry to see get automated with AI.

According to a new scoop from the The Wall Street Journal, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is building a CEO AI agent to help him do his job.

The AI agent helps Zuckerberg get information faster, such as by retrieving answers for him that he would typically have to go through layers of people to get, per the reporting, citing a person familiar with the project. Where this meaningfully differs from a run of the mill chatbot, or where its agentic capabilities come in, is unclear.

Credit to Zuckerberg: it seems he believes in his own tech’s hype enough to let it shadow his own role at the corporation. It’s that same kind of conviction he displayed when he renamed his entire multibillion dollar empire from Facebook to Meta in pursuit of building a sweeping virtual reality “Metaverse” to rival our mundane physical one. Just don’t ask how that experiment panned out, or about the roughly $80 billion it lost.

Part of Zuckerberg’s AI obsession is using it to de-bloat his 78,000 strong company, flatten its organizational structure, and accelerate productivity. In a January earnings call, Zuckerberg declared that it was “investing in AI-native tooling so individuals at Meta can get more done.”

“We’re elevating individual contributors and flattening teams,” he described, per the WSJ. “If we do this, then I think that we’re going to get a lot more done and I think it’ll be a lot more fun.”

This AI evangelism from the top has seeped into every nook and cranny of the company. Employees are encouraged to attend AI tutorial meetings several times per week, attend AI hackathons, and create their own AI tools to help them at work. And whether by their own accord or by Zuckerberg’s decree, the employees — whose performance reviews are now partly based on AI usage — seem to be on board.

An internal message board is filled with posts from employees enthusing about new AI use cases they discovered and new tools they built with AI. Some use AI agents like My Claw to act like personal secretaries, giving them access to their messages and work files, and deploying them to talk to their colleagues — or even their colleagues’ own AI agents. (My Claw is a more personalized version of Open Claw, an open source model that’s hyped in tech circles for being an AI that “actually does things.”)

Another option gaining steam in the workforce was built by a Meta employee. Called Second Brain, its creator described it as acting like an “AI chief of staff,” and can purportedly index and query documents for projects, per the reporting.

On the internal messaging board, employees have created a group where their personal AI agents talk to each other, mirroring a social media site for AI agents called “Moltbook” that generated a frenzy of hype earlier this year, and which Meta recently acquired.

A recent critical security incident at the company illustrated how fostering a culture of rapid AI deployment can backfire. When a software engineer used an in-house AI agent to break down a technical question posed by a colleague on the internal messaging board, the AI went “rogue” by posting its answer without the employee’s approval. Another employee read the post and acted on the AI’s erroneous advice, leading to troves of sensitive company and user data being exposed to engineers without proper access for nearly two hours.

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