Hi everyone, welcome back to the Washington AI Network podcast. This week's conversation took place the day before that White House correspondents dinner. At our third annual TGAI Friday event, I sat down with Meta President and Vice Chair Dina Powell McCormick and Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth to talk about how Meta is positioning AI as a democratization force and not just a productivity tool, and why small businesses are a critical battleground for AI adoption. A special thanks to Meta for partnering on this event where guests also got to play with the Meta AI glasses and see what all the hype is about. Have a listen.
Okay, Dina, I have to start with you. You were at Goldman Sachs for 16 years, where you were a member of the management committee when you ran the firm's sovereign wealth business. Then you were vice chairman of BDTMS and you served in the first Trump administration as deputy national security adviser working on the foundations that led to the Abraham Accords. Thank you. Thank you so much for that game-changing work. Now you're president and vice chair of Meta. Where do you start? You've done so many things.
Well, thank you Tammy. This is so special for all of us at Meta. All of my colleagues that are here, they don't often come to DC. And so Joel Kaplan and I promised that we would be able to bring them here to honor journalism and to give them a really good time. It's such a big deal to have Boz with us today. He is one of the founders of so many of the most important products at Meta. And I just want to say that Don Overton is one of the most important inspirations to this company and we are so honored to know you, to work with you. Thank you and your amazing wife.
Well, I had been on the board for a year actually at Meta and you learn a lot when you're on a board of a company and different CEOs and founders do it differently. I was always so struck by how much Mark would start every board meeting with here are all the challenges. Here's the things that I think I may be failing at and then he would be solicitous enough to actually ask the board what do you think and like real decisions were made in that boardroom which I think sometimes can be unusual. And so when he asked me last December if I would take on this role I was super excited because I knew how amazing this platform is. It's the last founder of the Magnificent 7. Mark is the last one. And yet the top 20, 25 people like Boz have been there 20 years plus or 16 years plus. So you have this mix of an innovator with a stable leadership team, a pretty remarkable balance sheet and almost 4 billion people every day on the platform between WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, etc. But the real thing, Tammy, that I was so excited about was the very unique AI vision that Mark and Meta have, which is that it's about people, not products. That in this moment that we are witnessing, which is the transformation of humanity, we actually are a company that's been connecting humans for a long time. And we believe that super intelligence will only make people better, will help them reach their potential, whether it's Dawn or creators or musicians or small business owners. And so I'm so excited that this is a very unique mission in today's world. There's a lot of talk about what's happening with AI and our belief is that it will empower human beings.
Well, I'm going to come back to you on small business, but Boz, you're running one of the biggest R&D operations on the planet. Look at him just shaking his head like just another day. I mean, come on. What you're doing with Reality Labs has literally changed how everyone is functioning and how they're communicating. But with AI now, if I may, can you tell us how is this changing things and why should Washington care?
I think before this year, we were still on a very kind of a progressive path of technology getting better over time, but kind of at the rate that we had become used to technology getting better, which is pretty rapidly by like historic human standards, but still like, okay, this thing's a little better, this thing's a little faster. This is a slightly new interface to the same app that I was already using. We've always thought in Reality Labs that there was this platform shift that had to happen. The phones are unbelievable. They're the greatest device we've ever invented as a species. They also do have limitations and they haven't materially changed in six to eight years. The phone you have in your pocket now is the same one you had in your pocket six years ago, more or less. And we start to run into the limitations as a creative technology. You start to run into the limitations of those platforms, what it can't do. We thought that the sequence of events would happen. Virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI kind of in that order. And to some degree, that's because virtual reality and augmented reality are physics problems. They're hard problems, legitimately challenging problems, but you can kind of attack them. Artificial intelligence was this very nonlinear problem. Nobody had a construct of how it was going to break out into a level of intelligence that was really groundbreaking for people. Yeah, we've been using autocorrect, but it's a pretty big jump from autocorrect to what we're using today. And I would say even the models that we were here, our own Silicon Valley types talking to you about a year ago or two years ago were still like really impressive. They did a lot of cool stuff. They deserved your attention, but it didn't yet feel like we'd crossed a major threshold. What I will say is now today in my career and I've always tried to be a student of history especially the research labs that came before us Xerox PARC and Bell Labs I've never seen a discontinuous change in technology the like the way that I've seen in the last year. January 1st of this year the overwhelming majority, 99% of code at Meta written by tens of thousands of engineers was written the old-fashioned way we would call it by hand. Today I doubt 1% of code at Meta is written by humans the old-fashioned way. So I'm referring to be clear here I'm referring to January 1st as the old times in this analogy. It's a discontinuous change. It's tremendously empowering to individuals. People who don't have computer science degrees can now execute software that was previously impossible for them to execute without going and hiring a very expensive person with such a degree. So it's very disruptive to my own industry. It's very disruptive to my own tribe so to speak. But the empowerment that it offers to every individual, we've never seen anything like it. And so if you go back to Facebook's initial mission, which is to give people the power to make the world more open and connected, most of our history has been known for that last word, the connectedness word. I think the giving people the power part is the part that we are kind of tapping into now.
Amazing. All right, Dina. You and I worked with Kevin Sheekey, who's here today. It's his birthday coming up. Everyone want to give him a round of applause on the 10,000 small business program. Mayor Bloomberg was the co-chair. I'm not going to go through all of these programs, but you have an entire history. What are you doing with small business? You've already had this information in government and private. What's your plan?
Well, we're going to hear a little bit more about that with some small business owners that are using Meta AI, but they're going to be introduced by some very special people. I just want to recognize them. My favorite senator from Pennsylvania, Senator John Fetterman, is here. The senior senator. My other favorite senator, Bernie Moreno, is here. Thank you so much, Senator Moreno. We have a big investment in Ohio that he is going to talk about. We have the deputy White House chief of staff, James Blair, is here who is prioritizing small businesses very, very sincerely and we're seeing a huge impact on that. And administrator Ed Gresser, where is he? Okay. He's the head of the GSA. He's in charge of some easy things like the White House ballroom. But we're really glad that you're here. I'll take a step back and tell you our kind of thinking around what's happening with small businesses and AI. When you really think about what it takes to fuel especially the American AI revolution, it's capital, it's energy, and it's people talent. Some estimates believe that the US will need 10 trillion dollars of capital in order to achieve compute goals. 250 gigawatts of power and millions and millions of new roles. Just in the next two years, the US will need 500,000 new electricians. So, just think about that. And the people sadly that we see today, and I was talking with Secretary Bessent the other day, are small business owners. Only 20% of American small business owners are using AI. That is a large percentage that is not. Margaret Spellings should do a report on this because she helped us build 10,000 small businesses so she knows what we're talking about. The 20% that do use AI increase their revenue dramatically and their market share. They are not laying off people, they are creating new jobs. And so one huge mission that we have, especially since we have 200 million small business owners on the platform, is to make sure that they're AI literate, to be advocates for that, obviously to proudly engage our tools on that. And we have four small business owners. I hope you saw their booths today that are using Meta AI in transformative ways. And I really, I am worried, Tammy. I think there's two big groups in America that aren't using AI being left behind. Women broadly, shockingly low numbers of using AI and small business owners. So, we're really hoping to change that.
Well, let's hope so because small business drives America. And I'm not Kelly Loeffler. I'm just going to say that. Anyway, all right, Boz. So, Dina has got this big plan and you've got all the big technology, right? And the money. He has the... Oh, he's got all the coin. I like that. When we talk about the Meta AI glasses, do you call it the first hardware category to be completely defined by AI from the beginning? What does AI actually do on the glasses that my phone can't?
