Hi girl. Look at you. This is our third annual lunch and we're so thrilled that you could join us here. We are here for a very serious reason because there's nothing more important than what's happening in AI in America. And at the Washington AI network, we're focused on the power and purpose of AI and how we keep ahead of the rest of the world. This nihilist view of technology is what we've got to end. This is about how AI helps American workers. We have to make certain that we've got the communications right. And I'm going to plagiarize Dina Powell here as I conclude. This is about AI for humanity. How do we make humans better, more productive, more connected, more engaged citizens? And that should be our north star.
I think AI is going to be hugely important in how we address things like poverty and climate change. But I actually think we've been thinking about it all wrong and we're asking the wrong question. I represent San Diego. So, what I hear from them is that they know a wave is coming, but they don't know if it's a wave they can surf or if it's a tsunami. And that makes them really, really anxious because this isn't abstract to them. We can ensure that America leads by building things people trust at scale for the long haul.
I mean, that's really a significant economic driver in my community. So, Pennsylvania is really at the center of a lot of it and at the very grassroots where it's smaller business just like this that are really driving this entire dialogue.
Our workload has actually increased with AI. But it's created phenomenal output and as a small business owner, I don't think it's taking away jobs at all. I think it's actually kind of filling roles that I would have never hired for otherwise. What drives me every day is the responsibility to create opportunity and support the families behind those 3,500 employees. A big part of that growth has come through our partnership with Meta. The real differentiator isn't just technology or capital, it's people. That's why programs like Meta's Level Up initiative matter so much.
I don't know what'll happen because it's live TV and the president is notoriously maybe the hardest person to read in the world, but I'm going to give it a shot. I would appreciate if everyone would join me to welcome Don Overton, one of our great veterans. He is a Gulf War veteran. He served in Desert Storm. Losing your eyesight is debilitating. You lose your independence, right? You become heavily dependent on others.
Hey, Meta, is this a blue shirt? Yes, that's the one. Perfect. They're glasses, right? We're able to once again integrate back into society and not stand out with some huge device either strapped to a hat or wearing on our head or strapped to our chest. Hey, Meta, what am I looking at? An American flag display on the wall. Several challenge coins attached to it. To other veterans out there, Meta Glasses have changed my life and they can change yours.
I dedicated the past 30 plus years of my life after sustaining my injuries to the military and veteran communities. I've done everything I can to raise awareness and to work for folks. The moment I put these glasses on, I instantly realized that this was revolutionary. All the different adaptive technologies that I've tried in 30 plus years never were capable of giving me the levels of independence that I was able to receive with these glasses and to be able to really lighten the burden on my wife Peggy who's been a tremendous caregiver in assisting and supporting me. We really want to make sure that the 130,000 veterans living with vision loss and with blindness and the 1.1 million veterans that are beginning to experience low vision as part of that natural aging process are aware of this technology and how to access the technology.
Okay, Dina, I have to start with you. You were at Goldman Sachs for 16 years, 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 Abrams Accords. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. Please join me. Game-changing. Now you're president and vice chair of Meta. Where do you start? You've done so many things.
Gosh. 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. So don't let us down. It's such a big deal to have Bos 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 again. Thank you, Don.
Well, I had been on the board for a year actually at Meta and I kind of learned 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 Seven. Mark is the last one. And yet the top 20, 25 people like Bos 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 four 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 Bos, you're running one of the biggest R&D operations on the planet. Yeah, look at him just shaking his head like just another day I mean come on this what 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 how is this changing things and and why should Washington care?
Yeah, 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, yep, 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. That the greatest device we've ever invented as a species. They also do have limitations and they haven't materially changed in six or 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 technologist, 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. Like you could they're hard problems, legitimately challenging problems, but you can like 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. Like 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 they were really impressive. They did a lot of cool stuff. They deserved your attention, but they weren't it didn't yet feel like we'd crossed a major threshold. What I will say is now today in my career and 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 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, 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 is, 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? Yes, he's turning 40 on the 10,000 small business program. Mayor Bloomberg was the co-chair. You have had an 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, in private. What's your plan?
