Mark Zuckerberg: 'Get me talking about closed platforms and I get angry’

At a SIGGRAPH talk with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg shared his thoughts on closed- vs. open-source platform.

Video Transcript

Um So I'd say by the time that Llama came around, we were sort of positively predisposed towards doing this.

Um for, for A I models specifically, I guess there's a few ways that I look at this, I mean, one is, you know, it's been really fun building stuff over the last 20 years at the company.

Um One of the things that, that has been sort of the most difficult has been kind of having to navigate the fact that we ship our apps through our competitors mobile platforms.

So in the one hand, the mobile platforms have been this huge boon to the industry.

That's been awesome.

Um On the other hand, having to deliver your products through your competitors um is challenging, right?

And, and I also, you know, I grew up in a time where, you know, the first version of Facebook was on the web and that was open and then, you know, as a transition to mobile, you know, the plus side of that was, you know, now everyone has a computer in their pocket.

So that's great.

The downside is OK, we're a lot more restricted in what we can do.

So when you look at these generations of computing, there's this big recency bias where everyone just looks at mobile and thinks, OK, because the closed ecosystem because Apple basically won and set the, the terms of that.

And like, yeah, I know that there's more Android phones out there technically, but like Apple basically has the whole market.

Um and, and, and like all the profits and, and basically Android is kind of following Apple and in terms of the development of it.

So I think Apple pretty clearly won this generation, but it's not always like that, right?

I mean, if you go back a generation, um you know, Apple was doing their, their kind of closed thing.

Um but Microsoft which was, you know, it's, it obviously isn't like this perfectly open company but, you know, compared to, to, to Apple with Windows running on all the different O EMS and different software uh and different, different hardware.

Um it was a much more open ecosystem and Windows.

Windows was the leading ecosystem.

It, it um you know, it, it basically in the kind of PC generation of things, the open ecosystem one.

And I am kind of hopeful that in the next generation of computing, we're gonna return to a zone where the open ecosystem wins and is the leading one.

Again, there will always be a closed one and an open one.

I think that there's reasons to do both.

There are benefits to both.

I'm not like a zealot on this.

I mean, we do close source stuff.

I'm not everything that we, that we publish is open.

Um But I think in general for the computing platforms that the whole industry is building on, there's a lot of value for that if the software especially is open.

So that's really shaped my philosophy on this and um for both A I with Llama and with the work that we're doing in A R and VR where we're basically making the horizon os that we're building for mixed reality um in an open operating system in the sense of, of kind of what Android or Windows was and, and basically making it so that um like, we're gonna be able to work with lots of different hardware companies to make all different kinds of, of devices.

We basically just want to return the ecosystem to that level where that, that's gonna be the open one.

And, and I, I, I'm pretty optimistic that in the next generation, the open ones are gonna win for, for us specifically.

Um You know, I just wanna make sure that we have access to, I mean, this is sort of selfish but, you know, I mean, it's, you know, after building this company for a while, um one of my things for the next 10 or 15 years is like, I just wanna make sure that we can build the fundamental technology that we're gonna be building social experiences on because there just been too many things that I've tried to build and then you have just been told no, you can't really build that by the platform provider that at some level, I'm just like, nah fuck that for the next generation.

Um Like we're gonna go build like all, all the way down and, and make sure that that where goes are a broadcast opportunity.

No.

Sorry.

Um Sorry.

Um I think it was a beep.

Yeah, you know we were doing ok for like 20 minutes but give me, give me talking about closed platforms and I get angry.

Um So.