In the summer of 2021, during a private moment at the Allen & Co. conference in the Idaho mountains, Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai complimented Mark Zuckerberg on a technological breakthrough by Facebook’s artificial intelligence team. Pichai’s comment was exactly the kind of thing Zuckerberg likes to hear. For one of the most prominent people in Silicon Valley, the co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms Inc. can be surprisingly touchy about getting recognition for being someone who actually makes technology. A decade earlier, a Hollywood blockbuster suggested that he stole the idea for Facebook, and many of his company’s most important products were made by startups it acquired, opening Zuckerberg up to the narrative that he’s more ruthless businessperson than innovative technologist. His communications team, which has done focus group polling showing he isn’t considered an innovator on par with Bill Gates or Elon Musk, has worked to brand him as a “builder,” according to people at the company who’ve worked on improving his personal image. The only problem for Zuckerberg in Idaho was that he had little idea what breakthrough Pichai was talking about, according to people familiar with the meeting. Zuckerberg had enthusiastically kick-started Facebook’s artificial intelligence research group in 2013, hiring Yann LeCun, a prominent computer scientist sometimes referred to as one of the godfathers of AI, to run it. But since then he hadn’t been closely involved in its operations. Instead, Zuckerberg cast about for other big ideas to futureproof his company, including direct messaging, video streaming and crypto, before falling for the idea of the metaverse, a digital world he thought could revolutionize the way people interacted online. Zuckerberg committed Facebook to this vision so completely that he changed the company’s name to Meta Platforms Inc. in 2021.
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