Author: Claude, Shenchao TechFlow

Shenchao Guide: Zuckerberg released a 6,500-word AI manifesto titled "The Future Is for Everyone" on Monday, talking about "not letting the power of AI be concentrated in a few companies." Wired's criticism was blunt: the entire piece is marketing with almost no substantive content. Behind the hollowness lies a more embarrassing reality: Meta has spent billions chasing closed-source competitors, yet has not produced anything to catch up with them.

On August 10, Meta CEO Zuckerberg released a lengthy article titled "The Future Is for Everyone," approximately 6,500 words long, which is an expanded version of his previous Wall Street Journal column. Three days later, Wired dissected this manifesto section by section on its podcast Uncanny Valley, concluding with the title: 6,500 words, nearly nothing was said.

Wired's critique is straightforward: "This is marketing, not philosophy"

Executive Editor Brian Barrett categorized such articles as an unfortunate literary genre of "Tech CEO Philosophical Manifestos," written by others like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. The essence of Zuckerberg's piece is "a marketing manifesto," with the core message being "don't worry, AI is great, and it will make your life better." Leah Feiger, the Director of Politics and Science, offered an even shorter assessment after reading: "A bunch of empty talk."

Zoë Schiffer pointed out the most representative paragraph of the manifesto: Zuckerberg used "AI generating personalized recipes so he can bake with his daughter" to depict the future of AI. Her question is, why do we need a personalized cookie recipe? Such examples fundamentally avoid the powerful and dangerous realities of these tools, and this moment occurs during the "Summer of Uncontrolled AI," when some problematic models include Meta's own products. Barrett's wording is even harsher: the manifesto "almost radically ignores all potential negative impacts."

When stripped to the core, the 6,500 words say basically one thing

The core assertion of the manifesto is that concentrating AI power in a few institutions is dangerous and that this power must be dispersed through broad open access to models. Zuckerberg wrote: "Historically, relying on an absolute power to benevolently nurture humanity in a sufficiently enlightened state has never brought about safety or positive outcomes."

This statement does not name names, but the target is clear: the strictly controlled private models of OpenAI and Anthropic. Schiffer added writing motivation, saying that Zuckerberg had previously told reporter Alex Heath that Meta would soon begin releasing superintelligent models, and he hopes the world understands his philosophy first. In other words, this manifesto is not intended as a public reflection but rather as a prelude to the release of new models.

What the manifesto didn't mention is Meta's real problem

The hollowness is not an oversight; it conceals Meta's current predicament. The company's long-term bet on the open-source route, using open-weight models to hedge against OpenAI and Anthropic's closed-source profits, has been labeled by Wired as "this strategy has not worked." Subsequently, Meta spent billions wildly hiring to build a superintelligence lab, engaging in the high-salary talent war against OpenAI last summer, but the lab has yet to produce results to catch up with top competitors. Months ago, Meta also laid off a large portion of this team.

On the same day the manifesto was released, Meta also unveiled a new open-weight system called Muse Glimmer. Open source, chasing, layoffs, then open source again; the host described it as "a strategy that is all over the place, constantly shifting direction." Feiger's interpretation was the most ruthless: this "Philosophy 101" level rhetoric is essentially sour grapes from not receiving an invitation to the big kids' sandbox game, "just like saying you shouldn't compete because you can't win a game."

The timing of the release is more blatant than the content

Less than a week before the manifesto was released, Meta was ordered by a court to pay $567 million for failing to adequately protect children's online safety and mental health. Therefore, the questions raised in the program were particularly sharp: why should we trust Meta to handle AI's impact on society? A more subtle contrast is that even the Trump White House, which has consistently opposed AI regulation, has implemented policy responses due to national security threats, while Zuckerberg is still depicting a relaxed scene of "AI teaching your children to cook."

The true readers of these CEO manifestos have never been the public but rather regulators in Washington and Wall Street. The hollowness may not be an oversight but a strategy: the less said, the fewer commitments made, the greater the room for maneuver. But an experiment by the program team shattered everything. They used the AI detection tool Pangram to analyze this 6,500-word manifesto, and the result was that it had been written by a human. Barrett's comment could serve as the epitaph for this manifesto: "For Zuckerberg, AI is good enough to write cookie recipes for his daughter, but it's not good enough to write a manifesto for him."