| I think a lot about the time that Mark Zuckerberg was hauled before Congress to answer questions about whether Facebook (now Meta Platforms Inc.) is a monopoly. He said:
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| We face a lot of competitors in every part of what we do, from connecting with friends privately to connecting with people in communities to connecting with all your friends at once to connecting with all kinds of user-generated content. … Congressman, the space of people connecting with other people is a very large space.
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| “See,” I wrote, “Facebook also has a tiny market share, if you define its market as … human interaction? Human behavior? ‘Only like 5% of human life consists of Facebook, how could we possibly be a monopoly?’”
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| Of course, when a chief executive officer is testifying in a congressional antitrust hearing, he will want to downplay the possibility that his company is a monopoly. When he leaves the hearing and goes back to his office, the incentives will reverse, and he will work to seize the biggest possible share of his market. If his market is all human interaction, there’s a lot of work to do. I went on:
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| When Facebook says “we’re not a monopoly, there’s lots of competition in the connecting-with-people space, some of our most fearsome competitors include Having Dinner With Friends and Reading Stories to Your Children,” you could interpret that as a threat. Facebook is good at disposing of competitors! Maybe it will copy enough features from Reading Stories to Your Children so that people will abandon it for a Facebook product, Instagram Reads Stories to Your Children or whatever. Maybe it will acquire Having Dinner With Friends so it can merge it into the Facebook experience. These companies are where they are because they dominate their markets; if they define their markets as the world, then the world had better watch out.
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| That was five years ago. The Wall Street Journal reports:
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| Mark Zuckerberg wants you to have AI friends, an AI therapist and AI business agents.
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| In Zuckerberg’s vision for a new digital future, artificial-intelligence friends outnumber human companions and chatbot experiences supplant therapists, ad agencies and coders. AI will play a central role in the human experience, the Facebook co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms has said in a series of recent podcasts, interviews and public appearances.
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| “I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday during an onstage interview with Stripe co-founder and president John Collison at Stripe’s annual conference.
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| Zuckerberg said on a podcast last week that he thinks the average person wants to have more friends and connections with other people than they currently do—and that AI friends are a solution. …
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| “The average American I think has, it’s fewer than three friends, three people they’d consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends,” he said in the interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel.
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| The total addressable market for friends is 15 per person, and right now humans are only providing about three friends per person, which leaves an opening for Meta to capture as much as 80% of human (well, human-ish) interaction.[1] That would be pretty good.
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