Mark Zuckerberg's Blunt Rejection of Closed Platforms: A Shift in Meta's Strategy

Mark Zuckerberg says 'f*ck that' to closed platforms

In his two decades running the company now known as Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has gone through many transformations. More recently, he's been showing off less filtered version of himself. But during a live streamed conversation with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, the Meta CEO seemed to veer a little more off script than he intended. The conversation began normally enough, with the two billionaire executives congratulating each other on their AI dominance. Zuckerberg made sure to talk up the company's recent announcement before settling into his usual talking points, which recently have included . Zuckerberg then launched into a lengthy rant about his frustrations with "closed" ecosystems like Apple's App Store. None of that is particularly new, as the Meta founder has been with Apple for years. But then Zuckerberg, who is usually quite controlled in his public appearances, revealed just how frustrated he is, telling Huang that his reaction to being told "no" is "fuck that." "I mean, this is sort of selfish, but, you know, after building this company for awhile, one of my things for the next 10 or 15 years is like, I just want to make sure that we can build the fundamental technology that we're going to be building social experiences on, because there just have been too many things that I've tried to build and then have just been told 'nah you can't really build that by the platform provider,' that at some level I'm just like, 'nah, fuck that,'" Zuckerberg said. "There goes our broadcast opportunity," Huang said. "Sorry," Zuckerberg said. "Get me talking about closed platforms, and I get angry."

Mark Zuckerberg: "Nah, fuck that."

Meta's CEO got a little heated while talking with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the SIGGRAPH conference today in Denver. The topic turned to Meta's approach to AI with Llama. Zuckerberg made clear that investing so much in foundational models is strongly influenced by not wanting to relive his history with Apple and the App Store: "One of my things for the next 10 or 15 years is I just want to make sure we can build the fundamental technology that we're going to be building social experiences on. Because there have just been too many things that I've tried to build and then have just been told, 'Nah, you can't really build that,' by the platform provider that, at some level, I'm just like, 'Nah, fuck that.'"