Meta is reportedly creating an AI clone of Mark Zuckerberg – trained on his mannerisms, tone and thinking – to help employees feel more connected to the American tech giant’s chief.
Zuckerberg is involved in training the AI with his thinking about the company’s strategy, sources told the Financial Times.
The AI clone is being built by Meta’s Superintelligence Labs and is in an early stage of development.
The sources said the clone would be capable of holding real-time conversations “so that employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it”.
The clone is different from the “CEO agent” being designed to help Zuckerberg, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal last month.
The clone is the latest attempt by the Meta chief to create a digitalised version of himself and the users of his products.
In 2022, Zuckerberg created his avatar inside the metaverse, which was mocked for its non-emoting facial features and poor graphic quality.
The following year, Meta launched celebrity-based chatbots, including personas modelled on Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady and Kendall Jenner, who had licensed their likenesses, but these AI personas were discontinued in 2024 after they failed to get much traction.
After spending tens of billions of dollars, the tech giant scaled down its vision of the metaverse in which people’s digital avatars could interact with those of others.
Currently, Meta appears keen on enabling creators to make AI avatars of themselves. In 2024, the tech giant showed a live demo of what the AI persona of a creator might look like.
Meta later began allowing creators to make AI versions of themselves to interact with followers and create custom AI chatbots, but these tools were blocked for teenagers in January.
The Zuckerberg clone seems to be part of an attempt by the Meta chief to take a more hands-on approach at the company, spending 5-10 hours per week coding and participating in technical reviews, according to the Financial Times.
He’s also reportedly investing time developing a personalised “CEO agent” AI system to help him obtain internal company information faster.
All this appears in line with Zuckerberg’s announcement on a January earnings call that Meta was “elevating individual contributors and flattening teams” by building native AI tools to “get more done”.
The Independent has contacted Meta for comment.
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