Zuck, Personal Superintelligence, and Vibe Writing

No facts, just vibes.

Photo by Victor on Unsplash

Mark Zuckerberg published an essay today called "Personal Superintelligence" that lives at the very top of Meta's domain hierarchy. Not on his Facebook page, not in his Instagram stories, but at meta.com/superintelligence on an otherwise blank white page that, from what I gather, is meant to signal the text’s importance and profundity, as if Meta were itself starting from a blank slate from this point forward.

The problem is the essay is all hat and no cattle.

It's a masterclass in what I call "vibe writing": the rapidly proliferating trend among tech CEOs (but particularly AI CEOs) of publishing sweeping, revolutionary statements without much or any substantiation.

Let's just look at the opener:

"Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight."

Sure sounds important and soaring. But ask yourself: What glimpses is he referring to? Whose AI systems does “ours” refer to: Meta's specifically, or AI systems generally? What are some of these undeniable improvements? How does he define superintelligence, a fairly new concept and one about which there is definitional disagreement? How will he or we know when we've achieved it?

The essay is chock full of these kinds of assertions or assumptions of shared knowledge, and never expounds on or answers the “why” or “how” questions of all this. It’s the kind of stuff you could go on Joe Rogan or Theo Vonn and riff about, but when presented with the ceremony and atmospherics here and on a surface that permits infinite length and multimedia, it reads underwhelming.

Zuck isn’t the first CEO to toss off a tone poem as corporate direction. Quite the opposite: it seems like it’s become a requirement of being an AI company CEO. But his essay illustrates the core problem with vibe writing: it prioritizes sounding visionary over being substantive. And while that might work for a podcast appearance, it's a communications miss when you're trying to move markets, recruit talent, or convince anyone who takes this space seriously.

The fundamental question any communicator should ask is: who is your audience? Zuck’s essay seems to have no clear answer.

Is it for investors? Given that the essay came out on earnings day, it certainly seems so. The market certainly perked up. But why not just build it into your earnings materials and call together with the detail that will make the markets understand its implications?

Is it for researchers and potential recruits? Doubtful. Anyone serious in the AI field would find this level of hand-waving unpersuasive. The best you could say for it in this regard is it shows AI researchers and other talent Zuck is pot committed to making this work. But as Don Draper famously said on Mad Men, that’s what the money’s for.

Is it for consumers? Definitely not. If you're a regular person reading this and then opening WhatsApp or Instagram, the disconnect between this lofty future and Meta's current AI capabilities is jarring. And that’s putting aside the privacy implications inherent in the personal superintelligence vision described.

My guess? This was written primarily for Zuck himself as a way to articulate his thinking that then got published because, well… he's CEO, bitch.

Zuck has clearly enrolled in the Sam Altman School of Literature in cranking this piece out. But When Altman talks about the future of AI, you can look at ChatGPT and see a pathway to that future. When Zuck talks about "personal superintelligence that knows us deeply," you can look at Meta AI and... what, exactly? And while Altman dabbles in big vision territory as well, he usually sprinkles just enough hard facts so as to provide some grounding for his audience.

OpenAI actually has products that, at the very least, come closer to matching Altman's rhetoric. Meta has Granny Cougar.

This is why the essay feels hollow. Zuck is playing catch-up but trying to sound like he's leading. It creates cognitive dissonance that undermines the entire message.

What Meta Should Have Done Instead

If I were advising Meta's comms team (and I'm assuming this essay came as a surprise to them too, or at least they were informed very late by Zuck), here's what I would have recommended:

Pick a primary audience and write for them. If this is for investors, include concrete investment figures and timelines. If it's for researchers, get technical. If it's for consumers, make it relatable and connected to products they use today.

Show, don't tell. You want to talk about superintelligence? Show us your massive GPU infrastructure. Create a video that illustrates what this future state actually looks like. You have a creative team. Use them.

Leverage your actual advantages. You have more GPUs than anyone else in the world right now. You have well-reviewed Ray-Ban smart glasses in market that are a solid proof point for "personal superintelligence." You make allusion to them, but why not double down on how they provide a window to the future.

Be more specific about the path forward. It’s an interesting vision, but how are you actually going to get there? What are the milestones? What are you building next quarter that moves you toward this goal?

The Bigger Picture

The real problem here isn't that Zuck wrote a vague, hand-wavy essay. It's that this kind of vibe writing has become endemic in tech communications, especially around AI, and it’s creating a culture where sounding visionary is valued over being clear and revolutionary rhetoric substitutes for strategic thinking.

Why is this kind of writing proliferating, though? To be frank, the push to go direct has given executives the permission and the platform to be lazy and even uninteresting writers if they want to be. That’s not to say all such writing is bad or boring. Marc Andreessen, as much a forefather of this movement as anyone, built his brand as an investor in part off of his razor-sharp writing and wit on his pre-a16z blog. But the Zucks far outnumber the Marcs.

As communicators, we need to resist this trend. Our job isn't to help executives sound profound, but to help them communicate effectively. That means pushing for specificity, demanding evidence for claims, imbuing writing with narrative tension, and always asking: "What is the audience supposed to do with this information?"

Vibe writing might generate headlines, but it doesn't build trust, move markets in sustainable ways, or help people understand why they should care about your company. In fact, it likely erodes trust as the intangible grandness of it all lands with most people as just more eyeroll-inducing Valley hyperbole.

If you're going to make bold statements about the future, you better be prepared to show your work too. Otherwise, you're just contributing to the noise.