Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicts a future where AI will understand you so well that different AI personas will become your “friends.”
In a new interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Zuckerberg said that he thinks “the average person wants more connectivity, more connection that they actually have,” and thinks AI chatbots trained to have different personalities could help fill that void.
“The average American, I think, has 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,” Zuckerberg told Patel. (He was likely referring to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, which found that 40% of Americans say they have three or fewer friends, while 38% have five or more.)
Zuckerberg says AI has the opportunity to fill that gap.
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Although he said that AI would “probably” not replace in-person or real-life connections, it could help people feel less alone. He added that users are already tapping into AI to prepare for difficult conversations with people in their lives, and other companies are already offering AI personas as virtual therapists and romantic partners.
“For people who don’t have a therapist, I think everyone will have an AI,” Zuckerberg said in a separate podcast with analyst Ben Thompson last week.
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However, not everyone is on board with having AI “friends,” and social media users criticized Zuckerberg for his comments.
The writer Neil Turkewitz wrote on X that Zuckerberg’s perspective “is what happens when you believe that humanity is reducible to binary data — you think of friendship through the lens of supply & demand.”
Other users questioned if AI friends would tell humans how to vote and what to believe, while another tracked Meta’s evolution from a place to connect with friends in 2006 to a place to connect with “imaginary friends” in 2026.
Some were more optimistic, writing that they “wanted an AI friend.”
Carolyn Rogers, head of marketing at the agency Blokhaus, wrote on X that the next step would be for AI friends to start recommending products, enabling Meta to monetize that friendship.
Zuckerberg’s comments arrive as Meta released a standalone Meta AI app last week to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok.
Zuckerberg revealed in an Instagram video about the app’s release that almost a billion people use Meta AI globally across the company’s apps like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
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