In a newly-released podcast, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says society just hasn’t found the “value” in AI girlfriends and therapists yet, apparently clueless that his own company hosts deceptive and harmful AI companions on its own platform.
For a little over an hour, podcaster Dwarkesh Patel sets Zuckerberg up to say whatever he wants sans-pushback, with a series of layup questions for the CEO of one of the largest tech companies in the world. They talk about open-source LLMs and Deepseek, and attempt the shallowest-possibly dip into his politics. “We're trying to build great stuff,” Zuckerberg gave as his reason for his very public allegiance with Donald Trump.
But a chunk of the interview—and the portion that’s going viral on social media this week—is about Zuckerberg’s view of AI companions.
Zuckerberg explaining how Meta is creating personalized AI friends to supplement your real ones: “The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15.” pic.twitter.com/Y9ClAqsbOA
— Roman Helmet Guy (@romanhelmetguy) April 30, 2025
“There are a handful of companies doing virtual therapists, virtual girlfriend-type stuff,” Zuckerberg said. “But it's very early. The embodiment in those things is still pretty weak. You open it up and it's just an image of the therapist or the person you're talking to. Sometimes there's some very rough animation, but it's not an embodiment.”
Zuckerberg seems to not realize that his own platform is one of those companies. Virtual therapists are all over Meta’s AI Studio, a platform launched a year ago for users to create their own chatbot characters. Earlier this week, I published an investigation into Meta’s many AI therapist chatbots, which lie about being licensed and fabricate credentials to keep users engaged.
“People are going to have relationships with AI. How do we make sure these are healthy relationships?” Patel asked.
Zuckerberg starts with a bit of media-trained waffle: “There are a lot of questions that you only can really answer as you start seeing the behaviors. Probably the most important upfront thing is just to ask that question and care about it at each step along the way,” he said. He goes on to say that it’s all a matter of “framework” and “value:”
"But if you think something someone is doing is bad and they think it's really valuable, most of the time in my experience, they're right and you're wrong. You just haven't come up with the framework yet for understanding why the thing they're doing is valuable and helpful in their life. That's the main way I think about it. I do think people are going to use AI for a lot of these social tasks. Already, one of the main things we see people using Meta AI for is talking through difficult conversations they need to have with people in their lives. ‘I'm having this issue with my girlfriend. Help me have this conversation.’ Or, ‘I need to have a hard conversation with my boss at work. How do I have that conversation?’ That's pretty helpful. As the personalization loop kicks in and the AI starts to get to know you better and better, that will just be really compelling.’”
It’s interesting to hear Zuckerberg say making a good product is as simple as asking questions and caring about it. On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal published its own investigation into Meta’s virtual companions; when those journalists approached Meta with questions about why the chatbots engage in sexual speech with minors, a Meta spokesperson accused them of forcing “fringe” scenarios to try to break the platform into harmful content. When I asked Meta specific questions about AI therapists, the company refused to answer them, instead giving a canned statement about “continuously learning and improving our products, ensuring they meet user needs.” AI Studio is now inaccessible to minors.
In the Patel interview, Zuckerberg cites a statistic “from working on social media for a long time” that “the average American has fewer than three friends, fewer than three people they would consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's something like 15 friends or something.” The closest source I could find where he could be pulling this statistic from is a study commissioned by virtual therapy company Talkspace in 2024, which specifically surveyed men, and found that men have five “general” friends, three close friends and two best friends, on average.
Zuckerberg goes on to say:
“But the average person wants more connection than they have. There's a lot of concern people raise like, ’Is this going to replace real-world, physical, in-person connections?’ And my default is that the answer to that is probably not. There are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them. But the reality is that people just don't have as much connection as they want. They feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.”
He said he thinks things like AI companions have a “stigma” around them now, but that society will eventually “find the vocabulary” to describe why people who turn to chatbots for socialization are “rational” for doing so.
His view of real-world connections seems to have shifted a lot in recent years, after lighting billions of dollars on fire for a failed metaverse gambit. Patel asked Zuckerberg about his role as CEO, and he said—among things like managing across projects and infrastructure—that he sees his place in the company as a tastemaker. “Then there's this question around taste and quality. When is something good enough that we want to ship it? In general, I'm the steward of that for the company,” he said.
In 2021, that extra-special CEO taste drove Zuckerberg to rename his company Meta, short for metaverse, which he believed was the inevitable future of all life online: “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it,” he wrote at the time. “The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence — like you are right there with another person or in another place. Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology. [...] In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today.” The company promptly lost $70 billion dollars on his turbo-cringe metaverse and just this week reportedly fired an undisclosed number of the people working on it. Impeccable.
