Meta is building an AI clone of Mark Zuckerberg. A photorealistic 3D avatar that can talk to employees in his voice, complete with his mannerisms. Insiders told Tom's Hardware the clone has been trained on years of Zuckerberg's public statements and will engage with staff on the CEO's behalf. It's part of Meta's multibillion-dollar push into what they're calling "personal superintelligence" as they race to compete with OpenAI and Google, spearheaded by the development of a digital Zuckerberg clone.
The project builds on Meta's long-running Codec Avatars research out of Reality Labs, which uses generative adversarial networks and custom multi-camera capture rigs to recreate facial expressions in real time. Yaser Sheikh's team has been working on this technology for years, originally aimed at VR telepresence. Now they're combining that visual rendering with large language models to produce something that moves well beyond a chatbot. A digital surrogate meant to convey physical presence and non-verbal cues.
The tech community is skeptical. And for good reason. Hacker News commenters pointed out the obvious: business relationships run on accountability and the ability to actually commit to decisions, two things an AI cannot offer. Then there's the governance angle. Zuckerberg controls Meta's voting shares, so the board can't remove him anyway. The clone extends a CEO who already answers to no one. When a bot gives you orders, who's really in charge?
Whether employees want to take strategy meetings from a digital Zuckerberg remains an open question.