Exclusive Mark Zuckerberg interview

I went to Menlo Park last week for an early look at Meta’s new products, including its audio-only Ray-Ban glasses, new VR glasses and more. And yes, we talked about whether AI is going to kill us all.

Everything you need to know is below. And the full video interview is now up on YouTube!

There are a LOT of questions to ask when Mark Zuckerberg unveils new products. How do the glasses work? What do you think people will use them for? What can the AI agent actually do? And, of course, just that real tiny one: Will AI kill us?

This evening, Meta unveiled new glasses and AI features at its annual Connect conference. But leading up to the event, last Friday, I sat down with Zuckerberg to talk about all of it.

There was no ignoring the bigger backdrop: the heated debate in Washington and across the tech industry over whether AI development is moving too fast and whether companies should slow down.

“I don’t think that we need some kind of industrywide coordination to not necessarily mess this up,” Zuckerberg told me. “I think that just each lab needs to take the time, and when it sees that there are issues, you just take the time that you need internally to basically make sure that you’re proceeding safely.” 

Translation: Every AI company can police itself.

Beyond those more existential questions, Zuckerberg also walked me through Meta’s new products and laid out his vision for the future of computing. And it keeps getting wilder. He thinks that eventually most people will wear some version of smart glasses, with a personal AI agent right there alongside us—seeing what we see, hearing what we hear and whispering in our ears.

I spent a lot of the interview asking about trust because that vision requires giving Meta access to an extraordinary amount of our personal lives. What emerged was a picture of a company Zuckerberg is once again trying to reinvent—this time around AI, personal computing and a much more intimate relationship with its users.

Go watch the full interview here, but below are my four biggest takeaways:

You know what I’ve always thought PDFs needed? Podcasts.

OK, maybe not, but Adobe Acrobat now has some AI audio features that are actually useful. You can take a document—or even a collection of documents—and turn it into a personalized podcast or audio summary. So instead of sitting at your desk reading a 60-page report, you can listen to the important parts while walking the dog.

It’s part of a much bigger shift Adobe is making with Acrobat: turning it from the place where you open a PDF and hit Ctrl + F —hoping you remember the exact phrase you’re looking for—into an AI-powered workspace, where you can have a conversation with your documents and more easily show what you know.

There are a bunch of other new things, too. Acrobat can turn dense documents into visual reports with charts, key takeaways and summary slides. And a new Stylize feature can take a boring-looking PDF and apply a professionally designed template while keeping the document editable.

Basically, Adobe wants us to stop treating PDFs like digital paper. Try out the new Adobe Acrobat here.  

This newsletter was written and curated by Joanna Stern and Adele Lowitz.