The Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, predicts a future in which the AI will understand you so well that different characters of AI will become your “friends.”
In a new interview with Podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Zuckerberg said he believes that “the average person wants connectivity, more connection he really has,” and believes that chatbots trained to have different personalities could help fill Condid.
“The average American, I think, has less than three friends, three people who would consider friends, and the average person has significantly more demand, I think it’s like 15 friends,” Zuckerberg told Patel. (He was probably referring to a survey of the Pew 2023 Research Center, which found that 40% of Americans say three or less friends, while 38% have five or more).
Zuckerberg says that AI has the opportunity to fill that void.
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Althegh said that “probably” would not replace connections in person or real life, could help people feel less. He added that users are already taking advantage of AI to prepare for difficult conversations with people in their lives, and other companies are already offering people of ia as virtual therapists and romantic partners.
“For people who do not have a therapist, I think everyone will have an AI,” said Zuckerberg in a separate podcast with analyst Ben Thompson last week.
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However, not everyone is aboard having “friends” of AI, and social networks users criticized Zuckerberg for their comments.
The writer Neil Turkewitz wrote in X that Zuckerberg’s perspective “is what happens when you think humanity is reducible to binary data: you think about friendship through the lens of supply and demand.”
Other users questioned whether the friends of AI would tell humans how to vote and what to believe, while another tracked the evolution of 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 a friend of AI.”
Carolyn Rogers, Marketing Chief of the Blokhaus agency, wrote in X that the next step would be that Ai Friends begin to recommend products, allowing that friendship to moneture.
2006 – Join Facebook to connect with your friends
2026 – Join Facebook to connect with your imaginary friends– WRLB? (@Wrlb2) May 1, 2025
Zuckerberg’s comments arrive when Meta launched an independent goal AI last week to compete with the OpenI chatgpt, GEMINI of Google and Grok of Xai.
Zuckerberg revealed in an Instagram video about the launch of the application that almost one billion people use a goal at the company’s applications such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Related: Goal Take Chatgpt launching an independent application: ‘A long trip’
