Mark Zuckerberg Joins Growing Ranks of CEOs Creating A.I. Avatars of Themselves

Meta, with more than 60 offices, nearly 80,000 staffers, might soon have two Mark Zuckerbergs: one human and one digital. The company is reportedly developing an A.I.-powered version of its CEO that can interact with staff when the real Zuckerberg isn’t available, according to the Financial Times. The avatar will be trained on Zuckerberg’s images, voice and mannerisms, people familiar with the project told FT. The effort dovetails with Zuckerberg’s aggressive push into all-things A.I., as he continues to bet heavily on the technology reshaping Meta’s future.

Meta did not respond to requests for comment from Observer.

Zuckerberg, 41, has emerged as one of A.I.’s most aggressive spenders. Meta expects to pour between $115 billion and $135 billion into A.I.-related infrastructure in 2026 alone. The company has also splashed cash to recruit top talent to its A.I. division, the newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), through eye-popping offers that include $100 million signing bonuses.

MSL, overseen by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, launched its first major product earlier this month: Muse Spark, a large language model designed to compete with other frontier A.I. systems. More models in the “Muse” series are slated for release later this year.

But Meta’s ambitions go beyond developing language models. The company is also building photorealistic 3D avatars capable of conversing with users, with the Zuckerberg clone serving as the first test case for employee feedback. If successful, the project could expand to let influencers and creators produce A.I. versions of themselves.

Zuckerberg isn’t the only executive experimenting with self-replication through A.I. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has used an A.I. version of himself to deliver quarterly earnings, while Zoom chief Eric Yuan has discussed training digital “clones” to attend meetings. Even hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio has a digital avatar sharing his investment principles online.

Beyond the employee-facing avatar, Zuckerberg is said to be developing another system: an A.I. CEO agent that can assist him with day-to-day executive tasks such as retrieving information quickly, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Meta has long been interested in blending A.I. with personality. In 2023, it launched chatbots modeled on celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Naomi Osaka. But the company later faced criticism over the feature’s impact on teens’ mental health and restricted underage users from accessing it earlier this year.

Avatars have been central to Zuckerberg’s vision before. They were a defining feature of his metaverse push, which fizzled out after his own 2022 VR avatar drew widespread mockery for its poor-quality graphics. Meta has since shifted its focus away from the metaverse in a pivot so sweeping that it now defines the company’s new identity around A.I.

If all goes according to plan, Zuckerberg’s next digital self may finally have a longer life than his last one.