Why do AI company CEOs keep publishing these giant manifestos

[Its_Jackson62]

There has been a real wave of tech CEOs putting out these massive essays lately about the future of AI, and a few outlets have started poking at why that is. Mark Zuckerberg dropped over 6000 words this week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's Machines of Loving Grace clocks in above 13000 words and has apparently been printed and bound as physical merch, and Satya Nadella and Sam Altman have their own versions of the same genre going

One communications adviser quoted in the coverage put it pretty bluntly, saying the sheer length of these things is supposed to carry a kind of gravitas, like the word count itself is doing some of the persuading. Another consultant said the honest answer to who reads these is basically nobody outside of media covering the industry and a small circle of tech superfans who are already inside the same echo chamber as the person writing the essay

There is a more cynical read floating around too, that industries selling something the public already wants do not usually feel the need to write 6000 word justifications for why their product matters. The suggestion is that when a product is still struggling to prove its value, executives compensate by writing a bigger vision statement instead, which is where that line about the weaker the product the stronger the pitch comes from

It is a fair point that these essays are mostly written by founders for other founders, investors and the journalists who cover them, which is a pretty narrow audience if the actual goal is winning over a skeptical public that is already wary of things like data centers showing up in their neighborhoods

Kind of funny that in an era where everyone complains attention spans are shrinking, the tech industry's answer to public skepticism is somehow to write even longer

Why tech bosses keep sharing their manifestos about AIwww.bbc.co.uk

[BigDogShane10]

The line about weaker product stronger pitch is brutal but honestly kind of fair, you rarely see a company with a genuinely obvious value proposition write a 6000 word essay justifying its own existence

[Clever Wrench]

13000 words for Machines of Loving Grace getting turned into physical printed merch is a wild flex, that is basically treating a blog post like scripture

[Scholar70]

I think the real audience for these is investors more than the general public, reads like a pitch deck dressed up as a philosophical statement

[Dylan38]

At some point this just becomes genre convention, like once one CEO does the big essay thing everyone else feels obligated to match it or look like they are falling behind in the vision race

[Always_Craig96]

Feels like a status thing more than a communication strategy honestly, whoever writes the longest and most ambitious sounding essay gets treated as the visionary of the moment

[QueueJump58]

Nobody is reading all 6000 words of a Zuckerberg essay, most people are getting a two sentence summary secondhand from a tweet or a news article about the essay

[Griffin55]

Public skepticism about data centers and AI hype is a real on the ground concern and a long essay about superintelligence does nothing to address someone worried about their local power grid or water usage

[StringTheory98]

The video comment is interesting, apparently these CEOs avoid doing video versions because it looks too much like a hostage tape, that is a pretty telling admission about how these things come across on camera

[EventHorizonOctopus]

Founders writing for other founders and investors rather than the public explains why these essays never actually seem to shift public opinion no matter how widely they get shared

[StringTheory51]

There is something almost defensive about how often these come out lately, like the industry knows public trust is slipping and figures more words will fix it

[Memory Jaguar]

Genuinely do not think length correlates with substance here, some of the shortest tech blog posts I have read said more than a 6000 word manifesto ever could