The gloves are off among Silicon Valley CEOs

• Silicon Valley CEOs are doing battle in public.
• Many of them are jostling to cement themselves as leaders in AI and mixed reality.
• Mark Zuckerberg was the latest to openly criticize rivals with a withering review of the Vision Pro.

The Silicon Valley elite have been at each other's throats a little more than usual lately.

Tech execs have been taking public shots at their rivals, and there might be a reason why they're all getting so confrontational.

All of them are jostling to cement themselves as leaders in the next generation of the platform wars. The stage for those skirmishes has been set thanks to the emergence of technologies like AI and mixed reality.

And it's safe to say they're already a little tetchy about the competition.

The latest example of this came this week when Mark Zuckerberg derided Apple's Vision Pro headset in an Instagram video.

The Vision Pro is a direct competitor to Meta's Quest Pro but Zuckerberg does not appear concerned for now.

Aside from the odd compliment here and there, such as conceding that "Apple’s eye-tracking is really nice," he was pretty blunt about how he felt the $3,500 Vision Pro stacked up: “I think Quest is the better product, period.”

Zuckerberg criticized Vision Pro for being too heavy. He said the Quest’s hand tracking was more accurate and that the Vision Pro's immersive content library was lacking. He even took a swipe at Apple fanboys.

“The reality is that every generation of computing has an open and a closed model, and yeah, in mobile, Apple’s closed model won. But it’s not always that way,” Zuckerberg said. 

“If you go back to the PC era, Microsoft’s open model was the winner, and in this next generation Meta is going to be the open model, and I really want to make sure that the open model wins out again.”

Zuckerberg has good reason to be on the offense. His Quest headsets are hardware designed to act as a gateway to the metaverse — a future vision of an immersive internet that his company has lost huge sums on. 

In 2022, losses at Meta’s Reality Labs division, which is responsible for metaverse projects, totaled $13.7 billion. In the last three months of 2023 alone, losses hit $4.6 billion. Apple's entrace into mixed reality poses a big threat to Zuckerberg, one that could hobble the Quest business if he doesn't address it.

AI makes rivals of everyone

Augmented and virtual reality is not the only battleground. AI has also tempted CEOs into public disputes.

After spending the majority of last year playing catch up to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, tech leaders are pushing their versions of AI chatbots forward while highlighting weaknesses they see in competitors. 

Their mission? To gain a favorable reputation in a field Bill Gates has heralded “as revolutionary as mobile phones and the internet.”

Elon Musk, for instance, who has had a longstanding rivalry with OpenAI chief Sam Altman since leaving the company in 2018, introduced chatbot Grok late last year as an “anti-woke” alternative to ChatGPT. 

Zuckerberg has also taken shots at rivals in AI. The Meta chief, who has been busy rebranding his company as an AI-first firm having released open source model Llama 2 last year, has been deeply critical of rivals like OpenAI that are operating closed-source models.

The open versus closed debate has been a contentious one in AI, with many in the pro-open source camp arguing that closed-source models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 ultimately harm everyone else by shrouding their data and the way they’re trained in secrecy. 

“There were all these companies that used to be open, used to publish all their work, and used to talk about how they were going to open source all their work,” Zuckerberg told The Verge in January.

"I think you see the dynamic of people just realizing, ‘hey, this is going to be a really valuable thing, let’s not share it.’”

AI has even inspired more reserved CEOs to get provocative. 

Microsoft chief Satya Nadella, who has invested billions in OpenAI, has said that he wants people to know Microsoft made Google “dance” by acting first on commercial AI projects. Google unveiled its AI model Gemini nine months after OpenAI released GPT-4.

It's far from clear who the winners and losers of these new open rivalries will be. What's more certain, according to Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham at least, is that innovation could happen faster than it has in some time.

“Maybe Tim Cook and Zuck as rivals will ship good new stuff as fast as Steve Jobs would have,” he posted on X. “I always assumed ‘the next Steve Jobs’ would be one person, but maybe it will be two.”

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