Julie Chang (3:26)

Zuckerberg has had, as you put it in your story, mixed success when it comes to predicting how people are going to interact with each other in the future. Specifically when he rebranded his company meta after the metaverse in 2021. Tell us about that and what it means for his AI vision.

Megan Bobrowski (3:44)

He invented Facebook, which went on to be a very lucrative company, acquired Instagram and WhatsApp. He does have an eye for this sort of thing with what's coming with the future. That being said, one of his more recent bets, the Metaverse and people using virtual reality goggles to access virtual worlds. That bet has not been successful so far and is not something that's widely used. So his AI product is called Meta AI and it's a chatbot that you can talk to, you can ask questions, and it's a already in Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and then it's also installed in the Meta Ray Ban's glasses, the hardware device. It's already integrated into all the products. Mark Zuckerberg at a conference, said that nearly a billion people are using the AI service monthly already.

Julie Chang (4:30)

What have people's reactions been to Zuckerberg's AI Forward future?

Megan Bobrowski (4:35)

A former Instagram executive I spoke with likened it to the arsonist setting a fire and then coming back to put the fire out, basically saying that Instagram and Facebook are some of the reasons that we have social isolation to begin with. And so they're now proposing a solution, but in her mind, the solution was not actually a solution. Another person I talked to, a professor of psychology at UC Irvine, said that chatbots cannot fully replace friends or therapists. But he said there are instances where they may actually be useful. For instance, if you don't have a therapist, but you do need to talk to someone. A chatbot is not going to be as good as a therapist, but it's going to be better than nothing.

Julie Chang (5:15)

That was WSJ reporter Megan Bobrowski. Coming up, an app that lets you publicly shame food companies over the ingredients in their products. We'll tell you about Yuka, what's driving its growth, and how food makers are responding after the break.

John Doe (5:38)

This is a CRM meltdown, so it gets worse.

Jane Smith (5:41)

Inventory swears the units arrived last week. They bounced me to Warehouse, who claim inventory's full of it. So either Inventory's got a vivid imagination or Warehouse lost everything. Our manufacturer says they'll look into it, but the only guy who'd know anything about this is Bob. But Bob's in Bora Bora. Sure hope Bob's enjoying his Mango Tangos, because we're about to lose so many customers.

John Doe (6:03)

Bad CRM was then. This is ServiceNow CRM for the AI era.

Julie Chang (6:13)

There's a mobile app that's changing what customers buy in grocery stores. Yuka lets you scan an item, and then it gives the product a score based on its nutritional quality, additives used, and whether it's organic or not. The app and others like it have become so popular that it's caused food manufacturers to reformulate some of their products. But there are questions about how. How reliable the app's underlying data is. WSJ reporter Jesse Newman covers food and agriculture. She spoke with our colleague Victoria Craig about this.

Jesse Newman (6:47)

So for people like me who are unfamiliar with the Yuka app, just walk us through what it is, but more, how does it work if I open it up, what can I do with it?

Mark Zuckerberg (6:57)

So the way Yuka works is it's an app on your phone. The icon has a little, like, orange carrot that you tap to open it up. And. And it allows you to scan barcodes both of food and cosmetics. You use your phone's camera to scan barcodes on any food product, and it will score that food from 1 to 100. And then based on that score that you get, it puts it into a category. The categories are bad, poor, good, and excellent. It renders this immediate judgment on whether the food is healthy or not. And if it receives a low score, it also gives you a recommendation for something that it deems to be healthier.

Jesse Newman (7:38)

And you have this great example of someone you spoke to in the story about how he used to use Hellman's mayonnaise. But as a result of using this app, he's now switched to using Butter instead. So it has changed the way that people think about ingredients that are used in various foods. It's also changed the way as you write about how stores stock products.

Mark Zuckerberg (7:58)

Yeah. So I should say this app not only gives you a rating, but it also tells you what it likes about the product and what it doesn't. And so it has lists of, like, positives. And it will tell you, okay, this product is low in calories or it's got fiber or it's low in sugar. And then it also gives you some of the negatives and it will list the additives that are in the product and it scores how risky it deems these additives to be. And you can then click on the individual additive and read more about the additive, what it's used for, what the science says. People we talked to said, nothing gets into my shopping cart before I use Yuca to scan it. And this app, it has tweaked over a thousand of its products to remove more than 140 additives in order to boost scores on the app. Consumers are adopting it here in the US More and more.

Jesse Newman (8:45)

And we also know that consumers love instant gratification, which this app also allows because it's broken down this barrier between these large food companies and the consumers. Just in the app, they can send feedback straight to the companies themselves. What is that relationship like and how have the companies responded?

Mark Zuckerberg (9:03)

It's pretty interesting and unique. If there are additives that Yuca deems risky, the app offers this new feature as of last fall. It's called the call out feature. And it allows you to either send a private email to the manufacturer or post it on social media saying, hey, I'm asking you to take these risky additives out of my food. And it's a pre drafted message. You don't have to write anything. You could just send it immediately to the manufacturer. Manufacturers are responding to these messages to a large degree. They're defending the use of these additives and saying, hey, they're FDA approved, they're safe, safe. We also know that brands here in the US Are seriously considering reformulating their products in order to boost their scores and make their products healthier. Chobani, as an example, took this one additive that had been called out, dipotassium phosphate out of its oat milk. Now, Chobani says it's been working on this for two years, so it's not necessarily a direct result, but these companies are getting thousands of messages via Yuca asking them to remove additives.

Jesse Newman (10:06)

This app is now a $7 million, global business, and a third of Yuka's users are in the US we have to mention this undercurrent in American society. Now that Robert Kennedy Jr. Is head of the Health and Human Services Department. He has this Make America Healthy Again campaign. How is that playing into the success or the use of Yuka and other apps across the U.S. so Yuka says.

Mark Zuckerberg (10:32)

They launched in 2017 in France and they came to the U.S. in 2020. Things began to take off for them in 2020. There was a video that went viral on TikTok. And so U.S. consumers really started picking up the app then. And they say that Maha, the Make America Healthy Again movement, has really fueled the app even further and that they've got a lot of users among people who would likely identify themselves as Maha supporters. And in fact, we learned that RFK Jr himself is a user of Yuka. He said that a is looking to encourage other companies to develop similar apps. The adoption and the growing adoption of apps like Yugo is really being driven by the same fundamental distrust that we're seeing among consumers toward food ingredients of the companies that are making their food and regulators like FDA that are overseeing these companies.

Jesse Newman (11:27)

If distrust is pushing people to the platform, what is it about it that they feel like they can trust this platform with all of the advice that it's giving?

Mark Zuckerberg (11:35)

They've got about 3 million products in their database, and so that's how they input the ingredients into the app. I talked to brands who said there's mistakes in what our ingredients are or something like an ingredient. Stevia is listed twice. So we get docked points for stevia. And so that's obviously something that they need to address. And that question of which system, which proprietary algorithm are you going to trust to make decisions about what you eat and to make decisions about nutrition is definitely a question.

Julie Chang (12:06)

That was WSJ's Victoria Craig speaking with reporter Jesse Newman. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Charlie Duffield with deputy editor Chris Zinsley. I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

John Doe (12:32)

This is a CRM meltdown.

Jane Smith (12:34)

Hey, Good news, only 200 customers are on hold now. Bad news, it's because 100 canceled their orders. We need a new CRM.

John Doe (12:42)

Bad CRM was then. This is ServiceNow CRM for the AI era.