Marissa Mayer said the honest answer on AI is uncertainty.
Speaking at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in California, Mayer said anyone who claims to know how AI will play out is 'either lying or arrogant or both'. She added that 'we have a new form of intelligence' and that there is a possibility 'things won’t go well', even as she put the odds of a negative outcome at 'well less than 50%'.
Mayer said the industry's benefits could include medical and science breakthroughs and 'freeing people up to spend their time and live their lives the way they want to'. She said public sentiment in the U.S. has turned against AI and that the industry probably bears some of the blame, because early positioning of the technology was 'perhaps too cavalier'.
She also welcomed discussion about regulation and collaboration across frontier labs as the technology advances. Mayer said people are asking the right questions about what enterprise-level AI will mean for jobs, families and children's futures, and said, 'I personally think it can make all three of those things better.'
The comments came as Mayer outlined her latest venture, Dazzle AI, which she founded after leaving Yahoo and after winding down Sunshine in 2025. Dazzle is a personal AI assistant that learns from the photos on a user's phone, according to Mayer. She said the idea grew from Sunshine, where her team concluded that about 60% of a typical camera roll is worth sharing, while the other 40% is 'all the stuff we need to get done'.
Mayer said Dazzle is designed to connect that context with human and AI agents that can act on it, creating what she described as a to-do list 'that gets itself done'. She said that if she had to act as a personal assistant for a week, she would ask for a user's camera roll.
On privacy, Mayer said users can grant Dazzle full, partial or no access to their photos, and that sensitive images are immediately discarded. She said the service is invite-only for now and will eventually charge subscription fees, transaction fees or both, while keeping a free tier.
Dazzle raised $8 million in a seed round in 2025 at a $35 million valuation and formally announced its launch on September 29 this year. Mayer said early adopters are men, but she hopes the product and AI more broadly will appeal to women as well.
The market has already voted on the size of the opportunity, but the warning signs Mayer raised matter just as much. New technology does not earn public trust by swagger; it earns it through clear rules, real privacy protections and products that respect the people using them. Capital rewards optimism, but it punishes carelessness faster when the stakes are jobs, families and the taxpayer's wider economy.
