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After hiring away numerous top AI researchers from the likes of OpenAI, Google, and Apple and dangling multi-hundred million-dollar (or in one case, reportedly a billion-dollar) pay packages in a recruitment spree that’s shaken the tech industry, Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sharing more about his vision for “superintelligence.”
In a new plain text note posted on the web today (full text below), Zuck writes: “Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight.”
He goes on to share more about his and Meta’s vision for superintelligence and how personalized it should be — in keeping with Meta’s entire fleet of products such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, and its AR glasses and VR headsets, which all allow the user some level of customization and personalized content.
But most interesting to me is the distinction Zuck draws against “others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work,” which seems like a thinly-veiled shot at his own rival and poaching target OpenAI, whose definition of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a precursor to superintelligence, is “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”
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OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman further recently stated at a conference in Washington, D.C., that AI would cause entire categories of jobs to be “totally, totally gone” calling out customer service as one area where automated AI systems would likely dominate.
Instead, Zuck offers a different vision as a counter:
“At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is how we have always made progress expanding prosperity, science, health, and culture. This will be increasingly important in the future as well…The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take, and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society. Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone.”
In a video posted with the note on X and other social channels, Zuck says: “At Meta, we believe in putting the power of superintelligence in people’s hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives. Some of this will be about improving productivity, but a lot of it may be more personal in nature.”
However, it’s actually quite similar to the vision shared by Altman on his personal website almost a year ago to date: “It won’t happen all at once, but we’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine.”
And just last month, Altman wrote again on his blog:
“We (the whole industry, not just OpenAI) are building a brain for the world. It will be extremely personalized and easy for everyone to use; we will be limited by good ideas. For a long time, technical people in the startup industry have made fun of “the idea guys”; people who had an idea and were looking for a team to build it. It now looks to me like they are about to have their day in the sun.
OpenAI is a lot of things now, but before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company. We have a lot of work in front of us, but most of the path in front of us is now lit, and the dark areas are receding fast.“
So perhaps, these competing visions of superintelligence are actually far more similar than they are opposed. Read Zuck’s full note below:
Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight.
It seems clear that in the coming years, AI will improve all our existing systems and enable the creation and discovery of new things that aren’t imaginable today. But it is an open question what we will direct superintelligence towards.
In some ways this will be a new era for humanity, but in others it’s just a continuation of historical trends. As recently as 200 years ago, 90% of people were farmers growing food to survive. Advances in technology have steadily freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits we choose. At each step, people have used our newfound productivity to achieve more than was previously possible, pushing the frontiers of science and health, as well as spending more time on creativity, culture, relationships, and enjoying life.
I am extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress. But perhaps even more important is that superintelligence has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where people will have greater agency to improve the world in the directions they choose.
As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.
Meta’s vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone. We believe in putting this power in people’s hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives.
This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output. At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is how we have always made progress expanding prosperity, science, health, and culture. This will be increasingly important in the future as well.
The intersection of technology and how people live is Meta’s focus, and this will only become more important in the future.
If trends continue, then you’d expect people to spend less time in productivity software, and more time creating and connecting. Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful. Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices.
We believe the benefits of superintelligence should be shared with the world as broadly as possible. That said, superintelligence will raise novel safety concerns. We’ll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source. Still, we believe that building a free society requires that we aim to empower people as much as possible.
The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take, and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society.
Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone. We have the resources and the expertise to build the massive infrastructure required, and the capability and will to deliver new technology to billions of people across our products. I’m excited to focus Meta’s efforts towards building this future.
– Mark
