With his latest initiative, Mark Zuckerberg has put Meta on the path to ‘superintelligence,’ a stage where AI surpasses the capabilities of the human mind.
Meta CEO Zuckerberg is assembling a team of AI scientists and researchers drawn from OpenAI, Google, and the start-up Scale to set up a new AI lab that will work towards developing superintelligence, according to The New York Times.
Scale and its founder-CEO, 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, are critical to Zuckerberg’s vision.
With a multi-billion-dollar investment in Scale, Zuckerberg intends to align the company with Meta to pursue superintelligence just like OpenAI is aligned with Microsoft, DeepMind is with Google, and Anthropic is with Amazon.
The news comes at a time when advancements in AI have sparked concerns about ethics and safety. There are concerns that superintelligent AI could no longer remain within human control and pose an existential threat to humanity if its values do not align with those of humans. There are also concerns about the fallout of superintelligent AI acquiring sentience.
After initial setback, Zuckerberg wants to outdo rivals
After losing out in the AI race to rivals like Google and Microsoft, Zuckerberg has now set his eyes on the race to superintelligence.
According to The Times, Zuckerberg has offered up to seven—to nine-figure packages to dozens of researchers from OpenAI and Google to join the new superintelligence team at Meta.
While Zuckerberg set Meta’s first dedicated AI lab in 2013, the company lost to Google and others in the race as they partnered with AI-centered start-ups like DeepMind, Anthropic, and OpenAI, now world leaders in AI.
While these companies are focused on achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), the stage where AI can do everything a human mind can, Meta has now raised the goalpost to superintelligence.
Bloomberg has reported that Zuckerberg has been frustrated with Meta’s AI model, Llama, whose latest edition has underperformed compared to offerings of rival companies. Insiders and outside analysts have found the model to have overpromised and underdelivered.
In the wake of this disappointment, Meta has also delayed the release of Behemoth, the company’s largest AI model so far. The company had promised that Behemoth would be better than the models of rivals OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
