Mark Zuckerberg goes all-in on AI and might even beat Sam Altman and OpenAI to superintelligence
- Zuckerberg has created a new group called Meta Superintelligence Labs
- The goal of the group is to create AI superintelligence
- New hires from OpenAI will form the team headed up by Alexandr Wang from Scale AI
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has heated up the race towards AI superintelligence by restructuring the company’s artificial intelligence division with the main aim being to develop artificial superintelligence, that is, intelligence that is far beyond what humans are capable of.
Superintelligence could mean exponential leaps in medicine, science, and technology that dramatically change the course of humanity, but it doesn’t come without risks.
In an memo to employees, Zuckerberg said he is creating a new group called Meta Superintelligence Labs, lead by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of data-labeling startup Scale AI, which Meta has recently acquired for $14.3 billion.
A new era for humanity
As reported by Bloomberg, the memo sent by Zuckerberg reads: “As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight. I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity, and I am fully committed to doing what it takes for Meta to lead the way.”
The memo goes on to list 11 recent hires to the new division, which include ex-employees of OpenAI who worked on the last 12 months of OpenAI products, along with employees from Anthropic and Google.
The list includes Trapit Bansal, who pioneered RL on chain of thought and co-creator of o-series models at OpenAI, Shuchao Bi, co-creator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini, and Huiwen Chang, co-creator of GPT-4o’s image generation, who previously invented MaskIT and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google Research.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, has repeatedly posted about achieving superintelligence being the goal for his company on his blog.
As recently as June, he wrote, “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.”
However, it appears that Zuckerberg wants Meta to be the company that first claims to have achieved superintelligence, and he is certainly throwing an awful lot of money at this project, which has led some to question whether this is really the right approach and if achieving superintelligence is even possible.
Mark Zuckerberg paid $14.3 billion for Scale AI just to hire Alexandr Wang, and has even been offering OpenAI employees $100 million to join Meta, according to a report in the New York Times.
Zuckerberg’s new push towards superintelligence comes after Meta’s own Chief AI Scientist, Yann Le Cun, talking about superintelligence said publicly last month that “It’s not going to happen within the next two years, there is no way in hell”, and cast doubt upon the whole idea of scaling up existing LLM models, like Meta AI or ChatGPT, to achieve superintelligence, which is the approach that companies like OpenAI seem to be following.
Meta AI is currently available inside all the Meta social media apps, like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, and can also be used within the new Meta AI app.
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