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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 t …