OpenAI’s mission is to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), a hypothetical AI system that would be at least equivalent to human intelligence. 

In keeping with that mission, its CEO, Sam Altman, has spent the past year hyping the potential of AGI, both in a positive and negative way. 

He wrote in a blog post last year that “a misaligned superintelligent AGI could cause grievous harm to the world,” later telling a Congressional committee that the growing industry must be properly regulated to mitigate the risks of so-called superintelligence. 

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In the same post, Altman hyped the beneficial potential of AGI as well, saying: “If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility.”

Researchers, meanwhile, have said that there is no science to support the hypothetical creation of AGI. 

Suresh Venkatasubramanian, an AI researcher and professor who in 2021 served as a White House tech advisor, told TheStreet last year that fears of a world-destroying artificial superintelligence are a “great degree of religious fervor sort of masked as rational thinking.”

Altman seems to have begun to come around to that perspective, telling Bloomberg recently that AGI will be developed in the “reasonably close-ish future,” but “will change the world much less than we all think and it will change jobs much less than we all think.”

“When we reach AGI,” he later said, “the world will freak out for two weeks and then humans will go back to do human things.”

Even as Altman has softened his tone, billionaire Facebook/Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has seemingly more fully embraced an effort to create an AGI of his own. 

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Zuckerberg’s on the AGI train

In a Thursday Instagram reel Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta  (META) – Get Free Report, said that he is bringing two of Meta’s AI research efforts — its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team and its generative AI team — closer together to support the company’s long-term goal of building and open-sourcing AGI. 

“It’s become clearer that the next generation of services requires building full general intelligence,” Zuckerberg said. 

His effort to build and open-source powerful systems comes as a marked contrast to many of the leading AI companies, such as OpenAI, which remain decidedly closed-off. 

“I tend to think that one of the bigger challenges here will be that if you build something that’s really valuable, then it ends up getting very concentrated,” Zuckerberg told The Verge Thursday. “Whereas, if you make it more open, then that addresses a large class of issues that might come about from unequal access to opportunity and value. So that’s a big part of the whole open-source vision.”

He added that the companies with the largest leads in AI seem to also be the ones pushing for guardrails the most aggressively. 

“I’m sure some of them are legitimately concerned about safety, but it’s a hell of a thing how much it lines up with the strategy,” he said.

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Meta’s Nvidia-powered infrastructure

Meta, Zuckerberg said, is currently building a “massive amount of infrastructure” to support this goal of developing AGI; the company will have around 350,000 Nvidia Nvidia H100 GPU chips by the end of the year and is currently training the next iteration of its open-sourced Large Language Model (LLM) Llama 3. 

Including other GPUs, Zuckerberg said Meta has a total of nearly 600,000 H100 equivalents of AI compute. One such chip carries a roughly $30,000 price tag, meaning Meta’s total chip array costs somewhere in the region of $18 billion. 

He told The Verge that he intends to make Llama 3 and any future iterations of the system one of the leading models within the industry. 

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Over time, Zuckerberg said, Meta’s efforts in developing more powerful AI systems will converge with the metaverse, a virtual reality that Meta has poured billions of dollars into developing. 

“People are also going to need new devices for AI, and this brings together AI and the metaverse,” he said. “Over time, I think a lot of us are going to talk to AIs throughout the day. Rayban Meta glasses are already off to a strong start, and overall across all this stuff, we are just getting started.”

Though his focus on the metaverse has seemingly shifted recently, Zuckerberg remains absolutely committed to it, telling The Verge that Reality Labs and the metaverse are still a priority that is sucking up around $15 billion annually. 

“This technology is so important, and the opportunities are so great, that we should open-source and make it as widely available as we possibly can,” Zuckerberg said. 

Shares of Meta, up around 5% for the year so far, rose 2% Thursday afternoon. 

Contact Ian with AI stories via email, ian.krietzberg@thearenagroup.net, or Signal 732-804-1223.

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