Meta is the newest company to pursue artificial general intelligence, a technology that’s variously exciting, scary and very much unproven.
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who runs one of the biggest AI research efforts around, wants to run one that’s even bigger.
On Thursday, he said Meta is leveling up its work to tackle not just artificial intelligence, but also artificial general intelligence. AI and AGI are already very nebulous terms, but in a nutshell, Zuckerberg wants to create much smarter computing systems, ones that at least match human cognitive abilities like learning, reasoning, planning, creating and remembering information.
That’s a sensible goal for a tech giant eager to shape the future of computing, attract the best research talent and keep antsy shareholders happy. But for you and me, it’s not likely to mean a hyperintelligent bot will be offering advice through your smart glasses anytime soon.
That’s because today’s AI, while exciting to computer scientists and much of the general public, hasn’t really delivered a revolution yet. It still struggles to distinguish hard facts from flights of fancy. Even so, it’s still miles ahead of AGI, which exists mostly as a domain of research and speculation.
But it’s Zuckerberg’s aspiration.
«It’s become clear that the next generation of services requires building full general intelligence,» Zuckerberg said in a post on Meta’s Threads social network. «Building the best AI assistants — AIs for creators, AIs for businesses and more — needs advances in every area of AI from reasoning to planning to coding to memory and other cognitive abilities.»
And he’s serious about it, saying that by year’s end, Meta will have 350,000 top-end Nvidia GPUs — the top-tier AI processor, which cost in the neighborhood of $30,000 apiece. Adding in other GPUs, that’ll bring processing power equivalent to 600,000 H100s, Zuckerberg said, dangling a big carrot in front of AI researchers’ eyes.
And giving a plug for his effort to usher in a metaverse that blends computer-generated and real worlds, he said that wearable devices like Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses could be an ideal interface for letting AI see what you see and helping you navigate reality.
