While Mark Zuckerberg has launched Meta headfirst into the AI arena, he’s not a fan of some who think they’re creating some sort of singular AI “God.”
The Meta CEO recently sat for an interview with YouTuber Kane Sutter, also known as Kallaway, to discuss his company’s AI strategy — and it doesn’t involve just one model.
“The future is not going to be one AI,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s going to be a lot of AIs with a lot of different people being able to create different things.”
While other tech giants are pinpointing a main AI model to focus on, like ChatGPT for OpenAI or Gemini for Google, Zuckerberg said Meta is looking toward integrating several AIs.
“Our overall view is that this isn’t the type of thing where there should just be one of,” he said. “People want to interact with lots of different people and businesses, and there needs to be a lot of different AIs that get created to reflect people’s different interests.”
Zuckerberg took the opportunity to once again endorse open-source AI models, saying that the technology should not be “hoarded” by a company seeking to control its use or build out a single central product.
The pursuit of a singular, all-powerful AI is off-putting to him, he said.
“I find it a pretty big turnoff when people in the tech industry kind of talk about building this one true AI,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s almost as if they kind of think they’re creating God or something.”
Zuckerberg appears to be referencing some of the talk about reaching the singularity, or artificial general intelligence — the idea that eventually AI will surpass humanity’s own intellect.
For some, the pursuit of AI can even veer into a sort of religion. Former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, for example, launched a “Way of the Future” church for people trying to build a “spiritual connection” with AI.
But Zuckerberg’s comments appear to be directed at AI workers who liken AGI to a deity.
“We’re creating God,” an unnamed AI worker told Vanity Fair in September. “We’re creating conscious machines.”
Others, like former OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, aren’t talking about “God” but are pursuing a singular “superintelligence.”
AI company Mistral’s CEO Arthur Mensch expressed concern last year over Silicon Valley’s almost devout interest in AGI, saying, “The whole AGI rhetoric is about creating God […] I’m a strong atheist. So I don’t believe in AGI.”
Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark has also suggested that “a lot of the breathless enthusiasm for AGI is misplaced religious impulses from people brought up in a secular culture.”
While Meta is also very much in the AI race and trying to build increasingly powerful AI systems, Zuckerberg said Meta is hoping to create a diverse set of tools so that users will be able to build their own AI systems.
“Some people are saying that there’s going to be the one true big AI that can do everything,” Zuckerberg said. “I just don’t think that that’s the way that things tend to go.”
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