Zuckerberg: The metaverse is out, AI is in
Meta is a real player in the race for supreme artificial intelligence, said Alex Heath in The Verge. OpenAI and Google get most of the attention, but Meta is working on what it believes will be an industry-leading large-language model, Llama 3. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said it will be a step toward his company’s ultimate goal of achieving artificial general intelligence, a human-like ability to reason through problems without special training. Zuckerberg last week said “he’s shaking things up by moving Meta’s AI research group, FAIR, to the same part of the company as the team building generative AI products across Meta’s apps.” That should enable “Meta’s AI breakthroughs to more directly reach its billions of users.” And Zuckerberg is not shy about wanting few limits on AI technology. “The biggest companies that started off with the biggest leads,” he says, are also the ones demanding “guardrails on how everyone else builds AI.”
So much for the metaverse, said Aisha Counts and Sarah Frier in Bloomberg Businessweek. Until recently, Meta “framed its interest in AI mostly as a way to achieve Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse,” a digital world entered through virtual reality. That vision—and the $50 billion bet Zuckerberg made to fulfill it—now “looks like a colossal failure.” Zuckerberg appears to be pivoting again, “making AI his top priority.” Can his workforce withstand another case of whiplash? The morale at Reality Labs, the division that’s developing Meta’s augmented and virtual reality technologies, “has plummeted.”
Credit Zuckerberg for pivoting before it’s too late, said The Economist. In October 2022, “investors appeared to throw in the towel” on Meta and Zuckerberg, “accusing him of trashing the core business while lavishing money on his pharaonic dreams for the metaverse.” Within weeks of the market rout, Zuckerberg slashed costs, laid off workers, and “launched an internal revolution aimed at using AI to galvanize Meta’s core business.” And Zuckerberg’s decision to make Llama open source, available for developers to reuse and modify, rather than turning it into a walledoff proprietary model, has turned him “from Silicon Valley’s villain to its hero.” Impressive turnaround.
Zuckerberg is the latest tech leader to jump on the “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) bandwagon, said Benj Edwards in Ars Technica. Zuckerberg and counterparts like OpenAI chief Sam Altman want it both ways. They say AGI is close. But they also dismiss fears that it “might pose an existential threat to humanity or replace humans working intellectual jobs.” So, will AI change everything or not? After “the drumbeat of world-threatening hype we heard throughout 2023,” Silicon Valley’s elite don’t seem very sure.