Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a letter outlining his vision for “personal superintelligence” Wednesday, giving investors a glimpse into his artificial intelligence strategy ahead of Meta’s second-quarter earnings report.
The company has shelled out billions of dollars hiring top AI researchers and engineers in recent weeks, and Wall Street will be listening for what Zuckerberg has to say about the spending spree.
Zuckerberg did not outline specific products or applications that Meta plans to build in his letter, but he said he views superintelligence as a tool for “personal empowerment” over automation and efficiency.
“This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Meta has been racing to keep up with competitors like OpenAI and Google. In June, the company announced plans to invest $14.3 billion into Scale AI and hired its CEO Alexandr Wang.
Weeks later, Zuckerberg revealed a new business unit called Meta Superintelligence Labs, where employees will work on foundation models such as the open-source Llama family of AI models, products and Fundamental AI Research projects.
Wang is leading the lab as Meta’s chief AI officer, and the company has also recruited talent from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.
Investors have seen Zuckerberg make expensive decisions around emerging technologies before.
In recent years, Meta has poured billions of dollars into building the metaverse, a computing platform involving digital worlds that are accessible through VR and augmented reality devices. He published a similar letter about his vision for the technology in 2021.
Meta’s Reality Labs business unit houses its metaverse efforts. As of April, Reality Labs has reported cumulative losses of more than $60 billion since late 2020.
“The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take,” Zuckerberg wrote, “and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society.”
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