In a surprise Instagram Reel today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company is developing open source artificial general intelligence (AGI).
It is bringing two of of its AI research teams – FAIR and GenAI – closer together with the goal of building full general intelligence and open sourcing it as much as possible.
“Our long-term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit,” wrote Zuckerberg in a caption. In the video, he said that “it’s become clear that the next generation of services required is building full general intelligence, building the best AI assistants, AIs for creators, AIs for businesses and more that needs advances in every area of AI from reasoning to planning to coding to memory and other cognitive abilities.”
Zuckerberg also pointed out that the company is currently training Llama 3 and touted the “massive compute infrastructure” it is building, including 350,000 Nvidia H100s by the end of this year.
He also touted the metaverse and Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. “People are also going to need new devices for AI and this brings together AI and Metaverse is over time,” he said. “I think a lot of us are going to talk to AI as frequently throughout the day. And I think a lot of us are going to do that using glasses. These glasses are the ideal form factor for letting an AI see what you see and hear what you hear. So it’s always available to help out.”
Zuckerberg’s announcement comes directly after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s many comments about AGI at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in which he softened his tone about the existential risks of AGI two months after being reinstated after his firing in November 2023.
It also comes even though Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun has often expressed skepticism that AGI will arrive anytime soon — certainly not in the next five years.
Finally, the news that Meta’s future AGI could be open sourced comes only a couple of months after VentureBeat said that Llama and open source AI ‘won’ 2023. This announcement will surely drive even more debate around open source vs. closed source AI, especially coming right after Anthropic released a paper that said open models could have destructive ‘sleeper agents’ lurking at their core.
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