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Mark Zuckerberg’s new goal is creating artificial general intelligence

209 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

lgleason 3y ago
[flagged]
paxys 3y ago
> Mark Zuckerberg’s new goal is creating artificial general intelligence So...what happened to that whole "Metaverse" thing? Is it time to rename the company again?
- threeseed 3y ago
  Meta's AR/VR strategy is still the over-arching priority and given how well Quest 3 and Ray Bans glasses are doing shows that it is likely the right one. Especially once Apple Vision Pro ignites the industry. AI will be used to enhance that e.g. generated avatars, autonomous agents, hand/body tracking etc.
  - aabhay 3y ago
    How well are the Ray Bans doing? I’ve never heard anyone talk about them nor seen anyone wearing them.
    - threeseed 3y ago
      Surprisingly well. Strong adoption by the younger TikTok generation which is an area that Meta has been desperate to bring back into their fold. Also the product is pretty impressive. The camera quality is really good and the AI features genuinely useful. Definitely caused many in the industry to wonder if that form factor could be the future of the AR industry in the short term as well as the long term.
      - aabhay 3y ago
        Doesn’t seem to be the case —- https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/3/23818462/meta-ray-ban-stories-smart-glasses-retention-reality-labs https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/3/23818462/meta-ray-ban-stor... Less than 10% retention after two years.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > Especially once Apple Vision Pro ignites the industry. I may be repeating my own errors with the following as I said much the same for the iPhone and the Apple Watch when they were new, but… The prices Apple are asking for seem excessive given what the products actually do, surely the cheaper alternatives are going to be what really matters? (In this case, cheaper alternatives would include the Meta headsets).
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - hindsightbias 3y ago
      Cheaper than an 8K OLED. Watched a guy spend $6K on iPads for his kids like it was a stocking stuffer. Took 15 minutes as he had to call the wife on if 1TB was enough. Felt bad I was just buying an Air so wandered to let the sales kid work him. Kid said it was an overage day.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Mmm. You've just reminded me how weird I am with money. Back in 2000-ish, a summer holiday job I was doing for an hourly pay of… I can't remember exactly, but perhaps the equivalent of £10k/year for the full-timers… one of my coworkers said he'd bought a plasma TV for his 1- or 2-year old son. Those things were considered expensive luxuries back then. I guess people like him are the norm.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    > Especially once Apple Vision Pro ignites the industry. Ah, yes, the inevitability of Apple success. Just as everyone switched from cell phones to PDAs after 1993.
    - blackoil 3y ago
      Wow, you must go back 30 years to find a failure. That's hugely impressive. If we squint enough we can add FireWire to that.
      - ethbr1 3y ago
        There's a train of Apple misses. Hindsight is success after success, because we only remember the successful and final versions of products. Generally, they get it right a lot of the time. More than others! But argumentum ad Apple to convince of the inevitability of technological shifts is insane.
- pelagicAustral 3y ago
  Man, the Metaverse... what a fad. I almost can't even believe that WAS a thing. We had Habbo, and then we had Second Life, and NOW!!!!!!.... * deafening silence *
  - rvnx 3y ago
    VR is a gadget, the same way that 4D cinemas are gadget. Ok it's +/- fun the first time to receive water droplets in your face while watching a movie, or for the cinema to spread fake fart smell, but this is not the experience you want to have every day. Apparently only a single-digit % of people who purchased AR headsets are using them once in a month (source: Valve developer Chet Faliszek)
    - nomel 3y ago
      In my opinion, HMD are clearly the future of display tech. VR is something you get for free, with an HMD.
      - rvnx 3y ago
        A (dystopian) future is more likely the Neuralink injecting visual signals or thoughts. Even an ultra-light HMD gives the Glasshole feeling, besides not being comfortable to wear.
        nomel 3y ago
        > Even an ultra-light HMD gives the Glasshole feeling, besides not being comfortable to wear. Which have you had experience with? And, do you believe whatever you wore was as good as it gets?
    - theshackleford 3y ago
      > but this is not the experience you want to have every day. It’s been the experience I’ve been having every day since the original oculus devkit. I’ve rarely touched a flatscreen title since. Eventually I hope they’ll become good enough to work in when I travel. edit In saying that, i've always maintained its not ready for normies yet, and that we were probably a good decade or two away from the point where its going to be in a format/design that the mass market would accept/have interest in. In fact in many cases, I still actively reccomend against purchase because I know it's still kinda incuating along.
- slowmovintarget 3y ago
  How would one manage a fully connected VR-scape without AGI?
- deleted 3y ago
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- ivanmontillam 3y ago
  It is that time. First it will be "Meta AI" and then the "Meta" will be long gone. I'm gonna get downvoted for this comment because this is not Reddit, but I had to say it.
the_cat_kittles 3y ago
so far hees made nothing but viral spyware but its all about to change!
- nwiswell 3y ago
  You're right, of course, but also Bill Gates was a cartoon capitalist villain for decades and then suddenly he started saving millions of kids in the third world. Maybe Mark will have a similar moment of redemption, who knows.
sokoloff 3y ago
HN title seems editorialized as compared to the article title ("Meta’s new goal is to build artificial general intelligence" or the article headline is similar but with Mark Zuckerberg as the subject.) The HN submitted title ("Meta will have a stockpile of almost 600k GPUs by the end of 2024") is one specific sentence in the article.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Is the headline stable, I see it pretty common for articles to sample multiple headlines until one gains traction.
tikkun 3y ago
> He tells me that, by the end of this year, Meta will own more than 340,000 of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs That's approx $15b worth of H100 GPUs.
- cleverwebble 3y ago
  You are assuming they are paying retail price, which they certainly are not.
  - JoshTko 3y ago
    Given the demand why wouldn't Nvidia be able to charge sticker price?
    - bilekas 3y ago
      You can afford to take a hit off your profits when you can simply ramp up production for retail sales. Looks great too for shareholders.
      - KeplerBoy 3y ago
        They can't just ramp up production though. Isn't TSMC booked for years by them, Apple, Intel and AMD?
        doctorpangloss 3y ago
        Nobody really knows. It certainly suits them for everyone to believe there is some secular reason, some supply crunch, it even suits AMD and Intel. Presumably all the chip supply issues regarding autos have been resolved, and yet prices have risen 30% in a decade, and there’s no reversal.
        blackoil 3y ago
        We know OpenAI and Azure was struggling to get enough GPU. That was implied not just by their words but also by action. And considering these two companies are most aggressive and making most money out of this AI. If GPUs are available they would have been able to buy it.
__loam 3y ago
I wonder how many of those chips were acquired to run metaverse stuff. Should be lots of overlap between rendering graphics and running cuda based models. I'm interested in seeing how the behemoths that are Meta and Google catch openai. I think it's a question of when, not if. Both companies just have a ridiculous amount of resources to throw behind these efforts. At least meta is releasing their stuff as "open source". We'll see how they justify putting out these models for free, or if it's purely about undercutting openai.
- rvnx 3y ago
  Almost no overlap: this metaverse thing just needs classical CPU servers (and not a lot of them considering the minimal user activity there). For now Google is still late to the party (full proprietary, and nobody has seen the supposedly good model called Ultra, only an average one called Pro), and Meta is actually the company that has pushed the field forward for all companies (with LLaMA).
  - threeseed 3y ago
    > this metaverse thing just needs classical CPU servers The idea is that the metaverse will be filled with AI avatars.
  - FartyMcFarter 3y ago
    > Meta is actually the company that has pushed the field forward for all companies (with LLaMA). This is the first time I'm hearing this, unless you mean the fact that it leaked to the public. How was LLaMa pushing the field forward otherwise?
  - InCityDreams 3y ago
    >the supposedly good model called Ultra, Good (as written), or God (at first glance)?
bugglebeetle 3y ago
I’m more bullish on Meta’s AI efforts than OpenAI’s at this point. Everything open source can flow back into what they’re doing, whereas OpenAI seems focused on staying locked down, while diluting their core product in myriad ways.
jstummbillig 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
OpenAI got all of the positive publicity for its social mission yet in short time we clearly see that Meta has done more for democratizing access to deep learning and will continue to lead on this front. The cost of open sourcing models is far more than just development cost. They're spending millions of dollars training models with that fleet of H100s. This makes open source AI much more costly, and generous.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  As Meta has always done. Their contributions to open source ML have always been above and beyond everyone else and they have one of the absolute best teams in the industry.
aluminum96 3y ago
Brace yourselves. The scale of capital investment coming from Meta, Google, and OpenAI/Microsoft is going to be historically mind-boggling.
- igravious 3y ago
  Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), OpenAI (Microsoft) Microsoft name change incoming?
basiccalendar74 3y ago
mostly because Meta did not develop a custom AI chip, like Google.
formerly_proven 3y ago
A stockpile of rapidly depreciating assets bought at eye-watering margins is an unusual brag for any company, no?
- nomel 3y ago
  From a naive perspective, it seems that true research/advances in AI (methods of training, etc) aren't necessarily related to model size. It seems that the goal of "building a big model that everyone else converges to because the training data is the same" doesn't have all that much value, especially since you could wait a couple years, do it all for a fraction of the price, and catch up immediately. Meta doesn't have an AI product yet, so it's not like they would be loosing money. I suspect this is more about talent attraction/retention.
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  CPUs are rapidly depreciating, hard drives are rapidly depreciating, SSDs are doubly rapidly depreciating, with this logic no hardware buy would make sense.
  - formerly_proven 3y ago
    Computer hardware has always been rapidly depreciating. You'd always get much more (performance/capability) for the same money just a few months to 1-2 years down the road. GPUs have been a complete outlier in this area for around ~8 years, and even they depreciate relatively quickly still.
- crotchfire 3y ago
  I am going to be buying these by the truckload on ebay three years from now. The current generation of GPUs is definitely going to have a long usable lifetime. Manufacturers finally have HBM totally figured out and yielding/aging well. Today's GPUs are the analog of the 28nm logic node -- it was the sweet spot for an absurdly long time. There will be something faster/lower-power 2-3 years from now that will cause the BigCos to cycle their fleet, but it won't be anywhere near the VRAM/MemBandwidth boost we have today compared to 2-3 years ago. Their data centers are power-constrained, so they'll upgrade regardless, and the rest of us will feast on the windfall. Don't ninja-bid on my auctions.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
Hopefully Llama 3 and Llama 4 open models will be released soon. For all of Meta’s faults, release powerful LLMs that users can run and modify on their own systems is a huge benefit to keeping AI from being entirely locked away and heavily censored by big corporations.
zozbot234 3y ago
Yes but can they run Crysis?
- rvnx 3y ago
  Yes https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-h100-benchmarkedin-games https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-h100-benchmarkedin-...
dbtc 3y ago
For the good of humanity no doubt.
cs702 3y ago
...rendering every competitor's massive investments worthless. Zuckerberg's thinking must be that Meta's competitors are more susceptible to disruption by broadly accessible AGI, and that if everyone has access to state-of-the-art AGI, then no one will be able to gain a new kind of competitive advantage from it.
- manojlds 3y ago
  Like in the dystopian Ready Player One, humans move to the VR world and who has the biggest investments in VR as of now?
  - poisonborz 3y ago
    And what are those investments worth? Quests have great quality with nearly no-profit price and who uses it. Their Horizon platform that even employees hate.
lnxg33k1 3y ago
Everyone is building something, also Tesla is building FSD, I am not sure why journalists decide to give up their profession’s dignity and become CEOs extended PR department Im building a planet
- glitchc 3y ago
  I'm building FUD.
  - lnxg33k1 3y ago
    Oh yeah that me too
bawolff 3y ago
Lol, ok. Are they also working on world peace?
- UcMISandDisinfo 3y ago
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nerdix 3y ago
Not gonna lie. Can't wait to run local AGI. First thing I'm going to task it with is producing paperclips.
mkaic 3y ago
Article is a bit of a nothingburger, here's the quote in question from Zuck's Instagram: "Some updates on our AI efforts. Our long term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit. We're bringing our two major AI research efforts (FAIR and GenAI) closer together to support this. We're currently training our next-gen model Llama 3, and we're building massive compute infrastructure to support our future roadmap, including 350k H100s by the end of this year -- and overall almost 600k H100s equivalents of compute if you include other GPUs."
tech_ken 3y ago
I feel like this is a subtle attempt to move the goalposts on what is meant by AGI. Regardless of whether the final product is truly an AGI (and I'm guessing it won't be) my guess is that it will be branded as such.
lofatdairy 3y ago
Say what you want about Facebook, the size of their dataset and computational resources definitely make them competitive, and their data science and ML teams have been always top notch. I think the Verge is missing the mark with the headline and general focus of the article. "Building AGI" is whatever, like half the companies with enough GPUs are claiming that and AGI is like more poorly-defined than "metaverse". The more interesting point seems to be this general incoherence with building chatbots and trying to run a social media company. >Meta is still a metaverse company. It’s the biggest social media company in the world. It’s now trying to build AGI. Zuckerberg frames all this around the overarching mission of “building the future of connection.” This is such "Verge" writing. I'm by no means bearish on VR, but that whole passage is so unreflective and uncritical it's almost a satire of journalistic fluff. Chatbots that fill social media with greater and greater amounts of garbage content is just a nightmare. Bot content is already one of the reasons people are retreating into groupchats. The blurring of AI and human interaction leads to accountability problems. Hell, Snapchat and Discord basically already tried this to enormous backlash. The fact that this is entirely antagonistic with "building the future of connection" goes essentially unacknowledged. There is something interesting with the fact that Facebook is more open to open-source, this is fairly credible actually given the quality and quantity of the company's open-source contributions. But I genuinely think LLMs are most useful as an applied technology, and the applications listed here are frankly uninspiring.
- maaaaattttt 3y ago
  Saying they make it “open source” in the same article where they say they need “350k high end GPUs to build it”. Is the equivalent of saying: ”we offer free nuclear submarine driving lessons”. I know you don’t need as many resources for inference as for training. But still…
  - weeblewobble 3y ago
    What do you mean “but still…”? It’s a pretty important distinction. Meta does indeed use their massive GPU farms to train models and then release the weights for free and people indeed run inference on prosumer hardware
cheschire 3y ago
That's such a crazy scale to consider that it makes me wonder how easy it is to maintain control over that many cards, and how easy it would be for someone at a company of this scale to become a purchasing tunnel to countries with sanctions.
- adventured 3y ago
  They'd notice a couple thousand of these if they were to vanish or never arrive. Anything less is fairly meaningless for major economies. China for example needs epic scale numbers of GPUs to power its economy going forward. The equivalent of many millions of H100s for a $20 trillion economy looking to advance rapidly. Given the restricted production globally (Nvidia production bottleneck, with only a few places on earth that can produce something like this), until China can produce their own very high-end GPUs their economy is going to be held back by the lack of capacity. Tens of thousands of high-end GPUs slipping through isn't going to cut it, that simply doesn't matter very much. You can prevent China from getting a million H100s. You can't prevent them from getting ten thousand of them from many different sources over time.
deleted 3y ago
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oldpersonintx 3y ago
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sublinear 3y ago
Can someone provide insight into why there's so much insistence from business that magic happens at scale with LLMs? We're a long way from AGI. The lack of meaningful details in these announcements makes me pessimistic.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  How do you know how long away we are?
  - digging 3y ago
    I imagine you don't expect a serious answer to that anyway, but to be clear: anyone talking about AI timelines seriously would not be expressing so much certainty because it's not possible to know AI timelines with certainty right now.
- skepticATX 3y ago
  I don’t think that’s Meta’s viewpoint, considering FAIR is run by Yann LeCun who has been quite vocal about the limitations of what we currently have.
- two_in_one 3y ago
  > why there's so much insistence from business that magic happens at scale with LLMs It's already happening. See latest Google layoffs. They are automating a lot of things. Most people don't realize it, but the change is going to be dramatic. > We're a long way from AGI This is a big question, what is AGI? LLMs are quite generic and 'intelligent'. Not human-like, but. Next is going to be incremental evolution. Till we find other, non-verbal, ways of 'thinking' and put them together. That's going to be a breakthrough. Interesting, terminator-like embodiment isn't a requirement for AGI, nor is stable 'personality'.
  - x86x87 3y ago
    Boy, we must have a totally different understanding of whay AGI is. Intelligence is not about parroting an answer you've seen before. It's about using your environment to gain an evolutionary advantage.
MichaelRo 3y ago
Fingers crossed it's another attempt along the "We're building the Metaverse and it's gonna be awesome and a great success because everyone is into VR now and it's not an overhyped fad like all the others before until some other crap replaces it". Facebook spent $36 billion on Metaverse, let's hope it spends double on AI and changes it's name to Aimmerse before that other crap makes it obsolete.
haunter 3y ago
Can't wait to not be able to buy an RTX 5080 next year. Crypto then AI, surely there will be a third thing coming too
- samspenc 3y ago
  I'm hoping that NVidia doesn't give up on the consumer market and keeps producing low cost (and by that I mean $500-1500) GPUs that we can use for hobbyist AI / ML / LLM. Right now, only the 3090 and 4090 have enough VRAM (24 GB) among the consumer models to make them worthwhile for most LLM work. I'm hoping the 50 series (5090?) has more VRAM and stays affordable - though I'm not holding my breath either.
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AndrewKemendo 3y ago
My money has been on Meta for AGI since they started training people to label data for them (tag your friends!) Between all their properties they have more instrumentation on humans, collecting human behavior trajectories and state action pairs transfer learning and inverse RL than anyone - and it’s not even a close second Specifically and critically I think they likely have the largest egocentric multimodal labeled dataset collection platform from their meta quest and ray ban glasses products Apple is the only group that will likely beat them to egocentric data collection at scale but I expect Meta to catch up quickly once people are used to it socially
- lolsal 3y ago
  I have always felt Ebay dropped the ball on this with untold amounts of custom, varying quality photos with tons of metadata added by users. Presumably they are working on using this, but I haven't seen anything from them for it.
  - mista2nith 3y ago
    [dead]
  - generalizations 3y ago
    I would assume that stuff can be scraped though. How much would it cost to set up a bot farm that scrapes ebay live?
  - s0rce 3y ago
    Same with Amazon and Aliexpress and Facebook marketplace.
  - ganeshkrishnan 3y ago
    They (we) were working on that more than 15 years ago with mallet library. Unfortunately some of the drawbacks of public companies are they too focused on the current quarter and all effort is towards increasing EPS
- karaterobot 3y ago
asgsdfg43rg 3y ago
[flagged]
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
  AI will power the metaverse, it was the missing piece.
  - Minor49er 3y ago
    I thought the missing piece was the userbase
    - asadawadia 3y ago
      lol dude
- jassyr 3y ago
  When I was younger I was naive to think these business leaders were some types of geniuses. Turns out every one of them is just jumping from one hype to the next, hoping something sticks. If it doesn't, write it off. If it hits, they're a genius.
  - nicup12345689 3y ago
    That's a lot of what I've seen the upper class be. Take a lot of bets, you need one to hit VS play it safe... And it even pans out in generations. The scion of the Tang family (as in MIT Tang hall) sent half his kids to business, half to politics, figuring out on average it would turn out ok (it did)
    - jassyr 3y ago
      I went down a very deep rabbit hole looking into the Tang clan/dynasty. So interesting.
- amelius 3y ago
  If I were Zuck, I'd be building a new phone + OS.
hackernoteng 3y ago
Why open source it? Just another virtue signal while their real motivation is something more sinister? They are a for-profit publicly owned company. Are investors happy about spending billions to open-source it?
- andy99 3y ago
  a, they're not really open sourcing it, they're releasing it under a license that says you can use it for what they say. So it's marketing mostly, both external and internal to try and appease the "AI ethics" crowd. And honestly, b, their strategy is incoherent anyway. It's a tech company with too much money and no acute market pressure hoping to find something that sticks.
  - prewett 3y ago
    Traditionally a company with too much money returns it to the shareholders as dividends, but that seems to be passé...
    - deleted 3y ago
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- nwoli 3y ago
  Probably partially to reduce momentum in profit extraction from competitors
- hiddencost 3y ago
  He's lying because he's so far behind.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  I think their investors should be happy about it. Once more open source models are released, a lot of ai companies will be freed to focus on other things, thus increasing the overall economy.
- kelnos 3y ago
ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
I love facebook. I hate other big tech companies. Facebook has done far more for software than any other company in the last 15 years. They: 1. Pushed salaries up across the board. Many people are not aware, but facebook was a major driver behind the 500k+ senior engineering pay. 2. Released major open source software: PyTorch, React, GraphQL, React Native. They basically invented modern web development. Facebook is basically the only game in town when it comes to open source. Whatsmore, Mark Zuckerberg should be more widely applauded. I know his open source ai strategy has capitalist roots, but its still great for the world.
- colordrops 3y ago
  Netflix is similar along these fronts.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  I think it's fine to applaud their pro open source behavior, while still being critical of the ill they've released upon society. Cambridge Analytica and spreading mob violence in some countries come to mind.
- vermilingua 3y ago
  > They forced the whole industry to pay up. And now we have industry-wide layoffs and a massive cooling of the job market. > They basically invented modern web development. Which is essentially a non-stop carosel that encourages cargo-culting and factory-farming of interns from boot camps.
  - ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
    So what, you would have preferred low pay all of these years?And you think React wasnt an improvement? Its been out for a decade now, the trope that javascript frameworks churn alot is not true anymore
    - kelnos 3y ago
      I personally benefited from the high pay, but I don't know if we can definitively say that the average developer is coming out of this better, after all the layoffs and belt-tightening.
victorbstan 3y ago
They certainly have a large stockpile of the cringiest boomer dataset on the planet, rivaled only by LinkedIn. Soon the AI loop will generate the largest neuron deactivation loop in human history.
Animats 3y ago
Remember "Facebook: It's free and always will be"?
homefree 3y ago
The actual quote: > "Our long term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit." "responsibly" is a pretty important word there that the hn title leaves out. I'm not really sure how that would be possible with a true general intelligence give the alignment problem - it's not really clear to me there's any responsible way to build a true general intelligence with that issue unsolved. For those that haven't watched his video interview, it's really great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aCg7jH4S1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aCg7jH4S1w - I highly recommend it to see how AI makes the low-fidelity stuff powerful (AR raybans) while the high fidelity stuff (VR) continues to improve. I think it makes sense strategically for Meta to pursue the open version with licensing they control, the leak of llama was advantageous to them. If they have the dominant open model they're well positioned if the 'nobody has a moat' analysis is actually true. Not too dissimilar from their open compute server stuff, a bit of commoditizing your complement. If you have the data then the model itself is the complement?
- konschubert 3y ago
  I am a general intelligence, with the knowledge of the internet at my fingertips, and I am not particularly dangerous.
  - avidphantasm 3y ago
    It all depends on the number and nature of sensors and actuators the AGI has access to…
  - blowski 3y ago
    There are many other “general intelligences” walking the planet who _are_ extremely dangerous. So it doesn’t need all AGIs to be dangerous for this to be a significant problem, just one is enough.
    - godelski 3y ago
      Idk, we have guns, knives, and fucking nuclear weapons. Humans are pretty dangerous. Very few creatures have weapons other than the ones god gave them. I'm not sure why all the responses here are just accepting of the claim when humans literally took control of an entire planet and routinely kill creatures that were designed to kill, with knives built into them. If you're not dangerous, it's because (thank god) you choose not to be.
hammyhavoc 3y ago
As a show of good faith, they should open up Messenger to support interoperable open standards without needing to use various self-hosted bridges on the likes of Matrix.
- bertil 3y ago
  I spend a lot of my life very much hoping for things like that, but I’m increasingly wondering how not having a central server makes it impossible to be interoperable, successful, and spam-proof. Having “AGI” —or at least a very convincing conversation agent— isn’t helping much.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    Spam is an inevitability on any system. Matrix gets spam, Facebook Messenger gets spam, email gets spam. Where there's people, there's always going to be spam. I even get spam on Xbox Live messages, beginning years ago! Another idea that interests me is whitelist-prioritized communications for stuff like IM, and phone calls from the PSTN. If someone isn't in my address book, they shouldn't be able to get through as easily (not saying block them completely, that sounds like a disaster). It's funny, so much hype and emphasis on things like AGI and crypto, but the problems we should solve first and foremost aren't anywhere near as sexy or lucrative. Profitable shareholder driven biz are usually by their very nature never going to chase these types of problems.
    - dnissley 3y ago
      Aside from when someone I'm friends with gets their account hacked I don't think I've ever experienced spam through messenger
      - hammyhavoc 3y ago
        Not infrequently, you'll get messages that then end up disappearing because enough people report the account. Also, there's your primary/general "inbox" for Messenger, and then there's "other" where people you "probably" don't know usually end up (that's an algorithmic "probably"). Not-so-interesting anecdote, but the missus was orphaned in the early '00s, but didn't realize she'd had blood relatives trying to contact her through Facebook since the late '00s until about 2015 due to the "other" non-primary inbox on Messenger that she couldn't access via the app, and only via the website (quirk of the phone she was using for several years as I don't think it was Android-based).
bertil 3y ago
I don’t think this announcement will make any of the relevant debates (on the impact of Meta on the world, or the fears around AI, or the confusion on whether sharing a trained model qualifies as “open source”) any less frustratingly controversial and heated.
dboreham 3y ago
...but not the training data.
tdeck 3y ago
How's their last long term vision going - you know, the one they renamed the company after?
- voisin 3y ago
  In his defence, unforeseen new shiny objects have since emerged for Zuck to chase.
lwhi 3y ago
I think his mid-term vision should be to source a better microphone.
opportune 3y ago
Isn’t it obvious to anybody paying attention what their actual strategy is? They know they probably won’t “win” a commercial AI race vs OpenAI or Google, and presuming some other company does win the commercial AI market with closed source tech, they may be forced into a multitude of bad outcomes: 1. having to pay out the nose for licensing/SAAS of the winning tech vs shipping a noticeably worse second rate in-house product 2. Struggling to compete with the winning company for hiring, assuming the winning company makes a ton of money at high margins and can outbid Meta. 3. Having to continue building “applications” products on other companies’ platforms, something Zuck has repeatedly noted as a problem and is a major motivation for their investments in VE. Also, they’d have a hard time commercializing the current iteration of AI products given their current products and business relations anyway. Even if they “won” in terms of superior tech they’d be in one of the worst starting positions for actually making money off it, given their lack of enterprise SAAS business customers, the potential negative impact on existing product lines in consumers’ hands, (what I expect to be) advertisers’ relative indifference to genAI, and being generally considered less trustworthy than most other big tech companies and so less able to pivot to enterprise software. So for them the strategy that makes the most sense is to open source really good, but not cutting edge, AI for others to build on top of it. It probably costs a lot less to play permanent catch up because they can let others make the big investments in speculative research and don’t have to pay for the absolute top experts. Then by open sourcing it they make it harder for OpenAI and Google to commercialize their offerings at high costs, as many companies will build off Meta’s tech for more control, and what customers they do get will be constantly deciding if what they’re paying for is worth a slightly-worse but cheaper open source alternative. This also allows Meta to more easily influence the AI applications space despite having less capable models, and make it easier for 3P commercializations to take off rather than ceding everything to OpenAI/Google potentially going all in on 1P, which would be greatly beneficial if Meta ever were to own a platform that benefits from GenAI (cough cough the metaverse). It’s smart but transparently obvious because like, it’s Meta lol, they don’t spend this kind of money out of the goodness of their hearts.
- erostrate 3y ago
  This is the strategy famously identified as "commoditize your complement" by Joel Spolsky 22 years ago.
hereme888 3y ago
I don't see how Zuck/Meta could create an AGI that is not VERY left-wing biased relative to the beliefs of most of the world's population.
amateuring 3y ago
[flagged]
idlewords 3y ago
Whatever happened to replacing the US dollar, or creating a metaverse, or curing disease in his children's lifetime? The guy has all the focus of a disco ball.
- blitzar 3y ago
  > Now, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is entering the race. If this goes the same way as when Zuck entered the race to replace the US dollar, create a metaverse or cure disease, Ai will be dead in the next 2 years.
  - jlarocco 3y ago
    We can hope.
  - randycupertino 3y ago
    > or cure disease My old office was in the same building as Chan-Zuckerberg HQ hq and all the scientists I worked with rolled their eyes at their completely over the top mission statement to "cure all disease within our lifetimes." Cure ALL disease? Really?? Maybe pick one and try hard to eradicate it. But *all* disease?! All of it? Geeze. Also one of their top scientists exposed himself taking his junk out of his pants and tried to feel up my coworker at STEM restaurant in the middle of the restaurant during happy hour. So overall they seemed like poor decision making reckless arrogant clowns.
    - tim333 3y ago
      Zuck seems a bit more modest on the goal https://youtu.be/1Wo6SqLNmLk?t=580 https://youtu.be/1Wo6SqLNmLk?t=580
  - rldjbpin 3y ago
    unsure about the medical initiative, but most of these endeavours have had some tangible benefits for the overall field. he is in a rare position to throw money in all of these fields without worrying about the ROI. so i will not throw too much criticism his way. but yes the ai bubble is real, but sadly we don't get to short on it this time.
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
Rebuff5007 3y ago
Really feels like facebook doesnt even try to have a strategy or mission statement any more. Even as someone who is bearish on AI, i get why it is an important part of Google and Microsoft's product offerings. What in the world does a fancy chatbot have to do with building a social network?
- edgyquant 3y ago
  That you equate AGI with “chatbot” shows OpenAIs marketing has been successful. That doesn’t mean the two are one in the same or that a chatbot is the actual path there.
cheschire 3y ago
If only he had set this goal a year ago, maybe John Carmack wouldn't have quit to work on AGI. https://fortune.com/2022/12/17/john-carmack-leaves-meta-as-investors-doubt-metaverse-push-by-mark-zuckerberg/ https://fortune.com/2022/12/17/john-carmack-leaves-meta-as-i...
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  Carmack seemed to really despise their culture too.
  - phyrex 3y ago
    Source?
    - ShamelessC 3y ago
      https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0iPixEvPJQGzNa6t2x6HUL5TYqfmKGqSgfkBg6QaTyHF5frXQi7eLGxC7uPQv5U5jl&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0iPix... > ...We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say “Half? Ha! I’m at quarter efficiency!” It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover...
- edgyquant 3y ago
  More likely Carmack left because meta stopped pushing hard for the metaverse as their future and the lawsuit involving him left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. Not sure why we’d take his declaration of building AGI seriously when he isn’t an AI researcher but a video game programmer.
jrsj 3y ago
its too bad Alamos Gold already has the AGI stock ticker symbol or they might be able to get rid of the whole META thing
JTbane 3y ago
Is it even possible to build an AGI with our current computing paradigms? So far our most advanced neural networks are purpose-built for a task (i.e. ChatGPT for text communication, Dall-E for images).
- swagmoney1606 3y ago
  I worry that we're getting close. I don't think our society is built for it.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    What is our society built for ? Climate change ? Social media? War? Covid ? Your sentiment isn’t lost on me but there isn’t much evidence the future need be a catastrophe either. I personally think society isn’t going in a great direction, maybe more intelligent systems will help us.
    - prewett 3y ago
      The problem with society is that people are willing to sacrifice the good of others in order to gain something for themselves. They also tend to lie to themselves and/or are oblivious to it. The problem is within us; better intelligence will just let us do it with more sophistication, or perhaps on a larger scale. One of the main force within society pushing against having all our arrows point inwards is religion, which these days isn't even in consideration for membership in the set of useful things.
      - ChatGTP 3y ago
        I personally think that more intelligence might make the need for personal gratification go away. I mean, to start with the ideas is that humans will be completely and utterly redundant, the AI will be better than us at everything, what happens to the ego in this situation? What happens if the cost of things is reduced to next to nothing due to efficiency gains from super intelligent systems?
pokstad 3y ago
His companies drive people to depression to sell ads. How is achieving AGI aligned with that business?
shsbdncudx 3y ago
“responsible agi” is a bit of an oxymoron imho. It’s like giving birth to a human, you can prepare it, train it, guide it, and tell it what not to do, but eventually that human becomes entirely accountable for their own actions
- esafak 3y ago
  Not if that human is congenitally psychopathic. That is the situation we are trying to avoid.
UcMISandDisinfo 3y ago
[dead]
LZ_Khan 3y ago
Over/under on days before he renames the company to "Singularity?"
cityzen 3y ago
“We are changing our name to Arti”
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ericra 3y ago
They really are attempting to dilute the term "open source" until it loses all meaning. You can already see it with nearly every LLM license that claims to be open source but is nothing close to how that term is commonly understood. While it's true that Facebook creates some valuable "true" open source projects (like React), I anticipate seeing a lot more complicated (and restrictive) open source licensing from them and other big tech for upcoming projects.
- juunpp 3y ago
  Just look at how "open source" the quoted Llama 2 in the article is: https://ai.meta.com/resources/models-and-libraries/llama-downloads/ https://ai.meta.com/resources/models-and-libraries/llama-dow...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gmerc 3y ago
Investor Narrative, Not Goal.
juunpp 3y ago
[flagged]
cdf 3y ago
Bigco creates a VR/AR/Metaverse seemingly for entertainment but really is gathering data of the "guests", esp how they will behave when they think nobody is watching and/or judging, and in time, uses the data for nefarious purposes... I think I have seen this show before...
- notavalleyman 3y ago
  Doesn't look like anything to me
vietvu 3y ago
So he will change the company from Meta to AI? Since the company shifted from metaverse to AI.
kgbcia 3y ago
Metaverse got boring quick
chriszeoli_NY 3y ago
Wrote more about this here: https://www.datagravity.dev/p/metas-ai-initiatives-20b-of-investment https://www.datagravity.dev/p/metas-ai-initiatives-20b-of-in...
chriszeoli_NY 3y ago
[dupe]
robotburrito 3y ago
I wonder if he will end up bringing Carmack back?
tristanb 3y ago
So has he finally admitted the floating torsos with no legs was a bit of a silly bet?
sidcool 3y ago
Is he renaming the company again?
pipeline_peak 3y ago
Mark Bandwagon Zuckerberg
cultofmetatron 3y ago
I for one look forward to the vr os that comes out when the "android" of vr steps up to what the apple vision is going to bring. meta is currently the top here but they have focussed mostly on the game experience. can't wait to see AR as a legitimate productivity tool. I'm sure general AI will play a role here of course
throwthrow5643 3y ago
Hopefully he does better at this than Chinese.
gloosx 3y ago
Mark is always about one year late to the party. Funny that he always stays confident that it will just work like facebook did ;)
amai 3y ago
So he dropped his old goal of creating Metaverse? Seems like we are going from Metaverse to Metaintelligence now.

209 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

[flagged]

> Mark Zuckerberg’s new goal is creating artificial general intelligence So...what happened to that whole "Metaverse" thing? Is it time to rename the company again?

threeseed 3y ago
Meta's AR/VR strategy is still the over-arching priority and given how well Quest 3 and Ray Bans glasses are doing shows that it is likely the right one. Especially once Apple Vision Pro ignites the industry. AI will be used to enhance that e.g. generated avatars, autonomous agents, hand/body tracking etc.
- aabhay 3y ago
  How well are the Ray Bans doing? I’ve never heard anyone talk about them nor seen anyone wearing them.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    Surprisingly well. Strong adoption by the younger TikTok generation which is an area that Meta has been desperate to bring back into their fold. Also the product is pretty impressive. The camera quality is really good and the AI features genuinely useful. Definitely caused many in the industry to wonder if that form factor could be the future of the AR industry in the short term as well as the long term.
    - aabhay 3y ago
      Doesn’t seem to be the case —- https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/3/23818462/meta-ray-ban-stories-smart-glasses-retention-reality-labs https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/3/23818462/meta-ray-ban-stor... Less than 10% retention after two years.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > Especially once Apple Vision Pro ignites the industry. I may be repeating my own errors with the following as I said much the same for the iPhone and the Apple Watch when they were new, but… The prices Apple are asking for seem excessive given what the products actually do, surely the cheaper alternatives are going to be what really matters? (In this case, cheaper alternatives would include the Meta headsets).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - hindsightbias 3y ago
    Cheaper than an 8K OLED. Watched a guy spend $6K on iPads for his kids like it was a stocking stuffer. Took 15 minutes as he had to call the wife on if 1TB was enough. Felt bad I was just buying an Air so wandered to let the sales kid work him. Kid said it was an overage day.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Mmm. You've just reminded me how weird I am with money. Back in 2000-ish, a summer holiday job I was doing for an hourly pay of… I can't remember exactly, but perhaps the equivalent of £10k/year for the full-timers… one of my coworkers said he'd bought a plasma TV for his 1- or 2-year old son. Those things were considered expensive luxuries back then. I guess people like him are the norm.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  > Especially once Apple Vision Pro ignites the industry. Ah, yes, the inevitability of Apple success. Just as everyone switched from cell phones to PDAs after 1993.
  - blackoil 3y ago
    Wow, you must go back 30 years to find a failure. That's hugely impressive. If we squint enough we can add FireWire to that.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      There's a train of Apple misses. Hindsight is success after success, because we only remember the successful and final versions of products. Generally, they get it right a lot of the time. More than others! But argumentum ad Apple to convince of the inevitability of technological shifts is insane.
pelagicAustral 3y ago
Man, the Metaverse... what a fad. I almost can't even believe that WAS a thing. We had Habbo, and then we had Second Life, and NOW!!!!!!.... * deafening silence *
- rvnx 3y ago
  VR is a gadget, the same way that 4D cinemas are gadget. Ok it's +/- fun the first time to receive water droplets in your face while watching a movie, or for the cinema to spread fake fart smell, but this is not the experience you want to have every day. Apparently only a single-digit % of people who purchased AR headsets are using them once in a month (source: Valve developer Chet Faliszek)
  - nomel 3y ago
    In my opinion, HMD are clearly the future of display tech. VR is something you get for free, with an HMD.
    - rvnx 3y ago
      A (dystopian) future is more likely the Neuralink injecting visual signals or thoughts. Even an ultra-light HMD gives the Glasshole feeling, besides not being comfortable to wear.
      - nomel 3y ago
        > Even an ultra-light HMD gives the Glasshole feeling, besides not being comfortable to wear. Which have you had experience with? And, do you believe whatever you wore was as good as it gets?
  - theshackleford 3y ago
    > but this is not the experience you want to have every day. It’s been the experience I’ve been having every day since the original oculus devkit. I’ve rarely touched a flatscreen title since. Eventually I hope they’ll become good enough to work in when I travel. edit In saying that, i've always maintained its not ready for normies yet, and that we were probably a good decade or two away from the point where its going to be in a format/design that the mass market would accept/have interest in. In fact in many cases, I still actively reccomend against purchase because I know it's still kinda incuating along.
slowmovintarget 3y ago
How would one manage a fully connected VR-scape without AGI?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ivanmontillam 3y ago
It is that time. First it will be "Meta AI" and then the "Meta" will be long gone. I'm gonna get downvoted for this comment because this is not Reddit, but I had to say it.

the_cat_kittles 3y ago

so far hees made nothing but viral spyware but its all about to change!

nwiswell 3y ago
You're right, of course, but also Bill Gates was a cartoon capitalist villain for decades and then suddenly he started saving millions of kids in the third world. Maybe Mark will have a similar moment of redemption, who knows.

sokoloff 3y ago

HN title seems editorialized as compared to the article title ("Meta’s new goal is to build artificial general intelligence" or the article headline is similar but with Mark Zuckerberg as the subject.) The HN submitted title ("Meta will have a stockpile of almost 600k GPUs by the end of 2024") is one specific sentence in the article.

pixl97 3y ago
Is the headline stable, I see it pretty common for articles to sample multiple headlines until one gains traction.

tikkun 3y ago

> He tells me that, by the end of this year, Meta will own more than 340,000 of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs That's approx $15b worth of H100 GPUs.

cleverwebble 3y ago
You are assuming they are paying retail price, which they certainly are not.
- JoshTko 3y ago
  Given the demand why wouldn't Nvidia be able to charge sticker price?
  - bilekas 3y ago
    You can afford to take a hit off your profits when you can simply ramp up production for retail sales. Looks great too for shareholders.
    - KeplerBoy 3y ago
      They can't just ramp up production though. Isn't TSMC booked for years by them, Apple, Intel and AMD?
      - doctorpangloss 3y ago
        Nobody really knows. It certainly suits them for everyone to believe there is some secular reason, some supply crunch, it even suits AMD and Intel. Presumably all the chip supply issues regarding autos have been resolved, and yet prices have risen 30% in a decade, and there’s no reversal.
        blackoil 3y ago
        We know OpenAI and Azure was struggling to get enough GPU. That was implied not just by their words but also by action. And considering these two companies are most aggressive and making most money out of this AI. If GPUs are available they would have been able to buy it.

__loam 3y ago

I wonder how many of those chips were acquired to run metaverse stuff. Should be lots of overlap between rendering graphics and running cuda based models. I'm interested in seeing how the behemoths that are Meta and Google catch openai. I think it's a question of when, not if. Both companies just have a ridiculous amount of resources to throw behind these efforts. At least meta is releasing their stuff as "open source". We'll see how they justify putting out these models for free, or if it's purely about undercutting openai.

rvnx 3y ago
Almost no overlap: this metaverse thing just needs classical CPU servers (and not a lot of them considering the minimal user activity there). For now Google is still late to the party (full proprietary, and nobody has seen the supposedly good model called Ultra, only an average one called Pro), and Meta is actually the company that has pushed the field forward for all companies (with LLaMA).
- threeseed 3y ago
  > this metaverse thing just needs classical CPU servers The idea is that the metaverse will be filled with AI avatars.
- FartyMcFarter 3y ago
  > Meta is actually the company that has pushed the field forward for all companies (with LLaMA). This is the first time I'm hearing this, unless you mean the fact that it leaked to the public. How was LLaMa pushing the field forward otherwise?
- InCityDreams 3y ago
  >the supposedly good model called Ultra, Good (as written), or God (at first glance)?

bugglebeetle 3y ago

I’m more bullish on Meta’s AI efforts than OpenAI’s at this point. Everything open source can flow back into what they’re doing, whereas OpenAI seems focused on staying locked down, while diluting their core product in myriad ways.

jstummbillig 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

say_it_as_it_is 3y ago

OpenAI got all of the positive publicity for its social mission yet in short time we clearly see that Meta has done more for democratizing access to deep learning and will continue to lead on this front. The cost of open sourcing models is far more than just development cost. They're spending millions of dollars training models with that fleet of H100s. This makes open source AI much more costly, and generous.

bugglebeetle 3y ago
As Meta has always done. Their contributions to open source ML have always been above and beyond everyone else and they have one of the absolute best teams in the industry.

aluminum96 3y ago

Brace yourselves. The scale of capital investment coming from Meta, Google, and OpenAI/Microsoft is going to be historically mind-boggling.

igravious 3y ago
Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), OpenAI (Microsoft) Microsoft name change incoming?

basiccalendar74 3y ago

mostly because Meta did not develop a custom AI chip, like Google.

formerly_proven 3y ago

A stockpile of rapidly depreciating assets bought at eye-watering margins is an unusual brag for any company, no?

nomel 3y ago
From a naive perspective, it seems that true research/advances in AI (methods of training, etc) aren't necessarily related to model size. It seems that the goal of "building a big model that everyone else converges to because the training data is the same" doesn't have all that much value, especially since you could wait a couple years, do it all for a fraction of the price, and catch up immediately. Meta doesn't have an AI product yet, so it's not like they would be loosing money. I suspect this is more about talent attraction/retention.
dist-epoch 3y ago
CPUs are rapidly depreciating, hard drives are rapidly depreciating, SSDs are doubly rapidly depreciating, with this logic no hardware buy would make sense.
- formerly_proven 3y ago
  Computer hardware has always been rapidly depreciating. You'd always get much more (performance/capability) for the same money just a few months to 1-2 years down the road. GPUs have been a complete outlier in this area for around ~8 years, and even they depreciate relatively quickly still.
crotchfire 3y ago
I am going to be buying these by the truckload on ebay three years from now. The current generation of GPUs is definitely going to have a long usable lifetime. Manufacturers finally have HBM totally figured out and yielding/aging well. Today's GPUs are the analog of the 28nm logic node -- it was the sweet spot for an absurdly long time. There will be something faster/lower-power 2-3 years from now that will cause the BigCos to cycle their fleet, but it won't be anywhere near the VRAM/MemBandwidth boost we have today compared to 2-3 years ago. Their data centers are power-constrained, so they'll upgrade regardless, and the rest of us will feast on the windfall. Don't ninja-bid on my auctions.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

Hopefully Llama 3 and Llama 4 open models will be released soon. For all of Meta’s faults, release powerful LLMs that users can run and modify on their own systems is a huge benefit to keeping AI from being entirely locked away and heavily censored by big corporations.

zozbot234 3y ago

Yes but can they run Crysis?

rvnx 3y ago
Yes https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-h100-benchmarkedin-games https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-h100-benchmarkedin-...

dbtc 3y ago

For the good of humanity no doubt.

cs702 3y ago

...rendering every competitor's massive investments worthless. Zuckerberg's thinking must be that Meta's competitors are more susceptible to disruption by broadly accessible AGI, and that if everyone has access to state-of-the-art AGI, then no one will be able to gain a new kind of competitive advantage from it.

manojlds 3y ago
Like in the dystopian Ready Player One, humans move to the VR world and who has the biggest investments in VR as of now?
- poisonborz 3y ago
  And what are those investments worth? Quests have great quality with nearly no-profit price and who uses it. Their Horizon platform that even employees hate.

lnxg33k1 3y ago

Everyone is building something, also Tesla is building FSD, I am not sure why journalists decide to give up their profession’s dignity and become CEOs extended PR department Im building a planet

glitchc 3y ago
I'm building FUD.
- lnxg33k1 3y ago
  Oh yeah that me too

bawolff 3y ago

Lol, ok. Are they also working on world peace?

UcMISandDisinfo 3y ago
[dead]

nerdix 3y ago

Not gonna lie. Can't wait to run local AGI. First thing I'm going to task it with is producing paperclips.

mkaic 3y ago

Article is a bit of a nothingburger, here's the quote in question from Zuck's Instagram: "Some updates on our AI efforts. Our long term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit. We're bringing our two major AI research efforts (FAIR and GenAI) closer together to support this. We're currently training our next-gen model Llama 3, and we're building massive compute infrastructure to support our future roadmap, including 350k H100s by the end of this year -- and overall almost 600k H100s equivalents of compute if you include other GPUs."

tech_ken 3y ago

I feel like this is a subtle attempt to move the goalposts on what is meant by AGI. Regardless of whether the final product is truly an AGI (and I'm guessing it won't be) my guess is that it will be branded as such.

lofatdairy 3y ago

Say what you want about Facebook, the size of their dataset and computational resources definitely make them competitive, and their data science and ML teams have been always top notch. I think the Verge is missing the mark with the headline and general focus of the article. "Building AGI" is whatever, like half the companies with enough GPUs are claiming that and AGI is like more poorly-defined than "metaverse". The more interesting point seems to be this general incoherence with building chatbots and trying to run a social media company. >Meta is still a metaverse company. It’s the biggest social media company in the world. It’s now trying to build AGI. Zuckerberg frames all this around the overarching mission of “building the future of connection.” This is such "Verge" writing. I'm by no means bearish on VR, but that whole passage is so unreflective and uncritical it's almost a satire of journalistic fluff. Chatbots that fill social media with greater and greater amounts of garbage content is just a nightmare. Bot content is already one of the reasons people are retreating into groupchats. The blurring of AI and human interaction leads to accountability problems. Hell, Snapchat and Discord basically already tried this to enormous backlash. The fact that this is entirely antagonistic with "building the future of connection" goes essentially unacknowledged. There is something interesting with the fact that Facebook is more open to open-source, this is fairly credible actually given the quality and quantity of the company's open-source contributions. But I genuinely think LLMs are most useful as an applied technology, and the applications listed here are frankly uninspiring.

maaaaattttt 3y ago
Saying they make it “open source” in the same article where they say they need “350k high end GPUs to build it”. Is the equivalent of saying: ”we offer free nuclear submarine driving lessons”. I know you don’t need as many resources for inference as for training. But still…
- weeblewobble 3y ago
  What do you mean “but still…”? It’s a pretty important distinction. Meta does indeed use their massive GPU farms to train models and then release the weights for free and people indeed run inference on prosumer hardware

cheschire 3y ago

That's such a crazy scale to consider that it makes me wonder how easy it is to maintain control over that many cards, and how easy it would be for someone at a company of this scale to become a purchasing tunnel to countries with sanctions.

adventured 3y ago
They'd notice a couple thousand of these if they were to vanish or never arrive. Anything less is fairly meaningless for major economies. China for example needs epic scale numbers of GPUs to power its economy going forward. The equivalent of many millions of H100s for a $20 trillion economy looking to advance rapidly. Given the restricted production globally (Nvidia production bottleneck, with only a few places on earth that can produce something like this), until China can produce their own very high-end GPUs their economy is going to be held back by the lack of capacity. Tens of thousands of high-end GPUs slipping through isn't going to cut it, that simply doesn't matter very much. You can prevent China from getting a million H100s. You can't prevent them from getting ten thousand of them from many different sources over time.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

oldpersonintx 3y ago

[dead]

sublinear 3y ago

Can someone provide insight into why there's so much insistence from business that magic happens at scale with LLMs? We're a long way from AGI. The lack of meaningful details in these announcements makes me pessimistic.

mewpmewp2 3y ago
How do you know how long away we are?
- digging 3y ago
  I imagine you don't expect a serious answer to that anyway, but to be clear: anyone talking about AI timelines seriously would not be expressing so much certainty because it's not possible to know AI timelines with certainty right now.
skepticATX 3y ago
I don’t think that’s Meta’s viewpoint, considering FAIR is run by Yann LeCun who has been quite vocal about the limitations of what we currently have.
two_in_one 3y ago
> why there's so much insistence from business that magic happens at scale with LLMs It's already happening. See latest Google layoffs. They are automating a lot of things. Most people don't realize it, but the change is going to be dramatic. > We're a long way from AGI This is a big question, what is AGI? LLMs are quite generic and 'intelligent'. Not human-like, but. Next is going to be incremental evolution. Till we find other, non-verbal, ways of 'thinking' and put them together. That's going to be a breakthrough. Interesting, terminator-like embodiment isn't a requirement for AGI, nor is stable 'personality'.
- x86x87 3y ago
  Boy, we must have a totally different understanding of whay AGI is. Intelligence is not about parroting an answer you've seen before. It's about using your environment to gain an evolutionary advantage.

MichaelRo 3y ago

Fingers crossed it's another attempt along the "We're building the Metaverse and it's gonna be awesome and a great success because everyone is into VR now and it's not an overhyped fad like all the others before until some other crap replaces it". Facebook spent $36 billion on Metaverse, let's hope it spends double on AI and changes it's name to Aimmerse before that other crap makes it obsolete.

haunter 3y ago

Can't wait to not be able to buy an RTX 5080 next year. Crypto then AI, surely there will be a third thing coming too

samspenc 3y ago
I'm hoping that NVidia doesn't give up on the consumer market and keeps producing low cost (and by that I mean $500-1500) GPUs that we can use for hobbyist AI / ML / LLM. Right now, only the 3090 and 4090 have enough VRAM (24 GB) among the consumer models to make them worthwhile for most LLM work. I'm hoping the 50 series (5090?) has more VRAM and stays affordable - though I'm not holding my breath either.

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AndrewKemendo 3y ago

My money has been on Meta for AGI since they started training people to label data for them (tag your friends!) Between all their properties they have more instrumentation on humans, collecting human behavior trajectories and state action pairs transfer learning and inverse RL than anyone - and it’s not even a close second Specifically and critically I think they likely have the largest egocentric multimodal labeled dataset collection platform from their meta quest and ray ban glasses products Apple is the only group that will likely beat them to egocentric data collection at scale but I expect Meta to catch up quickly once people are used to it socially

lolsal 3y ago
I have always felt Ebay dropped the ball on this with untold amounts of custom, varying quality photos with tons of metadata added by users. Presumably they are working on using this, but I haven't seen anything from them for it.
- mista2nith 3y ago
  [dead]
- generalizations 3y ago
  I would assume that stuff can be scraped though. How much would it cost to set up a bot farm that scrapes ebay live?
- s0rce 3y ago
  Same with Amazon and Aliexpress and Facebook marketplace.
- ganeshkrishnan 3y ago
  They (we) were working on that more than 15 years ago with mallet library. Unfortunately some of the drawbacks of public companies are they too focused on the current quarter and all effort is towards increasing EPS
karaterobot 3y ago

asgsdfg43rg 3y ago

[flagged]

ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
AI will power the metaverse, it was the missing piece.
- Minor49er 3y ago
  I thought the missing piece was the userbase
  - asadawadia 3y ago
    lol dude
jassyr 3y ago
When I was younger I was naive to think these business leaders were some types of geniuses. Turns out every one of them is just jumping from one hype to the next, hoping something sticks. If it doesn't, write it off. If it hits, they're a genius.
- nicup12345689 3y ago
  That's a lot of what I've seen the upper class be. Take a lot of bets, you need one to hit VS play it safe... And it even pans out in generations. The scion of the Tang family (as in MIT Tang hall) sent half his kids to business, half to politics, figuring out on average it would turn out ok (it did)
  - jassyr 3y ago
    I went down a very deep rabbit hole looking into the Tang clan/dynasty. So interesting.
amelius 3y ago
If I were Zuck, I'd be building a new phone + OS.

hackernoteng 3y ago

Why open source it? Just another virtue signal while their real motivation is something more sinister? They are a for-profit publicly owned company. Are investors happy about spending billions to open-source it?

andy99 3y ago
a, they're not really open sourcing it, they're releasing it under a license that says you can use it for what they say. So it's marketing mostly, both external and internal to try and appease the "AI ethics" crowd. And honestly, b, their strategy is incoherent anyway. It's a tech company with too much money and no acute market pressure hoping to find something that sticks.
- prewett 3y ago
  Traditionally a company with too much money returns it to the shareholders as dividends, but that seems to be passé...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
nwoli 3y ago
Probably partially to reduce momentum in profit extraction from competitors
hiddencost 3y ago
He's lying because he's so far behind.
gumballindie 3y ago
I think their investors should be happy about it. Once more open source models are released, a lot of ai companies will be freed to focus on other things, thus increasing the overall economy.
kelnos 3y ago

ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago

I love facebook. I hate other big tech companies. Facebook has done far more for software than any other company in the last 15 years. They: 1. Pushed salaries up across the board. Many people are not aware, but facebook was a major driver behind the 500k+ senior engineering pay. 2. Released major open source software: PyTorch, React, GraphQL, React Native. They basically invented modern web development. Facebook is basically the only game in town when it comes to open source. Whatsmore, Mark Zuckerberg should be more widely applauded. I know his open source ai strategy has capitalist roots, but its still great for the world.

colordrops 3y ago
Netflix is similar along these fronts.
7thaccount 3y ago
I think it's fine to applaud their pro open source behavior, while still being critical of the ill they've released upon society. Cambridge Analytica and spreading mob violence in some countries come to mind.
vermilingua 3y ago
> They forced the whole industry to pay up. And now we have industry-wide layoffs and a massive cooling of the job market. > They basically invented modern web development. Which is essentially a non-stop carosel that encourages cargo-culting and factory-farming of interns from boot camps.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
  So what, you would have preferred low pay all of these years?And you think React wasnt an improvement? Its been out for a decade now, the trope that javascript frameworks churn alot is not true anymore
  - kelnos 3y ago
    I personally benefited from the high pay, but I don't know if we can definitively say that the average developer is coming out of this better, after all the layoffs and belt-tightening.

victorbstan 3y ago

They certainly have a large stockpile of the cringiest boomer dataset on the planet, rivaled only by LinkedIn. Soon the AI loop will generate the largest neuron deactivation loop in human history.

Animats 3y ago

Remember "Facebook: It's free and always will be"?

homefree 3y ago

The actual quote: > "Our long term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit." "responsibly" is a pretty important word there that the hn title leaves out. I'm not really sure how that would be possible with a true general intelligence give the alignment problem - it's not really clear to me there's any responsible way to build a true general intelligence with that issue unsolved. For those that haven't watched his video interview, it's really great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aCg7jH4S1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aCg7jH4S1w - I highly recommend it to see how AI makes the low-fidelity stuff powerful (AR raybans) while the high fidelity stuff (VR) continues to improve. I think it makes sense strategically for Meta to pursue the open version with licensing they control, the leak of llama was advantageous to them. If they have the dominant open model they're well positioned if the 'nobody has a moat' analysis is actually true. Not too dissimilar from their open compute server stuff, a bit of commoditizing your complement. If you have the data then the model itself is the complement?

konschubert 3y ago
I am a general intelligence, with the knowledge of the internet at my fingertips, and I am not particularly dangerous.
- avidphantasm 3y ago
  It all depends on the number and nature of sensors and actuators the AGI has access to…
- blowski 3y ago
  There are many other “general intelligences” walking the planet who _are_ extremely dangerous. So it doesn’t need all AGIs to be dangerous for this to be a significant problem, just one is enough.
  - godelski 3y ago
    Idk, we have guns, knives, and fucking nuclear weapons. Humans are pretty dangerous. Very few creatures have weapons other than the ones god gave them. I'm not sure why all the responses here are just accepting of the claim when humans literally took control of an entire planet and routinely kill creatures that were designed to kill, with knives built into them. If you're not dangerous, it's because (thank god) you choose not to be.

hammyhavoc 3y ago

As a show of good faith, they should open up Messenger to support interoperable open standards without needing to use various self-hosted bridges on the likes of Matrix.

bertil 3y ago
I spend a lot of my life very much hoping for things like that, but I’m increasingly wondering how not having a central server makes it impossible to be interoperable, successful, and spam-proof. Having “AGI” —or at least a very convincing conversation agent— isn’t helping much.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Spam is an inevitability on any system. Matrix gets spam, Facebook Messenger gets spam, email gets spam. Where there's people, there's always going to be spam. I even get spam on Xbox Live messages, beginning years ago! Another idea that interests me is whitelist-prioritized communications for stuff like IM, and phone calls from the PSTN. If someone isn't in my address book, they shouldn't be able to get through as easily (not saying block them completely, that sounds like a disaster). It's funny, so much hype and emphasis on things like AGI and crypto, but the problems we should solve first and foremost aren't anywhere near as sexy or lucrative. Profitable shareholder driven biz are usually by their very nature never going to chase these types of problems.
  - dnissley 3y ago
    Aside from when someone I'm friends with gets their account hacked I don't think I've ever experienced spam through messenger
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      Not infrequently, you'll get messages that then end up disappearing because enough people report the account. Also, there's your primary/general "inbox" for Messenger, and then there's "other" where people you "probably" don't know usually end up (that's an algorithmic "probably"). Not-so-interesting anecdote, but the missus was orphaned in the early '00s, but didn't realize she'd had blood relatives trying to contact her through Facebook since the late '00s until about 2015 due to the "other" non-primary inbox on Messenger that she couldn't access via the app, and only via the website (quirk of the phone she was using for several years as I don't think it was Android-based).

bertil 3y ago

I don’t think this announcement will make any of the relevant debates (on the impact of Meta on the world, or the fears around AI, or the confusion on whether sharing a trained model qualifies as “open source”) any less frustratingly controversial and heated.

dboreham 3y ago

...but not the training data.

tdeck 3y ago

How's their last long term vision going - you know, the one they renamed the company after?

voisin 3y ago
In his defence, unforeseen new shiny objects have since emerged for Zuck to chase.

lwhi 3y ago

I think his mid-term vision should be to source a better microphone.

opportune 3y ago

Isn’t it obvious to anybody paying attention what their actual strategy is? They know they probably won’t “win” a commercial AI race vs OpenAI or Google, and presuming some other company does win the commercial AI market with closed source tech, they may be forced into a multitude of bad outcomes: 1. having to pay out the nose for licensing/SAAS of the winning tech vs shipping a noticeably worse second rate in-house product 2. Struggling to compete with the winning company for hiring, assuming the winning company makes a ton of money at high margins and can outbid Meta. 3. Having to continue building “applications” products on other companies’ platforms, something Zuck has repeatedly noted as a problem and is a major motivation for their investments in VE. Also, they’d have a hard time commercializing the current iteration of AI products given their current products and business relations anyway. Even if they “won” in terms of superior tech they’d be in one of the worst starting positions for actually making money off it, given their lack of enterprise SAAS business customers, the potential negative impact on existing product lines in consumers’ hands, (what I expect to be) advertisers’ relative indifference to genAI, and being generally considered less trustworthy than most other big tech companies and so less able to pivot to enterprise software. So for them the strategy that makes the most sense is to open source really good, but not cutting edge, AI for others to build on top of it. It probably costs a lot less to play permanent catch up because they can let others make the big investments in speculative research and don’t have to pay for the absolute top experts. Then by open sourcing it they make it harder for OpenAI and Google to commercialize their offerings at high costs, as many companies will build off Meta’s tech for more control, and what customers they do get will be constantly deciding if what they’re paying for is worth a slightly-worse but cheaper open source alternative. This also allows Meta to more easily influence the AI applications space despite having less capable models, and make it easier for 3P commercializations to take off rather than ceding everything to OpenAI/Google potentially going all in on 1P, which would be greatly beneficial if Meta ever were to own a platform that benefits from GenAI (cough cough the metaverse). It’s smart but transparently obvious because like, it’s Meta lol, they don’t spend this kind of money out of the goodness of their hearts.

erostrate 3y ago
This is the strategy famously identified as "commoditize your complement" by Joel Spolsky 22 years ago.

hereme888 3y ago

I don't see how Zuck/Meta could create an AGI that is not VERY left-wing biased relative to the beliefs of most of the world's population.

amateuring 3y ago

[flagged]

idlewords 3y ago

Whatever happened to replacing the US dollar, or creating a metaverse, or curing disease in his children's lifetime? The guy has all the focus of a disco ball.

blitzar 3y ago
> Now, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is entering the race. If this goes the same way as when Zuck entered the race to replace the US dollar, create a metaverse or cure disease, Ai will be dead in the next 2 years.
- jlarocco 3y ago
  We can hope.
- randycupertino 3y ago
  > or cure disease My old office was in the same building as Chan-Zuckerberg HQ hq and all the scientists I worked with rolled their eyes at their completely over the top mission statement to "cure all disease within our lifetimes." Cure ALL disease? Really?? Maybe pick one and try hard to eradicate it. But *all* disease?! All of it? Geeze. Also one of their top scientists exposed himself taking his junk out of his pants and tried to feel up my coworker at STEM restaurant in the middle of the restaurant during happy hour. So overall they seemed like poor decision making reckless arrogant clowns.
  - tim333 3y ago
    Zuck seems a bit more modest on the goal https://youtu.be/1Wo6SqLNmLk?t=580 https://youtu.be/1Wo6SqLNmLk?t=580
- rldjbpin 3y ago
  unsure about the medical initiative, but most of these endeavours have had some tangible benefits for the overall field. he is in a rare position to throw money in all of these fields without worrying about the ROI. so i will not throw too much criticism his way. but yes the ai bubble is real, but sadly we don't get to short on it this time.

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

Rebuff5007 3y ago

Really feels like facebook doesnt even try to have a strategy or mission statement any more. Even as someone who is bearish on AI, i get why it is an important part of Google and Microsoft's product offerings. What in the world does a fancy chatbot have to do with building a social network?

edgyquant 3y ago
That you equate AGI with “chatbot” shows OpenAIs marketing has been successful. That doesn’t mean the two are one in the same or that a chatbot is the actual path there.

cheschire 3y ago

If only he had set this goal a year ago, maybe John Carmack wouldn't have quit to work on AGI. https://fortune.com/2022/12/17/john-carmack-leaves-meta-as-investors-doubt-metaverse-push-by-mark-zuckerberg/ https://fortune.com/2022/12/17/john-carmack-leaves-meta-as-i...

ShamelessC 3y ago
Carmack seemed to really despise their culture too.
- phyrex 3y ago
  Source?
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0iPixEvPJQGzNa6t2x6HUL5TYqfmKGqSgfkBg6QaTyHF5frXQi7eLGxC7uPQv5U5jl&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0iPix... > ...We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say “Half? Ha! I’m at quarter efficiency!” It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover...
edgyquant 3y ago
More likely Carmack left because meta stopped pushing hard for the metaverse as their future and the lawsuit involving him left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. Not sure why we’d take his declaration of building AGI seriously when he isn’t an AI researcher but a video game programmer.

jrsj 3y ago

its too bad Alamos Gold already has the AGI stock ticker symbol or they might be able to get rid of the whole META thing

JTbane 3y ago

Is it even possible to build an AGI with our current computing paradigms? So far our most advanced neural networks are purpose-built for a task (i.e. ChatGPT for text communication, Dall-E for images).

swagmoney1606 3y ago
I worry that we're getting close. I don't think our society is built for it.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  What is our society built for ? Climate change ? Social media? War? Covid ? Your sentiment isn’t lost on me but there isn’t much evidence the future need be a catastrophe either. I personally think society isn’t going in a great direction, maybe more intelligent systems will help us.
  - prewett 3y ago
    The problem with society is that people are willing to sacrifice the good of others in order to gain something for themselves. They also tend to lie to themselves and/or are oblivious to it. The problem is within us; better intelligence will just let us do it with more sophistication, or perhaps on a larger scale. One of the main force within society pushing against having all our arrows point inwards is religion, which these days isn't even in consideration for membership in the set of useful things.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      I personally think that more intelligence might make the need for personal gratification go away. I mean, to start with the ideas is that humans will be completely and utterly redundant, the AI will be better than us at everything, what happens to the ego in this situation? What happens if the cost of things is reduced to next to nothing due to efficiency gains from super intelligent systems?

pokstad 3y ago

His companies drive people to depression to sell ads. How is achieving AGI aligned with that business?

shsbdncudx 3y ago

“responsible agi” is a bit of an oxymoron imho. It’s like giving birth to a human, you can prepare it, train it, guide it, and tell it what not to do, but eventually that human becomes entirely accountable for their own actions

esafak 3y ago
Not if that human is congenitally psychopathic. That is the situation we are trying to avoid.

UcMISandDisinfo 3y ago

[dead]

LZ_Khan 3y ago

Over/under on days before he renames the company to "Singularity?"

cityzen 3y ago

“We are changing our name to Arti”

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ericra 3y ago

They really are attempting to dilute the term "open source" until it loses all meaning. You can already see it with nearly every LLM license that claims to be open source but is nothing close to how that term is commonly understood. While it's true that Facebook creates some valuable "true" open source projects (like React), I anticipate seeing a lot more complicated (and restrictive) open source licensing from them and other big tech for upcoming projects.

juunpp 3y ago
Just look at how "open source" the quoted Llama 2 in the article is: https://ai.meta.com/resources/models-and-libraries/llama-downloads/ https://ai.meta.com/resources/models-and-libraries/llama-dow...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

gmerc 3y ago

Investor Narrative, Not Goal.

juunpp 3y ago

[flagged]

cdf 3y ago

Bigco creates a VR/AR/Metaverse seemingly for entertainment but really is gathering data of the "guests", esp how they will behave when they think nobody is watching and/or judging, and in time, uses the data for nefarious purposes... I think I have seen this show before...

notavalleyman 3y ago
Doesn't look like anything to me

vietvu 3y ago

So he will change the company from Meta to AI? Since the company shifted from metaverse to AI.

kgbcia 3y ago

Metaverse got boring quick

chriszeoli_NY 3y ago

Wrote more about this here: https://www.datagravity.dev/p/metas-ai-initiatives-20b-of-investment https://www.datagravity.dev/p/metas-ai-initiatives-20b-of-in...

chriszeoli_NY 3y ago

[dupe]

robotburrito 3y ago

I wonder if he will end up bringing Carmack back?

tristanb 3y ago

So has he finally admitted the floating torsos with no legs was a bit of a silly bet?

sidcool 3y ago

Is he renaming the company again?

pipeline_peak 3y ago

Mark Bandwagon Zuckerberg

cultofmetatron 3y ago

I for one look forward to the vr os that comes out when the "android" of vr steps up to what the apple vision is going to bring. meta is currently the top here but they have focussed mostly on the game experience. can't wait to see AR as a legitimate productivity tool. I'm sure general AI will play a role here of course

throwthrow5643 3y ago

Hopefully he does better at this than Chinese.

gloosx 3y ago

Mark is always about one year late to the party. Funny that he always stays confident that it will just work like facebook did ;)

amai 3y ago

So he dropped his old goal of creating Metaverse? Seems like we are going from Metaverse to Metaintelligence now.