Meta has developed plans to create a brand new synthetic intelligence analysis lab devoted to pursuing “superintelligence,” in response to reporting from The New York Occasions. The social media large selected 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of Scale AI, to affix the brand new lab as a part of a broader reorganization of Meta’s AI efforts beneath CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Superintelligence refers to a hypothetical AI system that might exceed human cognitive talents—a step past synthetic common intelligence (AGI), which goals to match an clever human’s functionality for studying new duties with out intensive specialised coaching.
Nevertheless, very like AGI, superintelligence stays a nebulous time period within the discipline. Since scientists nonetheless poorly perceive the mechanics of human intelligence, and since human intelligence resists easy quantification with no single definition, figuring out superintelligence when it arrives will current vital challenges.
Computer systems already far surpass people in sure types of data processing corresponding to calculations, however this slender superiority would not qualify as superintelligence beneath most definitions. The pursuit assumes we’ll acknowledge it after we see it, regardless of the conceptual fuzziness.
AI researcher Dr. Margaret Mitchell instructed Ars Technica in April 2024 that there’ll “possible by no means be settlement on comparisons between human and machine intelligence” however predicted that “males in positions of energy and affect, significantly ones with investments in AI, will declare that AI is smarter than people” whatever the actuality.
The brand new lab represents Meta’s effort to stay aggressive within the more and more crowded AI race, the place tech giants proceed pouring billions into analysis and expertise acquisition. Meta has reportedly provided compensation packages value seven to 9 figures to dozens of researchers from firms like OpenAI and Google, in response to The New York Occasions, with some already agreeing to affix the corporate.
Meta joins a rising record of tech giants making daring claims about superior AI growth. In January, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a weblog publish that “we are actually assured we all know how one can construct AGI as we have now historically understood it.” Earlier, in September 2024, Altman predicted that the AI trade may develop superintelligence “in a couple of thousand days.” Elon Musk made an much more aggressive prediction in April 2024, saying that AI can be “smarter than the neatest human” by “subsequent 12 months, inside two years.”
