How Zuckerberg's AI plan could change the world

From multimillion-dollar staff salaries to data centres the size of Manhattan, what does Meta's Prometheus project mean for the future of humanity? Chris Stokel-Walker investigates

- Chris Stokel-Walker

Since November 2022, the world of AI has been near-synonymous with one tool and one tool alone: ChatGPT. Last week, we discovered that users pepper OpenAI's chatbot with 2.5 billion prompts every day, according to newly released data from the company, and half a billion people interact with it every week.

If social media was the marker of the last generation of big tech, then AI is the next one. And while it seems as if OpenAI could become the household name, there’s one person who wants to break that: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In the last few years, Zuckerberg, who set up Facebook in 2004 and is now worth $247bn, has expanded his digital empire to encompass WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads. He has also promised to wrest control of the AI narrative away from OpenAI, offering billion-dollar deals to lure the best brains to join his AI project, Prometheus. The venture, due to launch early next year, is named after the Greek god who stole fire from the other gods and gave it to humanity.

“Meta has faced several setbacks with its generative AI strategy, prompting the company to spend more aggressively in an effort to catch up in the AGI race,” says Stefan Slowinski, a research analyst at the financial services group BNP Paribas. Driving the investment, which dwarfs a lot of what the company has previously spent on similar initiatives, at least in such a short time, is the desire to make up lost ground against the competition, mostly OpenAI, which is supplanting Meta as the dominant force in terms of what we interact with on a daily basis.

Similar threats are compelling Google to spend big in developing its own AI model, Gemini, and to fend off challenges from OpenAI to its Chrome browser. Elon Musk is also ramping up his work on his xAI tool because of “overwhelming” existential dread about AI.