Why Meta is building superintelligence lab

Mark Zuckerberg has reorganised his company’s ambitions around a hypothetical future that is suddenly the talk of Silicon Valley, writes Cade Metz from San Francisco

- Cade Metz

On Thursday, Meta unveiled a $14.3 billion investment and partnership that will be the core of a new artificial intelligence research lab dedicated to the pursuit of “superintelligence,” a swing-for-the-fences effort in the global technology race.

The new lab will be led by Alexandr Wang, a co-founder and the chief executive of Scale AI. Meta invested in his start-up as part of an agreement to bring Mr Wang to the company.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been offering compensation packages as high as $100 million to leading researchers across the field in an effort to staff the new lab, according to four people familiar with the effort.

News of the lab has left many people asking what exactly a superintelligence lab is meant to do.

Here is a guide.

WHAT IS SUPERINTELLIGENCE?

Companies like OpenAI and Google want to build “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, which is a way to describe a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. It is an ambitious goal with no clear path to success. Many tech leaders say a breakthrough is not far away, but it’s hard to know what that means because AGI is so loosely defined.

As a result, Silicon Valley leaders are now talking about building superintelligence, which would be even more powerful than AGI. It, too, is a loosely defined term, but generally refers to a machine that is more powerful than the human brain.

Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist at OpenAI, has co-founded a company called Safe Superintelligence. It has no plans to release products. Its stated mission is to privately build superintelligence and release the technology when it has been proved to be completely safe. Dr Sutskever is among those who believe that powerful AI could harm humanity.

ARE WE CLOSE TO AGI?