Zuckerberg’s boring, bleak AI bet

Of all the many famous stories of Steve Jobs, who like to share the tech industry, is perhaps the most famous single 1983 pitch at the then Pepsi President John Sculley to join Apple: “Would you like to spend the rest of your life selling sugar, or would you like to change the world?”

How many things that Jobs said was the playing field wildly arrogant, self -essential and self -franking, but ultimately correct. What Sculley did at Apple (mainly after the released of jobs) to sell the Macintosh and popularize personal, graphic -centered computing, the world more changed than its invention of the Pepsi Challenge. There was really a big difference between the sale of Macs and the sale of sugar water.

After listening to Meta -CEO Mark Zuckerberg Place his vision How AI “Superintelligence” would change the world was my main reaction: man, this guy only wants to sell us sugar water.

“Personal superintelligence”? Maybe just “superintelligence”, it's cleaner

In Instagram video (Of course) said last week that Meta's goal is to develop “personal superintelligence for everyone” who can hear on devices such as “glasses, what we see, hear what we hear and interact with us all day.”

“A lot was written about the scientific and economic progress that AI can bring,” he noted. “And I'm really optimistic.” But his vision differs from others in the industry who want to guide the AI in the automation of all the valuable work: “I think an even more sensible influence in our lives will come from everyone who has a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, what you want to see, be a better friend and grow to be the person you want to strive for.”

The Main reaction To this pitch I saw out of Smart KI observer Is: do you want jokes? By definition, “superintelligence” means a system that cuts better than a human, sometimes very better, if not in all areas. And the most ambitious what Zuck can think of doing it is … VR glasses? As Sharon Goldman from Fortune Say it while Steve Jobs called his computers as a “bike for the spirit”, “Zuckerberg, in contrast, imagines superintelligence as a few ray bans that help them … to be a better friend?”

The lack of ambition in Zuckerberg's rhetoric is all the noticeable if you look at the extreme ambitions of it expenditure On AI. This year alone he is hired by former Github CEO Nat Friedman and veteran ai founder Daniel Gross; SCASTE AI CEO Alexandr Wang (As part of a quasi purchase of scale, a massively important company whose training data is used by almost every AI company); Apple Ai Chef Ruoming Pang; and Chatgpt-Co creator Shengjia ZhaoAmong several others.

His attitude and the gigantic amounts that he is willing to pay top talents have built the sector for weeks. In a competitor (former Openai CTO Mira Muratis memorial laboratory), Zuckerberg reported reportedly to offers more than a dozen of the 50 employees of the companyOne of them was more than 1 billion US dollars over a few years, while the rest of over four years was between 200 and 500 million US dollars.

Even for such a rich company as Meta, the billion dollar offers for talents are unknown. (1 billion US dollar is how much Zuckerberg Paid for all of Instagram 2012.) It is a fairly lively sign that Zuckerberg sees AI as the future of his business.

But what does this future look like?

I saw the best digital minds of my generation that were wasted on roles

One could be very non-profit, since Zuckerberg knows that a world of very super-intelligent AI systems would lead to massive, far-reaching social effects that are not sufficiently summarized if “they intelligently intelligent with Smart Sunglassesen”, but it has come to the conclusion that most of its investors and customers are not in one place to understand the severity of these changes. So talk about glasses.

That could be what happens and I have a sympathy for his position, if so. The attempt to find out what a world looks like after superintelligence is actually extremely difficult, not least for those of us who are limited to mere human intellect. And it is usually scary – even if the changes ultimately prove to be positive.

With all the uncertainty there is no plausible world in which people have access to “personal superintelligence” and do not use this to automate a large number of tasks, and there are a number of conceivable scenarios Where this leads to the demand for human wage work in order to collapse completely. Other scenarios see wages up. It is a difficult situation for a CEO to send a message.

However, it is also worth taking into account that Zuckerberg means exactly what he says: The AI system that his team builds up is not intended to automate work, but to offer a meta-managed layer between individual people and the world outside of them. In a sense, Facebook and Instagram are very large versions of this level, synthesize and compress the outside world into a digestible and addictive form that can consume people during their time, and Zuckerbergs earlier obsession with the metaverse seemed to be a logical sequel. This approach was immensely profitable. (Although, not so much the meta -verses.) Imagine how much more profitable it would be if a digital spirit has designed much smarter than Zucks.

Talks like Zuckerbergs with the business author Ben Thompson In May credibility of this interpretation. Zuckerberg sees four options with AI: improvement of the recommendation algorithms of its products to better aim to advertise, and the commitment to “consumer interfaces” such as Instagram -Reels, “Business Messaging” (i.e. companies that carry out transactions through WhatsApp and messenger) and ultimately drive direct AI use à la chatgpt.

The promise of AI to Zuckerberg is that it can help him sell more ads and convince you to see more time in Instagram Brainrot. My reaction to this pitch was the same as the AI writer ZVI Mowshowitz's: “It was as if they had taken a caricature of the left wing for why Zuckerberg is angry, combined them with a caricature of the left wing, why AI is angry and then merged into its final form. Unless it comes directly from Zuckerberg as an explicit text.” At least the sugar water from Pepsi tastes good.

That the Sixth largest company On Earth, it dedicates billions of dollars to this vision, you don't know Great. But it has a silver strip.

One thing that I have learned over the years with AI researchers is that most of them are driven by a conviction that this thing that they build is really, very socially important. Sometimes this is connected to a security tax (“This thing could kill us, and we have to do it in such a way that it is not possible”), sometimes with an acceleration shimmer (“This thing could free humanity from economic scarcity”), but one way or another it is normally stated with a real belief. If you just wanted money, you would work for a hedge fund. But they also want to build something that they are proud of.

I think these characteristics will be the strategy “throws money on intelligent people until they all join” that Zuckerberg tries to fail. When superintelligence is built, it is built up by a team that will look like a passionate, common, optimistic vision for a world with superintelligence. It is done because its makers change the world and do not want to sell sugar water. A team of researchers who mainly join for the money, among a guide whose bravest vision “What if we sell more advertisements for sunglasses” will not be possible.