Mark Zuckerberg's New Goal is Creating AGI

OpenAI's stated mission is to create the artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Demis Hassabis, the leader of Google's AI efforts, has the same goal. Now, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is entering the race. From a report: While he doesn't have a timeline for when AGI will be reached, or even an exact definition for it, he wants to build it. At the same time, he's shaking things up by moving Meta's AI research group, FAIR, to the same part of the company as the team building generative AI products across Meta's apps. The goal is for Meta's AI breakthroughs to more directly reach its billions of users. "We've come to this view that, in order to build the products that we want to build, we need to build for general intelligence," Zuckerberg tells me in an exclusive interview. "I think that's important to convey because a lot of the best researchers want to work on the more ambitious problems." [...] No one working on AI, including Zuckerberg, seems to have a clear definition for AGI or an idea of when it will arrive. "I don't have a one-sentence, pithy definition," he tells me. "You can quibble about if general intelligence is akin to human level intelligence, or is it like human-plus, or is it some far-future super intelligence. But to me, the important part is actually the breadth of it, which is that intelligence has all these different capabilities where you have to be able to reason and have intuition." He sees its eventual arrival as being a gradual process, rather than a single moment. "I'm not actually that sure that some specific threshold will feel that profound." As Zuckerberg explains it, Meta's new, broader focus on AGI was influenced by the release of Llama 2, its latest large language model, last year. The company didn't think that the ability for it to generate code made sense for how people would use a LLM in Meta's apps. But it's still an important skill to develop for building smarter AI, so Meta built it anyway. External research has pegged Meta's H100 shipments for 2023 at 150,000, a number that is tied only with Microsoft's shipments and at least three times larger than everyone else's. When its Nvidia A100s and other AI chips are accounted for, Meta will have a stockpile of almost 600,000 GPUs by the end of 2024, according to Zuckerberg.

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