Mark Zuckerberg’s Artificial General Intelligence System Raises Alarms Among Experts

Published 22 January 2024 by

Martin Hamilton

I recently answered which AI company founder I think is the most forward looking in this newsletter edition. I took into consideration aspects of technological advances combined with consideration for the environment and human relations throughout the world. I didn’t include Zuckerberg in the names of the most forward looking company founders because of his tendency to be a bit radical with his thinking. He’s really aggressive with his ideas and sometimes over uses greed. If his ideas succeed to a high level, and I hope they do, it will still take humans to operate AGI.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has committed to building an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system that matches or exceeds human intelligence levels. He has also raised the prospect of making it open source, which means it will be accessible to developers outside the company and the public. Zuckerberg believes that the next generation of tech services requires building full general intelligence, and the potential emergence of AGI has alarmed experts and politicians around the world who fear such a system could evade human control and threaten humanity.

AGI is a theoretical AI system that can carry out an array of tasks at a level of intelligence that matches or exceeds humans. Meta’s AGI system, if developed, will be made as widely available as possible, according to Zuckerberg. The company will consider making its AGI open source, like the company’s Llama 2 AI model, which is freely available to developers and the public to use and adapt.

However, some experts have criticized the prospect of open source AGI, saying that it is irresponsible to consider it before we have worked out how to regulate these very powerful AI systems. They argue that in the wrong hands, technology like this could do a great deal of harm, and that it is a matter of public safety that we progress this work with some urgency.

Meta was among the tech firms at a global AI safety summit in the UK last year that committed to allowing governments to vet artificial intelligence tools before and after their release. Another UK-based expert said that open sourcing an AGI system was not a decision that should be left in the hands of a tech company. These decisions need to be taken by international consensus, not in the boardroom of a tech giant.

Meta’s decision last year to open source Llama 2 drew criticism from some experts, who said it was a bit like giving people a template to build a nuclear bomb. The California-based OpenAI is also building AGI, which it defines as AI systems that are generally smarter than humans, while Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s AI division Google DeepMind, has said AGI could be less than a decade away.

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Zuckerberg did not give a timeframe for developing an AGI system, although he referred to Meta having built an absolutely massive amount of infrastructure to create new AI systems. The company has ordered a significant stockpile of AI processing chips, and work on a sequel to Llama 2 is also underway.