Meta's next project is open source artificial general intelligence

While other companies are focused on conversational AI, it looks like Meta has some loftier ambitions in mind. The social media giant is reportedly working on artificial general intelligence (AGI).

In an Instagram Reel published today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that his company is currently working on AGI. This particular type of AI is often described as human-level AI. Two of the company’s AI research teams — FAIR and GenAI — have been brought together to develop the AGI and make it open source.

The social post in question features Zuckerberg explaining Meta’s goal in a video with a caption that reads:

Some updates on our AI efforts. Our long term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit. We’re bringing our two major AI research efforts (FAIR and GenAI) closer together to support this. We’re currently training our next-gen model Llama 3, and we’re building massive compute infrastructure to support our future roadmap, including 350k H100s by the end of this year — and overall almost 600k H100s equivalents of compute if you include other GPUs. Also really excited about our progress building new AI-centric computing devices like Ray Ban Meta smart glasses. Lots more to come soon.

This news comes after Meta’s chief scientist, Yann LeCun, expressed skepticism in December that AI superintelligence would arrive anytime soon. The French computer scientist said he believes that current AI systems are still decades away from reaching some semblance of sentience. LeCun also added that we’re more likely to get cat or dog-level AI intelligence years before we achieve human-level AI intelligence.