AI arms race joned by Zuckerberg's Meta, smart glasses only a beginning
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Getty Images)
Meta, a company that owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp among other products and services, is joining the race to create and implement its generative artificial intelligence, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, CNN, and The Verge report.
Meta's long-term vision
The company aims to be a big player in the race for advanced AI technology. Mark Zuckerberg recently shared Meta's plans to create its own artificial general intelligence or AGI. AGI is a kind of AI that can be as smart as or even smarter than humans in almost everything. After creating, Meta wants to share it with other developers, and the public, and make it widely available for everyone to use.
“Our long-term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit,” he says in a post on Threads.
Meta aims to build artificial general intelligence (Getty Images)
Zuckerberg explains that to make the best AI for chatbots, creators, and businesses, one needs to improve AI in many areas. The next generation of services needs a more advanced kind of intelligence.
First steps toward goals
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg mentioned that Meta is forming a new group to boost its work on AI tools. Since then, Meta has been providing tools and information to help users understand how AI affects what they see on its apps.
Zuckerberg says that by the end of the year, Meta will have about 350,000 Nvidia AI chips to handle the powerful computing needed for this. He also wants to bring Meta's two major AI research groups, FAIR and GenAI, together to speed up their work. He believes that Meta's vision for AI and the virtual space called the metaverse are linked.
“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 says.
Meta's smart glasses
These smart glasses, which Meta is developing with Ray Ban, are powered by AI and allow users to make calls, send messages, and take videos without using their hands.
“By the end of the decade, I think lots of people will talk to AIs frequently throughout the day using smart glasses like what we’re building with Ray Ban Meta,” he says.
Zuckerberg's announcement is one of Meta's most significant commitments to focus on artificial intelligence.
AI arms race
Other big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are also actively sharing new AI tools and ideas, creating a competitive environment known as the AI arms race. For example, Microsoft is putting a special button for AI opening on its Windows keyboards. It is the first time it changed consoles in almost 30 years.
After the Microsoft-backed OpenAI company introduced ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot, a wave of similar developments arose, including Google Bard, Google Gemini, and Samsung's AI Gauss.
Walmart also implements AI for its new shopping features to make shopping in stores or online feel more advanced.
However, some people are worried that these powerful AI technologies from big companies, including newcomers like OpenAI, could unintentionally cause problems.
