General artificial intelligence will be as smart as a human being and with many more resources and knowledge. This is fascinating and potentially devastating. Mark Zuckerberg wants to make it open source.
Mark Zuckerberg has been accused of taking a reckless approach to artificial intelligence after committing to build a powerful AI system on par with human intelligence levels.
The problem? The founder of Facebook has also raised the possibility of making it available to the public for free.
The CEO of Meta has stated that the company will attempt to build a general artificial intelligence (GAI) system and do it open source, which means it will be accessible to developers outside the company. He added that the system should be “as available as we can responsibly make it”.
Meta is seeking AGI and aims to make it open source
In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg stated that it was clear that the next generation of technological services “requires building a complete general intelligence”.
AGI is not a strictly defined term, but it commonly refers to a theoretical AI system that can perform a range of tasks with a level of intelligence that equals or surpasses that of humans.
The possible emergence of AGI has alarmed experts and politicians worldwide, who fear that such a system, or a combination of multiple AGI systems, could bypass human control and threaten humanity.
Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta would consider the possibility of making its AGI open source, that is, freely available for developers and the public to use and adapt, like the Llama 2 AI model from the company.
“This technology is so important and offers so many opportunities that we should make it open source and make it available to the public in the most responsible way possible, so that everyone can benefit,” he said.
Meta was one of the technology companies that committed last year at a global AI security summit held in the United Kingdom to allow governments to examine artificial intelligence tools before and after their launch.
In an interview given on Thursday to the technology news website The Verge, Zuckerberg stated that he would lean towards open sourcing as long as it made sense and was “the safest and most responsible” option.
The decision by Meta last year to open source Llama 2 code sparked criticism from some experts: “it’s a bit like giving people a template to build a nuclear bomb”.
