Why does Mark Zuckerberg want to solve general intelligence? Well, for one thing, if he doesn’t, one of his competitors will have a better chatbot. Zuckerberg wants to be the best (and good for him). At his core, he wants to build the best stuff (even the world’s best cattle on his ranch).
If AGI is possible, it will get built. I’m not the first person to point out that this is a new space race. If America takes a pause, then someone else will get there first. However, I thought the Zuck interview was an interesting microcosm for why AGI, if possible, will get made.
… We started FAIR about 10 years ago. The idea was that, along the way to general intelligence or whatever you wanna call it, there are going to be all these different innovations and that’s going to just improve everything that we do. So we didn’t conceive of it as a product. It was more of a research group. Over the last 10 years it has created a lot of different things that have improved all of our products. …
There’s obviously a big change in the last few years with ChatGPT and the diffusion models around image creation coming out. This is some pretty wild stuff that is pretty clearly going to affect how people interact with every app that’s out there. At that point we started a second group, the gen AI group, with the goal of bringing that stuff into our products and building leading foundation models that would power all these different products.
… There’s also basic assistant functionality, whether it’s for our apps or the smart glasses or VR. So it wasn’t completely clear at first that you were going to need full AGI to be able to support those use cases. But in all these subtle ways, through working on them, I think it’s actually become clear that you do. …
Reasoning is another example. Maybe you want to chat with a creator or you’re a business and you’re trying to interact with a customer. That interaction is not just like “okay, the person sends you a message and you just reply.” It’s a multi-step interaction where you’re trying to think through “how do I accomplish the person’s goals?” A lot of times when a customer comes, they don’t necessarily know exactly what they’re looking for or how to ask their questions. So it’s not really the job of the AI to just respond to the question.
You need to kind of think about it more holistically. It really becomes a reasoning problem. So if someone else solves reasoning, or makes good advances on reasoning, and we’re sitting here with a basic chat bot, then our product is lame compared to what other people are building. At the end of the day, we basically realized we’ve got to solve general intelligence… (emphasis mine)
Credit to Dwarkesh Patel for this excellent interview. Credit to M.Z. for sharing his thoughts on topics that affect the world.
“we’ve got to solve general intelligence” If a competitor solves AGI first, then you are left behind. No one would not want general intelligence on their team, on the assumption that it can be controlled.
I would like the AGI to do my chores for me, please. Unfortunately, it’s more likely to be able to write my blog posts first.
Economist Writing Every Day 
Trenchant quote you included by Joanna M re what you really would like the ‘droids to be doing for you.
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