Why Meta Should Give Up on Superintelligence

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg is on a tear in recruiting for a team focused on “superintelligence,” roughly defined as a more powerful version of artificial general intelligence, AI that can handle most of the economic work people do. 

Here’s a question, though: Why is Meta going after superintelligence?

We can understand why Meta, as a major technology developer that has long used AI models for its consumer and advertising products, wouldn’t want to depend on models from other companies like OpenAI or Anthropic. But that doesn’t explain why Meta has to build AI models on par with or better than those of its AI rivals. 

Meta isn’t selling models to other businesses the way OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are doing, and it seems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has sewn up the general chatbot market, or at least the subscription tier of that market.