What is existential risk from artificial general intelligence?
Autoblocks GlossaryJan 19
Zuckerberg: Meta Plans to Build Artificial General Intelligence
The Facts
Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that his company's goal is to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) — AI that equals or surpasses human intelligence. In a post to Meta's social platform Threads, he said the "long-term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available."
As part of the AGI pursuit, Meta will also shift its AI research group, called FAIR, to the same part of the company that contains its AI product development team. The race to AGI among tech companies has led to intense pursuits of talent, including offering compensation packages of over $1M. Zuckerberg also said Meta will own 340K of Nvidia’s H100 GPU computer chips — the top choice in the industry — by year's end.
The Spin
Narrative A
AGI isn't just another form of AI, but an existential threat to humanity as a whole. If AGI isn't vigorously monitored, it will eventually become smarter than humans and develop itself exponentially until we can no longer put the genie back in the bottle. Once it's fully autonomous, it can decide to overtake human beings and the environment we inhabit. This is more than just the latest social app, and it requires much more scrutiny.
Narrative B
While there are risks involved in any advanced technology, we cannot forget about the incredible potential of AGI, particularly regarding the science. As AI companies slowly and cautiously roll out AGI to the world — and after periods of thorough safety testing — the world will be able to learn about and adapt alongside AGI to make their lives exponentially better economically and socially.
Nerd narrative
There's a 2% chance that the control problem (i.e. how to create AI that will benefit and avoid inadvertently harming its creators) will be solved before the creation of Artificial General Intelligence, according to the Metaculus prediction community.