Latest news with #Zuck
Business Insider
a day ago
- Business
- Business Insider
AI talent war poses a gnarly question: Are you a monkey or a missionary?
Since my dad died, I've grown close to my father-in-law Bill. He has a mix of joy and realism I admire, and his advice tends to stick. One of his favorites: "We're all prostitutes when it comes to work." He's from an older generation, so I'll swap in "sex workers" as the appropriate phrase here. What he means is that we work mainly for money. That's been on my mind as the AI talent war heats up. Mark Zuckerberg has been offering $100 million-plus packages to lure AI researchers and engineers from frontier labs and Big Tech rivals. Some have refused, citing loyalty to their company's mission. "They are trying to buy something that cannot be bought. And that is alignment with the mission," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said recently, noting his top talent has stayed despite Meta's offers. Staff at Thinking Machines Lab have also turned Zuck down, either over leadership concerns or mission loyalty, according to Wired. My father-in-law would say a phrase that includes the letters B and S. According to the gospel of Bill, this is all about getting paid, as usual. A Business Insider scoop backs this up: This week, Charles Rollet reported Zuck's recruiting drive has created tension among existing Meta AI experts, who resent newcomers getting higher pay in its new Superintelligence team. That's made some easier to poach. xAI has nabbed several, and Microsoft has a Meta talent wish list. On August 6, Laurens van der Maaten, a top Meta scientist, announced he was joining Anthropic. Reacting on X, former Meta engineering director Erik Meijer wrote: "Every action has a reaction; the unintended side effects of creating a SI team," referring to the Superintelligence group. When asked for comment, he shared a YouTube clip of an experiment in which two monkeys performing the same task were given different rewards. The one that got a less tasty treat hurled it back and angrily shook its cage. If we're all metaphorical monkeys or sex workers, what about the "mission-driven" folks staying put? One possible explanation: equity. Many engineers and researchers get stock in their startups, and these awards typically vest over several years. If you're at a hot AI lab, your unvested equity has probably soared in value lately, or there's a chance it could. For instance, Anthropic could be worth $170 billion soon, up from about $4 billion two years ago. If you got equity back then and you're waiting for it to vest, there's no way you're leaving right now. No surprise: most folks are staying at Anthropic. Until that equity vests, anyway. I want to hear back from AI experts who are getting big offers. Are you mission-driven and staying put, or will you take the $$$ like most of us monkeys? Let me know: abarr@
Tom's Guide
3 days ago
- Tom's Guide
Forget Ray-Ban Meta — HTC just unveiled Vive Eagle smart glasses that look like a stylish AI breakthrough
Smart glasses aren't just a new trend anymore, they're very much here. And so far, AI glasses have been dominated by Meta — I, for one, love the company's Ray-Ban smart specs. But HTC has just come from out of nowhere and launched a pair of its own that seriously challenge the sleek stylings and technological smarts of Zuck's glasses. Whether you're looking for a pair of AI glasses like the Vive Eagle, or AR specs to watch and play in comfort on long haul flights, I've got you. I have been testing pairs for over four years, and have ranked the best smart glasses you can buy. Named the HTC Vive Eagle, these glasses are lighter, pack a much bigger battery, sport Zeiss lenses for great UV protection, and even support both the biggest AI models you can use right now. Spec Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses HTC Vive Eagle smart glasses Chipset Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 Storage 32GB 32GB Camera 12MP 12MP Weight 49g 48.8g AI model Meta AI Google Gemini or ChatGPT Battery capacity 154 mAh 235 mAh Specification-wise, these two pairs of specs are largely the same. But there are three critical differences to talk about that could give HTC a narrow lead here. First, battery life. With a far bigger capacity in that cell, you should get all-day longevity out of these for your key tasks. Second, they're slightly lighter on the face — the tiniest bit, but every little reduction matters. Third, instead of only having Meta AI, users can pick between using Google Gemini or ChatGPT as the assistant. Don't get me wrong, Meta AI is good, but these two models have shot ahead in terms of multi-modal assistance, so putting it directly on camera glasses is really exciting. These specs even do real-time text-to-speech translation across 13 languages — far beyond Meta's support for four languages! Ever since buying the transparent Ray-Ban Meta glasses, I've been a sucker for anything that is see-through or transparent. So to see HTC pick up on this in its aesthetic across all colors makes them look gorgeous — techy-yet-refined. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. So how much are they? Well, we only know the price in Taiwan right now (more on that later), but that NT$15,600 cost converts to roughly $520, which is quite a step above the $299 asking price of the Ray-Ban Metas! However, the pre-order price of a pair of Eagles gets you two years of Vive AI Plus for free. We're not exactly sure what you get for that, aside from another monthly subscription, but the choice to sell them directly to Taiwan Mobile customers as part of their phone plans should offset the price a little. This is a tricky question to answer. Currently, they're only initially available in Taiwan. Pre-orders go live today, and they launch on September 1, but HTC has told me that the company doesn't have a window for an international release soon. That means we could be in for the long haul waiting for these to launch, which sucks! These glasses look so cool, and with access to ChatGPT or Google Gemini, they could very well be more intelligent too — especially in multimodal use. Fingers crossed they land in the U.S. and U.K. sooner rather than later. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News to get our up-to-date news, how-tos, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.
Vox
08-08-2025
- Business
- Vox
Mark Zuckerberg's unbelievably bleak AI vision
is a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox's Future Perfect section and has worked at Vox since 2014. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy. The future is Zuck, and all of us, using AI on our sunglasses, apparently. Allison Robbert/Bloomberg via Getty Images Of all the many famous Steve Jobs stories that tech industry folks like to share, perhaps the single most famous is his 1983 pitch to then-Pepsi president John Sculley to join Apple: 'Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?' Like many things Jobs said, the pitch was wildly arrogant, self-important and self-aggrandizing, but ultimately correct. What Sculley did at Apple (mostly after firing Jobs) to sell the Macintosh and popularize personal, graphics-centered computing changed the world more than his invention of the Pepsi Challenge had. There really was a huge difference between selling Macs and selling sugar water. After listening to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg lay out his vision of how AI 'superintelligence' would change the world, though, my main reaction was: man, this guy just wants to sell us sugar water. 'Personal superintelligence'? Maybe just 'superintelligence,' it's cleaner In an Instagram video (of course) posted last week, Zuck explains that Meta's goal is to develop 'personal superintelligence for everyone,' accessed through devices like 'glasses that can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day.' 'A lot has been written about the scientific and economic advances that AI can bring,' he noted. 'And I'm really optimistic about this.' But his vision is 'different from others in the industry who want to direct AI at automating all of the valuable work': 'I think an even more meaningful impact in our lives is going to come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, be a better friend, and grow to become the person that you aspire to be.' This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. The main reaction to this pitch I've seen from smart AI observers is: are you kidding? 'Superintelligence,' by definition, means a system that performs better than a human, sometimes vastly better, across most if not all domains. And the most ambitious thing Zuck can think of to make with that is… VR glasses? As Fortune's Sharon Goldman put it, while Steve Jobs called his computers 'a bicycle for the mind,' 'Zuckerberg, by contrast, imagines superintelligence as a pair of Ray-Bans that help you…be a better friend?' The lack of ambition in Zuckerberg's rhetoric is all the more striking when one considers the extreme ambition of his spending on AI. This year alone, he's hired former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and veteran AI founder Daniel Gross; Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang (as part of a quasi-purchase of Scale, a massively important company whose training data is used by just about every AI company); Apple AI chief Ruoming Pang; and ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao, among several others. His hiring spree, and the gargantuan amounts he's willing to pay top talent, have roiled the sector for weeks now. At one competitor (former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab), Zuckerberg reportedly sent offers to more than a dozen of the company's 50 staffers, one of which was for over $1 billion over a few years, while the rest ranged from $200 million to $500 million over four years. Even for a company as rich as Meta, billion-plus offers for talent are unheard of. ($1 billion is how much Zuckerberg paid for all of Instagram in 2012.) It's a pretty vivid sign that Zuckerberg sees AI as the future of his business. But what does that future look like? I've seen the best digital minds of my generation wasted on Reels One could, very charitably, reason that Zuckerberg knows that a world of vastly superintelligent AI systems would lead to massive, far-reaching social ramifications that are not adequately summarized as 'you get smart sunglasses,' but he has concluded that most of his investors and customers aren't in a place to understand the gravity of those changes. Hence, talk about glasses. That could be what's happening, and I have some sympathy for his position if so. Trying to game out what a post-superintelligence world looks like is in fact extremely difficult, not least to those of us limited to mere human intellects. And it's usually scary — even if the changes ultimately prove positive. For all the uncertainty, there is no plausible world where people have access to 'personal superintelligence' and they and businesses do not use that to automate huge numbers of tasks, and there are a number of conceivable scenarios where that leads demand for human wage labor to totally collapse. Other scenarios see wages skyrocket. It's a tough situation for a CEO to message. But it's also worth considering the possibility that Zuckerberg means exactly what he's saying: that the AI systems his team is building are not meant to automate work but to provide a Meta-governed layer between individual human beings and the world outside of them. Facebook and Instagram are, in a sense, very crude versions of that layer, synthesizing and compressing the outside world into a digestible and addictive form people can consume throughout their days, and Zuckerberg's earlier obsession with the metaverse seemed a logical continuation. This approach has been immensely profitable. (Though, not so much the metaverse.) Imagine how much more profitable it'd be if a digital mind much smarter than Zuck's was designing it. Conversations like Zuckerberg's with the business writer Ben Thompson in May give credence to this interpretation. Zuckerberg sees four opportunities with AI: improving his products' recommendation algorithms to better target advertising, driving greater engagement on 'consumer surfaces' like Instagram Reels, 'business messaging' (i.e., businesses doing transactions through WhatsApp and Messenger, using AI), and lastly direct AI use à la ChatGPT. The promise of AI, to Zuckerberg, is that it can help him sell you more ads and convince you to spend more time watching Instagram brainrot. My reaction to that pitch was the same as AI writer Zvi Mowshowitz's: 'It was like if you took a left wing caricature of why Zuckerberg is evil, combined it with a left wing caricature about why AI is evil, and then fused them into their final form. Except it's coming directly from Zuckerberg, as explicit text, on purpose.' At least the sugar water from Pepsi tastes good. That the sixth largest company on Earth is devoting billions of dollars toward this vision is not, y'know, great. But it has a silver lining. One thing I've learned from talking to AI researchers over the years is that most of them are driven by a conviction that this thing they're building is really, really socially important. Sometimes that comes with a safety tinge ('this thing could kill us, and we need to make it so it doesn't'), sometimes with an accelerationist tinge ('this thing could liberate mankind from economic scarcity'), but either way it's usually stated with real conviction. If they only wanted money they'd go work for a hedge fund. But they also want to build something they're proud of. That character trait will, I think, cause the 'throw money at smart people until they all join' strategy that Zuckerberg is attempting to fail. If superintelligence is built, it will be built by a team that is productive due to a passionate, shared, optimistic vision for what a world with superintelligence will look like. It will be made because its makers want to change the world, not sell sugar water. A team of researchers joining primarily for the money, under a leader whose boldest vision is 'what if we sold more ads on sunglasses,' is not going to make it.
Yahoo
30-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Zuckerberg Outlines His Vision for the Development of AI ‘Superintelligence'
This story was originally published on Social Media Today. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Social Media Today newsletter. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has outlined his view for the development of AI 'superintelligence,' which is a goal that he believes is now in view, as we accelerate development of the latest AI systems. Which, in technical terms at least, are not 'AI' at all, as they are not 'intelligent,' as such. The current slate of generative AI tools are able to crossmatch data patterns, in order to come up with human-like responses, based on whatever inputs you give them, but that doesn't equate to thought, and these systems aren't capable of original ideas or human-like thinking. Indeed, Meta's own AI chief Yann Lecun has repeatedly highlighted the limitations with LLMs, noting that such tools will be useful in a range of applications. But they're not likely to lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is the Holy Grail of AI development, because such systems have no way of understanding the physical world, nor what their outputs are, in practical sense. In this respect, the current gen AI models are more akin to calculators than replicating human-like thinking. And it's that next stage, and the possibility of systems that can think for themselves, that Zuckerberg is now aiming for with his new super intelligence team. Which is a little scary, but Zuck has the money, and time. So it's happening, whether we like it or not. As explained by Zuckerberg: 'I am extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress. But perhaps even more important is that superintelligence has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where people will have greater agency to improve the world in the directions they choose.' Zuckerberg says that his new superintelligence project aims to 'bring personal superintelligence to everyone,' providing the power of advanced machine learning to everyday applications: 'As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.' Yeah, some of these are a little concerning, in reflecting Zuck's worldview, and the value of such tools. Like, being a better friend seems like that should remain in the realm of purely human experience, but maybe, for people like Zuckerberg, human connection is a key element that true AI can help with. Which may or may not be where we want to be headed. Either way, Zuckerberg has assembled his own Avengers-like team of AI development superstars, after gathering up staff from other AI projects. That team will be led by Shengjia Zhao, the co-creator of ChatGPT, and Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, with the two of them now tasked with building a system that can replicate the synapses of the human brain in digital form. Which will be some feat, though Meta is likely the frontrunner in this race. For years, Meta has been working on computer systems that can understand more about their environment, in order to factor such into their responses. Meta's V-JEPA 2 world model, for example, aims to mimic human understanding of the physical world, while Meta's 'Brain Decoding' process, which it first previewed in 2023, which aims to simulate neuron activity, and understand how humans think. Meta's even got direct insight into brain control itself, based on its previous efforts to build a human brain computer interface. That project has been in varying levels of exploration since 2017, and while Meta has since stepped back from its initial brain implant approach, it has been using this same MEG (magnetoencephalography) tracking to map brain activity in its more recent mind-reading projects. So Meta is already well-advanced in regards to understanding how the human brain functions, and how neurons can be translated to computer chips. Now, it's looking to cross the next threshold in building systems that can capitalize on this knowledge. Can it be done? Well again, Zuck's confident that it can, so much so that he's investing 'hundreds of billions' of dollars into making it a reality. 'Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful. Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices.' A world of empowered AI, which you can summon at any time via a wearable device. It's either utopia, or a disaster, with seemingly little in between. 'The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take, and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society.' Zuckerberg's obviously angling for the former, but really, we have no idea where this path leads, and what might come from Meta's superintelligence push. Sign in to access your portfolio
Business Insider
14-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Zuck is building Meta data centers in tents now, part of a mad dash to catch up in AI
Mark Zuckerberg is in full founder mode again. This time it's the AI version. Meta fell behind in the generative AI race earlier this year when the company rolled out its Llama 4 model. The product was not up to scratch, compared to rival offerings from DeepSeek, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Since then, Zuck has gone on a hiring bender, personally recruiting top AI talent with pay packages in the $100 million range and more. That's just one ingredient for success in generative AI. Another is high-quality data. Hence, Meta's weird $14 billion deal to buy just under half of Scale AI and its leader, Alex Wang. The third ingredient required is infrastructure, which is tech jargon for the AI chips (GPUs, etc), networking gear, and data centers needed to build, refine, and run giant AI models such as the Llama series. On Friday, SemiAnalysis blew the lid off Zuck's big plans for Meta's huge new AI infrastructure. You can read the report here. You'll need to pay to read the whole thing, but if you're serious about AI, you will prob want to shell out. Zuck confirmed some of the details of SemiAnalysis's report via a Facebook post on Monday. The CEO said Meta will build several new AI data centers that use more than 1 gigawatt of power each. This is how data center capacity is measured, and anything in the 1 gigawatt range is absolutely massive (or at least it was until now). Data centers in tents The thing that really caught my eye in the SemiAnalysis report is that Meta is building some of these AI data centers in tents right now. A Meta spokesperson confirmed this. Data centers house a lot of complex, expensive gear and they need to be kept cool in really controlled ways, otherwise some of the pricey gear will overheat. So, building data centers in tents is a sign of how quickly Zuck is moving to get Meta's new AI data centers up and running. Remember when Elon Musk had Tesla making Model 3 cars in tents outside the company's Fremont factory in 2018? That was about speed to market, and Zuck is now doing this for data centers — likely taking a page from Elon's strategy book. "Inspired by xAI's unprecedented time-to-market, Meta is embracing a datacenter design that prioritizes speed above all else," Semianalysis wrote in their Friday report. "They're already building more of them! Traditional datacenter and real estate investors, still somewhat reeling from xAI's Memphis site and time to market, will be shocked yet again." "From prefabricated power and cooling modules to ultra-light structures, speed is of the essence," it added. Tents get really hot, so this could be a challenge for running these prefab AI data centers. Indeed, Semianalysis reported that Meta could shut down workloads during the hottest summer days. Over the long term, Meta will likely build full data centers, but in the short and medium term, the company needs these facilities up and running "as soon as possible," Dylan Patel, CEO of SemiAnalysis, told me on Monday. And here's the full post from Zuck on Monday: "For our superintelligence effort, I'm focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry. We're also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence. We have the capital from our business to do this. SemiAnalysis just reported that Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online. "We're actually building several multi-GW clusters. We're calling the first one Prometheus, and it's coming online in '26. We're also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years. We're building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan. "Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher. I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!"
