The future is for billionaires – the rest of us will get open weight AI models, maybe

AI and ML

Mark Zuckerberg muses about 'superintelligence' and 'arc of human civilization'

OPINION In a public post titled "The Future is for Everyone," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declares, "We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history." 

For Zuck to posit that "The Future is for Everyone" is at once facile for being so vague it could mean anything – are there people now living who are excluded from the future? – and foolish for its failure to address real issues that actually affect people's lives.

We are perhaps not so fortunate as the unpopular but wealthy Zuck, worth more than $200 billion. But we're fortunate enough not to be chased by a public record that mocks his musings.

In 2019, Zuck said, "The Future is Private." This was while he was running Facebook, an ad business predicated on the denial of privacy. His credibility as a forecaster of the future leaves something to be desired.

His company could have worked toward this future after its rebranding as Meta in 2021. Instead, it became the prime purveyor of Meta Glasses, dubbed "pervert glasses" by detractors for flouting people's privacy expectations.

The purpose of Zuck's post is to "develop a philosophy for how we can best use superintelligence to ensure it improves all of our lives, work, communities, freedom and safety."

He declares, "The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?"

Beyond the fact that "superintelligence" is undefined, he overstates the importance of AI in the scheme of things. Centralization and access may be defining questions for AI policy, but AI policy exists in a global context that invites tougher inquiries.

Here are a few that come to mind: Who will have access to the world's wealth and to what portion of it? Who will have access to water, food, and healthcare? Where will human rights be respected? Where will democracy survive? Where will the rule of law thrive? Where will people have access to affordable justice? What will constrain technology from becoming a tool of tyranny? What will constrain public discourse that sows dissension and promotes harm?

Hey, Siri, what's the answer to humanity's problems?

The initial 700 words or so of Zuck's call for Pollyannaish AI groupthink lean into banal generalizations. We'll spare you the line-by-line critique but take, for example, "All new technologies create opportunities and challenges." 

That's true but also not very insightful. We leave it as an exercise to the reader to ask Meta's latest AI model to produce a more trenchant formulation of Zuck's all-in-for-AI utopianism.

The subsequent section cites specific examples of how Meta is approaching "superintelligence," and it's no more credible. 

Consider Zuck's assertion that his foretold universally accessible AI assistant "will have strong privacy and security options so you can trust it to handle all of your personal content knowing that no one else can access your information, similar to how encryption works on WhatsApp."

Meta's track record here doesn't exactly make this claim more convincing.

"Everyone will have incredible tools for creation to express your ideas." 

And it will become more difficult to market these ideas because AI has commodified content creation. But creators will be able to distribute their work for free on social media networks to boost engagement and sell ads.

"Everyone will have powerful tools to create new businesses and the economy will become more entrepreneurial." 

That's just a naive generalization that fails to consider the difficulty of creating and sustaining a business amid intense competition – something major tech companies have fought tooth and nail to avoid. Driving for Uber might be considered entrepreneurial, but it's an option many would trade for a fair wage, good health insurance coverage, a pension, and other employee benefits that once sustained the US workforce.

And then there's the real tell: Meta is ready to profit from providing AI access.

"Everyone will have free or affordable access to these tools … We will offer free versions that will be accessible to billions of people. For those who want to pay to use more compute, there will be a dynamic auction mechanism that will guarantee that everyone gets the lowest price possible for the intelligence and compute they're using while also ensuring the capacity is used for whatever people collectively find most valuable."

The Future is for Everyone, but distribution and monetization are for Meta and a few other cloud service providers. Someone's gotta pay for Meta's datacenter capex.

Zuck is right about the need to keep AI accessible to as broad an audience as possible. "Restricting people and companies from using the leading open source models – wherever they come from – will reduce the quality of AI accessible to them, and centralize AI rather than putting more power in people's hands," he writes.

But then he squanders whatever credit he might be due by co-opting Dr. Martin Luther King's famous statement, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

"The arc of human civilization has bent towards putting more power in people's hands to live and shape the world in the ways we believe are best," Zuck concludes. "Superintelligence holds the promise of giving everyone that power, and building a positive future for everyone."

If you want power to shape the world, try being a billionaire, particularly if you can get your hands on a major social media or search platform and can spend your way to political sway. For everyone else, there's always voting, where allowed by law and tolerated by authorities, even if that doesn't necessarily produce the desired results. ®