Thoughts on superintelligence

Zuckerberg has written a post on “personal superintelligence” here. Most of it is just fluff - for example, “superintelligence” is never defined*, so it looks more like a PR piece. However, there are a couple of lines worth commenting on.

If trends continue, then you’d expect people to spend less time in productivity software, and more time creating and connecting.

Not sure what “productivity software” refers to here, but as a business that relies on creators, it makes sense that Meta would want people spending more time creating and engaging with their software… err.. I mean “connecting with others”. Sincerely, I do believe Meta’s products facilitate some connection, but my full thoughts on this are complex and better saved for a future post. This seems out of place with the rest of the article (which is about “empowering” people) but is in line with what makes sense for Meta as a business.

Personal devices like glasses […] will become our primary computing devices.

This one is interesting because it looks like a big backtrack from “the metaverse” (VR) and a move to augmented/mixed reality (AR/MR), which seemed like the obvious move even when the Metaverse was just created. As evidence:

In a similar vein, I’ve always been, I think like a lot of people, more bullish about AR versus VR because like a phone, it’s something that accompanies you in the real world, as opposed to being immersive and you go somewhere else.

As stated by Ben Thompson in this [2022 interview with Zuckerberg], it was clear back then that AR was likely to be a bigger market than VR.

We’ll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source.

This is a clear move away from Llama where the model was open-sourced.

*: Based on context, it seems to be referring to digital assistants.