Hours before Meta’s earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision for the future of AI: personalized super-smart AI for everyone — especially in the form of wearable glasses.
He said his vision is for everyone to have an AI tool 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.”
The announcement came in the form of a plain-text webpage and letter to the public espousing the importance of bringing “personal superintelligence” to everyone, even if it takes a while. Superintelligence is another term for artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a type of AI that equals or surpasses human intelligence on a wide range of tasks — a goal that most leading AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, are chasing right now.
“The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable,” Zuckerberg wrote of AI’s advances. “Developing superintelligence is now in sight.”
The news follows Zuckerberg’s expensive, high-profile, and often dramatic AI hiring spree after making its largest-ever external investment: paying $14.3 billion to acquire a 49 percent stake in Scale AI, an industry giant for AI training data. Zuckerberg spun up a new superintelligence lab headed by Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, and since then, Meta has poached top talent for the team from competitors like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and Apple. A select few of those offers reportedly include $100 million pay packages, although many also fall in the $1-1.4 million range, The Verge has previously reported.
But not everyone can be bought. Many top AI researchers have said no to Meta offers, as many of their salaries are already so large that they could retire, meaning it’s only possible to attract or retain them with a broad mission they believe in, or alignment with their ethics or goals for AI advancement. Zuckerberg may be trying to do that with his Wednesday manifesto.
Zuckerberg also subtly cast doubt on the goals of his competitors in AI, writing that Meta’s goal “is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output.” For instance, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has publicly stated he believes that AI could replace many jobs in society and eventually lead to a form of universal basic income.
Zuckerberg continued his bullish stance on smart glasses, writing that above all, humanity’s “primary computing devices” will be personal devices like glasses.
He also included a warning about being careful about what companies choose to open-source, referencing the fact that the nature of open models makes it easier to get past built-in safeguards and potentially trick them into dangerous actions on a large scale. It’s a discussion that’s been especially relevant in light of the open-source part of President Trump’s recent AI Action Plan.
“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 wrote.
