In a Threads post last week, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company’s new frontier is open-source artificial general intelligence (AGI). Meta has united its FAIR and GenAI research teams behind the goal of developing such a platform, which Zuckerberg described as part of the company’s “long-term vision.” “The next generation of services required is building full general intelligence, building the best AI assistants, AIs for creators, AIs for businesses and more,” Zuckerberg said, explaining that will require “advances in every area of AI from reasoning to planning to coding to memory and other cognitive abilities.”

Zuckerberg says of AGI in the video that Meta intends to “open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit.”

FAIR is Meta’s Fundamental AI Research group, while GenAI is building generative apps for Meta’s many apps and products. They are now joined under a single corporate unit.

“The goal is for Meta’s AI breakthroughs to more directly reach its billions of users,” reports The Verge, noting that OpenAI and Google AI are also pursuing development of AGI.

“A lot of the best researchers want to work on the more ambitious problems,” Zuckerberg tells The Verge, which writes that “the battle for AI talent has never been more fierce, with every company in the space vying for an extremely small pool of researchers and engineers,” many of whom command “eye-popping compensation packages to the tune of over $1 million a year.”

In the video post, which also appeared on Instagram Reels, Zuckerberg says “the company’s ‘future roadmap’ for AI requires it to build a ‘massive compute infrastructure,’” which by the end of 2024 will include 350,000 H100 graphics cards from Nvidia,” reports CNBC, which then does the math, extrapolating that equates to “close to $9 billion” in Nvidia chips.

“We have built up the capacity to do this at a scale that may be larger than any other individual company. I think a lot of people may not appreciate that,” Zuckerberg tells The Verge, in a quote that was squarely aimed at Wall Street.

“Zuckerberg also pointed out that the company is currently training Llama 3 and touted the metaverse and Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses,” writes VentureBeat, contextualizing that his remarks come “directly after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s many comments about AGI at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.”

The comments also come in the wake of what VB describes as Meta Chief Scientist Yann LeCun’s frequently expressed “skepticism that AGI will arrive anytime soon — certainly not in the next five years.”