{"id":32673,"date":"2025-07-30T14:57:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T14:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/32673\/"},"modified":"2025-07-30T14:57:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T14:57:10","slug":"how-zuckerbergs-prometheus-ai-project-could-change-the-world-as-we-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/32673\/","title":{"rendered":"How Zuckerberg\u2019s Prometheus AI project could change the world as we know it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since November 2022, the world of AI<\/a> has been near-synonymous <\/a>with one tool and one tool alone: ChatGPT<\/a>. Last week, we discovered that users pepper OpenAI\u2019s chatbot <\/a>with 2.5 billion prompts every day, according to newly released data from the company, while a staggering half a billion people every week interact with the chatbot<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If social media was the marker of the last generation of big tech, then AI is the next one. And while it seems as if OpenAI could become the household name, there\u2019s one person who wants to break that: Meta<\/a> CEO Mark Zuckerberg<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the last few years, Zuckerberg, who set up Facebook<\/a> in 2004 and is now worth $247bn, has expanded his digital empire to encompass WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads. He has also made big pledges to try and wrest control of the AI narrative away from OpenAI, offering billion-dollar deals to some of his top staff in an attempt to lure them to join his AI project called Prometheus. The venture is due to launch early next year and is named after the Greek god who stole fire from the other gods and gave it to humanity.<\/p>\n

\u201cMeta has faced several setbacks with its generative AI strategy, prompting the company to spend more aggressively in an effort to catch up in the AGI race,\u201d says Stefan Slowinski, a research analyst at BNP Paribas. Driving the investment, which dwarfs a lot of what the company has previously spent on similar initiatives, at least in such a short time, is the desire to make up lost ground against the competition, mostly OpenAI, which is supplanting Meta as the dominant force in terms of what we interact with on a daily basis. <\/p>\n

Similar threats are compelling Google to spend big in developing its own AI model, Gemini, and to fend off challenges from an OpenAI web browser to its Chrome app. Elon Musk is also ramping up his work on his xAI tool, because of \u201coverwhelming\u201d<\/a> existential dread about AI. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe think internet CEOs are likely seeing a growing AI opportunity as 2025 progresses, and greater risk of missing out, and therefore the competitive capex [capital expenditure] cycle is far from over,\u201d says Justin Post, an analyst at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch.<\/p>\n

Meta is one of the few companies that can afford to spend such large figures on AI. While OpenAI and others aren\u2019t exactly short of money, they\u2019re reliant on funders who will want, at some point, to see a return on their investment. Meta, meanwhile, is flush with cash, having made a $134bn profit last year, which means its pockets are a little deeper than most.<\/p>\n

For that reason, Zuckerberg\u2019s desire to corner the AI market and make it Meta\u2019s own has to be taken seriously. Few others can commit the amount of cash he has in the last few weeks alone, which is why social media commentary by rivals has been quite so catty about him buying up AI talent.<\/p>\n

Still, not everyone is convinced we\u2019ll soon be living in a world using AI under Zuckerberg\u2019s direction. \u201cMy personal conviction is that the world will not exist,\u201d says one former Meta employee, who was granted anonymity because their current employer does not allow them to speak to the press about their past role.<\/p>\n

\"ChatGPT<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

ChatGPT handles billions of user prompts every single day (Getty)<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not from a lack of trying by Zuckerberg, the former Meta staff member admits. \u201cA lot of people forget that when Google acquired DeepMind [in 2014], it was actually Mark Zuckerberg who wanted to buy DeepMind. He failed to do so, and then essentially went on a shopping spree, as he is doing right now, which involved hiring Yann LeCun.\u201d <\/p>\n

LeCun was a leading academic researcher before founding Facebook AI Research and is currently Meta\u2019s chief AI scientist. He has criticised OpenAI and Google DeepMind for being too closed or fear-driven and believes AI will augment humans, but will not replace them or pose apocalyptic risks. He has said: \u201cWe\u2019re working on the next generation of AI systems that can reason, plan and understand the world the way animals and humans do.\u201d<\/p>\n

The former Meta employee believes Zuckerberg is trying to recreate his tech shopping spree today, but will face problems because Meta is not the same company it was in 2014. \u201cIt has a lot of big battle scars,\u201d they say. \u201cIt\u2019s gone through a lot of corporate issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also working against Meta these days is that the financial situation has changed, with leading AI talent requiring millions of dollars in compensation, as AI researchers are treated like rock stars. Both of which make it more difficult \u2013 and more expensive \u2013 to try and attract talent.<\/p>\n

\"Meta\u2019s<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

Meta\u2019s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun at the World Economic Forum in January (AFP\/Getty)<\/p>\n

Meta has had some success in attracting talent to its AI arm: Alexandr Wang, the founder of rival Scale AI, was brought into the tech giant in June through a $14.3bn deal to acquire a stake in his company. Wang now sits as chief AI officer within Meta, and was joined by Nat Friedman, the former CEO of coding platform GitHub, who co-leads Meta\u2019s specific new Superintelligence Lab alongside another new hire, Daniel Gross. <\/p>\n

Nearly a dozen OpenAI staff, including some of those who developed ChatGPT\u2019s most foundational models, have also been lured over to the company, as have some of Apple\u2019s top talent. The sums on offer to those researchers seem scarcely believable: up to $300m for individual staff members over four years, according to some reports.<\/p>\n

Still, the cash isn\u2019t enough for some AI researchers to join Zuckerberg and his colleagues. Rumours abound within the industry that some individuals have been offered billion-dollar sums to make the leap to Meta, but have rejected them because they don\u2019t want to join Zuckerberg. These figures have been repeated by The Wall Street Journal, which said Zuckerberg personally offered a billion dollars to OpenAI\u2019s chief research officer, Mark Chen, to jump ship.<\/p>\n

Meta isn\u2019t just splashing the cash on talent; it\u2019s investing in the infrastructure that will be crucial to the successful adoption of AI at the scale Zuckerberg and others hope to make money from. This month, Zuckerberg announced via his social network Threads that Meta would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build gigantic data centres to power its AI models. <\/p>\n

\"OpenAI<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (Getty)<\/p>\n

Prometheus will be based in Ohio and the footprint of the massive data centre will be nearly as big as the island of Manhattan, Zuckerberg has revealed. Another similarly huge data centre would be built in Louisiana by the end of the decade. Prometheus alone will need 1 gigawatt of energy to power it, enough to power nearly a million homes.<\/p>\n

The financial spend \u201csignifies a real commitment to push in that direction,\u201d says Carissa Veliz, an AI ethicist at Oxford University.<\/p>\n

The big question is that, if Zuckerberg\u2019s big money bets pay off and Meta manages to leapfrog not just OpenAI but its slew of competitors, including the similarly flush Google, then what will the world look like? If the gloves have come off, will that include the guardrails too?<\/p>\n

Experts foresee a deeper integration of AI into our lives. \u201cMeta is already a platform deeply integrated into many features of people’s lives,\u201d says Michael Veale, an associate professor of law at University College London, who points to everything from Facebook to Instagram and WhatsApp as platforms we rely on to interact with one another. \u201cAs a result, they have a much greater capability than OpenAI to deploy tools that access and use individuals\u2019 data and communications.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not necessarily a good thing, says Veale. \u201cAt this point, people\u2019s attention should be on how these products are going to be integrated into services designed to produce or extract value, rather than be too distracted by visions aimed at press coverage and marketing hype,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\"Zuckerberg<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg is offering billions of dollars in an attempt to corner the AI market (Getty)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a worry shared by Oxford\u2019s Carissa Veliz. \u201cAt the moment, the kind of AI that we’re using and the kind of design that we’re seeing is incredibly invasive and Meta is perhaps the least trustworthy of them all, which is saying something.\u201d<\/p>\n

She points to Meta\u2019s history with how Facebook was initially designed, including Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s infamous early comments that people who handed over data to him in the early days of the platform were \u201cdumb f***s\u201d, and the controversy the company faced with Cambridge Analytica. \u201cThinking about a company that still has a business model based on surveillance, developing AI in this very surveillance-heavy design is a definite cause for concern,\u201d says Veliz. Meta did not respond to a request to comment on this story.<\/p>\n

However, if anyone can make money out of AI, it\u2019s Zuckerberg, say the experts. \u201cMeta, unlike OpenAI, has a track record of turning technology into profit rather than investor capital,\u201d says UCL\u2019s Veale. \u201cIn a corporate sense, OpenAI is probably realising, as they did with Microsoft, that the adults are now in the room with it. Whether Zuckerberg counts among those adults in 2025 is something we have to wait and see.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since November 2022, the world of AI has been near-synonymous with one tool and one tool alone: ChatGPT.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32674,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-32673","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32673\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}