Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg pushed back on calls for AI companies to work together to slow the pace of their products\u2019 development, following warnings from inside AI labs of the potential for human annihilation via rogue technology. <\/p>\n
In an interview with NBC News\u2019 chief tech analyst Joanna Stern, Zuckerberg said that leading AI companies could slow down or pause development of their own products if they felt the technology was unsafe. His position cuts against recent calls for coordinated action from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. <\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think that we need some kind of industrywide coordination,\u201d Zuckerberg said. \u201cI think that each lab needs to take the time, and when it sees that there are issues, you just take the time that you need internally to basically make sure that you\u2019re proceeding safely.\u201d<\/p>\n
His comments came during a wide-ranging discussion with Stern about Meta\u2019s approach to AI, wearable devices and privacy. Zuckerberg expanded on comments he posted on X<\/a> last week, distancing himself from Amodei and Altman\u2019s calls to \u201cpace\u201d or regulate the speed of AI development. <\/p>\n Zuckerberg staked out a defiant position amid growing concern about risks from advanced AI systems. In early September, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon set off a wave of pitched concerns when he resigned over fears that AI systems could spiral out of human control in the next few years.<\/p>\n Amodei released an essay<\/a> calling for intercompany efforts to \u201cpace the frontier<\/a>\u201d of AI development, which Altman soon endorsed alongside Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis and xAI\u2019s Elon Musk. <\/p>\n Zuckerberg said there was no need for such efforts, which critics have said are a Trojan horse that could allow AI companies to shut out competition and take control of efforts to regulate the industry.<\/p>\n \u201cI happen to think that there\u2019s plenty of commercial incentive to get this right,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n Amodei and Altman briefed the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday, using the session to make their case for cooperation on slowing down the rate of AI progress in order to have more time to develop adequate safety and monitoring measures.<\/p>\n Speaking to Stern in California, Zuckerberg emphasized that customers would naturally flock to the products that served their purposes best and said that an unsafe or unwieldy product would scare away potential users. <\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re building a product, people aren\u2019t going to want to use it if it doesn\u2019t do what they want,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n The company\u2019s Muse AI agent, an autonomous AI assistant, has soared in popularity in recent weeks. Released on Sept. 8, it can perform a raft of actions on behalf of users \u2014 from booking plane tickets and replying to emails to compiling research briefs and canceling unused magazine subscriptions. Muse is now the most popular free offering on the Apple App and Google Play stores. <\/p>\n Mark Zuckerberg interview<\/p>\n Several AI companies \u2014 including Amazon<\/a> and Nvidia<\/a> \u2014 have also released their own AI agents since the first widespread consumer-facing agent, OpenClaw, burst onto the AI scene<\/a> in November.<\/p>\n As an example of Muse\u2019s capabilities, Zuckerberg said his own Muse agent helped give feedback on his mixed martial arts performance by connecting to cameras watching over his workout area. <\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re basically going to have an extremely capable assistant who can understand the things that you care about,\u201d Zuckerberg said. <\/p>\n Rather than worry about distant apocalyptic scenarios from rapidly improving AI systems, Zuckerberg said, AI companies should focus on making sure their systems understand users\u2019 desires and intents and handle that information with discretion.<\/p>\n \u201cNailing those things are going to be the most important next things to align with what people actually want in the world,\u201d Zuckerberg said.<\/p>\n Zuckerberg pointed out that the Muse system is actually several agents working together \u2014 another Meta AI agent, called Sentinel, oversees and polices the main Muse agent. If the Sentinel observes the Muse agent potentially exceeding its remit, the oversight agent can alert users and ask for human permission before carrying out any further actions. <\/p>\n \u201cThe AI agent needs to be trained from the ground up to have a sense of what information is OK to share and what isn\u2019t,\u201d Zuckerberg said. Muse and other AI agents have stoked privacy concerns, given the amount of information and access that users can provide to them, including linking email accounts, bank cards and more so they can act without human intervention.<\/p>\n Zuckerberg said users\u2019 information was safe with Meta, pointing to the company\u2019s track record on privacy and WhatsApp\u2019s encrypted messaging as evidence that users could trust Muse with their data. <\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve shown that we have the ability to build those kinds of world-class, leading security systems,\u201d Zuckerberg said, mentioning that Meta worked with a field-leading cryptographer behind the popular anonymous Signal messaging app to develop its own secure technology. \u201cI think that\u2019s something that people can feel very good about.\u201d<\/p>\n Taking stock of the larger AI landscape, Zuckerberg distanced himself from warnings from Coxon and other researchers that AI could cause human extinction within a few years. Instead, he highlighted how personalized AI systems could revolutionize human life \u2014 echoing his August essay<\/a> about the dawn of personalized superintelligence. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of rhetoric that is filled with doom,\u201d Zuckerberg said. \u201cI\u2019m quite optimistic about the fact that this is going to be a very positive future for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg pushed back on calls for AI companies to work together to slow…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":626097,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-626096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}