Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg penned an open letter today touting the emergence of superintelligent artificial intelligence and how the company will pave a path towards it.

“The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable,” he wrote. “Developing superintelligence is now in sight.”

In the letter, Zuckerberg shared Meta’s vision for approaching this new possibility for AI and how it will help free people from what he sees as drudge labor. In his lengthy commentary, he discussed how historical trends in technology have disrupted work and “steadily freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits we choose.”

From his view, AI will be no different. “I am extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress,” Zuckerberg said.

He contends that superintelligence should focus on personal needs rather than eliminating valuable jobs. Many AI experts have noted that the rise of this technology will lead to significant disruptions in the job market, and some of these changes are already happening.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently noted that certain categories of jobs, such as customer support, may be the first to be replaced. “Now you call one of these things and AI answers. It’s like a super-smart, capable person,” he said.

Zuckerberg said he wants to make superintelligence personal, by which he means to put it in the hands of people. In their devices, to extend their knowledge and capabilities, similar to how mobile devices have made people superhuman by putting supercomputers in the palm of their hands.

Meta has poured a lot of research and development into designing smart glasses that allow AI to see, hear and respond to what people are experiencing and Zuckerberg believes that’s the medium through which personal superintelligence will manifest.

“Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful,” he said. “Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices.”

While Zuckerberg expressed optimism about AI superintelligence benefiting humanity, his statement also indicated a pullback from offering it as open software to the community.

“We believe the benefits of superintelligence should be shared with the world as broadly as possible,” Zuckerberg wrote. “That said, superintelligence will raise novel safety concerns. We’ll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source.”

That seems to stand in contention with what Zuckerberg wrote a year ago, stating that the company would remain open source with its AI work. In general, when an open-source software product is released, it’s made publicly available and can be modified, used and distributed by anyone.

Although Meta claims many of its models fall into this category, it should be noted that the company’s Llama AI model family has a somewhat restrictive license. The Open Source Initiative, a group that oversees the open-source definition, has openly stated that the license fails on multiple counts.

For example, Meta restricts users from using the Llama model on critical infrastructure or for regulated controlled substances. The agreement also requires users to license the model if their model use exceeds more than 700 million monthly active users in a calendar month. None of these restrictions works within the open-source definition.

Although Zuckerberg will keep superintelligence under proprietary wraps, he concluded that he believes the rest of the decade will be “the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take.”

Of course, he also added that personal superintelligence will be delivered to the billions of Meta customers via the company’s products.

Photo: Anthony Quintano/Flickr