The Prompt: Can Meta Hire Its Way To Superintelligence?

InnovationEditors' PickThe mpt: Can Meta Hire Its Way To Superintelligence

Plus: People are using AI while tripping on magic mushrooms

ByRashi Shrivastava, Forbes Staff

Rashi Shrivastava is a staff writer covering AI and startups

Cloudflare, the platform that powers millions of websites representing 20% of the internet, announced yesterday that it will by default block crawlers from AI companies from scraping content without permission

It’s a significant move as AI juggernauts OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta have scrounged the corners of the internet for data to power their AI models, often depriving the websites of the traffic (and associated revenue) they would have otherwise gotten

Publishers Conde Nast, TIME, The Associated Press and The Atlantic as well as companies Pinterest and Quora have expressed their support for Cloudflare’s shift to permission-based crawling

The company also announced a partnership with an initiative called Pay Per Crawl that would allow website creators to get paid for their content

Let’s get into the headlines

PEAK PERFORMANCE Microsoft claims that its AI system, called “Microsoft AI Diagnostic Center,” can diagnose diseases four times more accurately than a group of experienced doctors at a significantly lower cost

However, in the study doctors were asked not to use any additional tools to aid their diagnosis, which doesn’t reflect real world scenarios

ETHICS + LAW AI-generated s that portray Black women as primates and perpetuate racist stereotypes are amassing millions of views on platforms Instagram and TikTok, Wired reported

The s, part of a social media trend called “Bigfoot Baddie,” were generated by Google’s AI generator, Veo 3

TALENT RESHUFFLES Anysphere, the company behind fast growing AI coding tool Cursor, has hired two engineers from Anthropic who previously worked on Claude Code, The Information reported

Cursor, which is used by developers at top AI companies to create grams and write code, is also a customer of Anthropic’s powerful coding models

DEEP DIVEIn the past few weeks, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has personally reached out to dozens of AI reers and engineers and offered eye-popping multi-million dollar pay packages, according to multiple reports

On Monday, Alexandr Wang, Meta’s newly hired Chief AI Officer and former CEO of data labelling giant Scale AI, announced the creation of a new lab within Meta that is aiming to build so-called “superintelligence”— an AI system that outperforms humans in a range of cognitive tasks including creativity and blem solving. (That’s different from artificial general intelligence which is an AI system that can match human cognitive abilities,) Joining Wang are 11 top reers that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has freshly poached from leading AI labs including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, with shiny multi-million dollar offers

In the past few weeks, Zuckerberg has personally reached out to dozens of reers and engineers and offered eye-popping multi-million dollar pay packages, according to multiple reports

The Facebook founder has offered top talent $300 million over four years, with $100 million in total compensation (including equity) for the first year, Wired recently reported

Meta’s initiative also raises questions whether “The List” has actually got the right names on it

Richard Socher, a pioneer in natural language cessing and CEO of You

Com, tells me that while the talent pool for AI engineers is relatively small, companies Meta are scouting for talent in the most “obvious places” OpenAI, which ends up becoming expensive. "Not everyone who's joined OpenAI as employee number 500 is more qualified than someone in a smaller startup," he said

That said, not everyone at OpenAI is a target: Alex Nichol, a deep learning reer at the startup posted on X, “Kinda off that Meta didn’t try to recruit me… (not that I would accept, but it's nice to feel recognized)”

While the hires may seem flashy, they are entirely within reach for a giant Meta, which has near-unlimited financial resources and unfettered access to powerful chips used to run these AI models to woo top talent, even from cushy jobs at juggernauts OpenAI

But not everyone is convinced that the monetary incentives are enough to build a superstar AI team and create the best AI ducts

Two former Meta AI employees told Forbes they are unconvinced that huge sums of cash can motivate reers to build superintelligence. “You want to attract people who care,” a former Meta AI employee said

Meta itself has lost a lot of its top AI talent over the years, who’ve either left to start their own companies or to join rivals OpenAI, the former Meta AI employee told Forbes. “A lot of people left to go to OpenAI…

This is Mark trying to undo the loss of talent,” they said

WEEKLY DEMO In an experiment called ject Vend, Anthropic let its flagship AI model Claude run a small automated physical store in its San Francisco office

The AI system, which had access to different external grams, was responsible for maintaining the inventory, setting prices and carrying out transactions

But it experienced a series of hiccups that included inventing a fake Venmo account, stocking and selling metal cubes after being mpted by a customer and giving persuasive customers discounts

MODEL BEHAVIOR People are using AI tools ChatGPT to act as “trip sitters” — a term used to describe a sober person who monitors someone under the influence of psychedelic— while they consume psychedelics magic mushrooms, MIT nology Review reported

During their trip, people chat with AI tools to their feelings and calm themselves

But adding AI into the mix could result in a “dangerous psychological cocktail,” according to multiple psychotherapists

Confidential information with Forbes

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