Zuckerberg's Superintelligence Delusions
His vision for "personal superintelligence" has nothing to do with "personal empowerment", and Meta's plan will likely make existing social media issues exponentially worse | Edition #222
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Zuckerberg's Superintelligence Delusions
One of this week's tech highlights was Zuckerberg's vision for “personal superintelligence,” where he spoke about “a new era of personal empowerment” and “everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals.”
In today's edition, I write about Zuckerberg's announcement and what Meta's AI-related plans actually look like, based on what Zuckerberg told investors this week. Instead of empowering people, they might make existing social media issues exponentially worse.
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“Superintelligence” is one of 2025's hype words. The AI news cycle seems to have become a bit repetitive, so the latest AI announcements focus on a new promise around intelligence: surpassing humans.
Among the companies that have been heavily betting on this trend is Meta. Zuckerberg was personally involved in forming Meta's “superintelligence” team, allegedly hiring from competitors like OpenAI, with job offers reaching $1 billion.
This week, Zuckerberg announced his vision (video here) for a “personal superintelligence,” and some of his statements have activated my bull**t radar. Here are a few examples:
“(…) superintelligence has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where people will have greater agency to improve the world in the directions they choose.”
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“As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.”
Among the negative consequences of widespread AI deployment are dependence and disempowerment, as people overdelegate tasks to automated systems and miss opportunities to learn and develop.
Claiming that superintelligence will improve agency makes no sense, especially when, a few lines later, Zuckerberg claims that Meta's superintelligence will serve as a full-time crutch for intellectual and creative tasks and even help people “be a better friend.”
This is peak technosolutionism, with a strange touch of arrogance. So, AI-related abundance (whatever it means) will only have a meaningful impact when everyone has superintelligence?
Around a quarter of humans don't have access to drinking water, but ‘personal superintelligence’ will impact them more?
“Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful. 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.”
I almost laughed out loud when I read this part. So, all this ‘personal superintelligence’ talk is just a marketing strategy to sell Meta's smart glasses (which most people are not interested in wearing)?
I understand that Meta must justify its massive ‘Metaverse’ investments from a few years ago, but smart glasses sales must be really bad if Meta had to create a whole new ‘superintelligence lab’ to help promote them.
“We have the resources and the expertise to build the massive infrastructure required, and the capability and will to deliver new technology to billions of people across our products. I'm excited to focus Meta's efforts towards building this future.”
This part is essential to understanding what Meta's AI-related plans really are (and to making financial sense of them), as Zuckerberg clarified to investors this week: