Quartz reports:

Meta’s chief AI scientist says even “cat-level intelligence” is “very far” away. His CEO just bet $14.3 billion on superintelligence.

The contradiction crystallized last week when Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs, a brand new division led by Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang. Zuckerberg promised in a memo that “developing superintelligence is coming into sight” and called it “the beginning of a new era for humanity.” The declaration put Zuckerberg on a collision course with Yann LeCun, Meta’s top AI researcher and a Turing Award winner, who has spent the last few years publicly arguing that current approaches can’t even achieve animal-level intelligence — let alone the godlike AI his boss is now promising to build.

The philosophical split extends beyond timelines to Meta’s core AI strategy. LeCun has consistently beaten the drum for open-source AI, calling it essential for diversity and democracy. As recently as last year, he praised Zuckerberg’s commitment to open source, writing on LinkedIn that “AI platforms must be open, just like the software infrastructure of the Internet became open.” He argued that open source enables “more diversity in languages, cultures, value systems, and centers of interest in AI assistants.”

But Zuckerberg’s superintelligence memo makes no mention of open source, a notable omission given that he wrote just last July that “Open Source AI is the Path Forward.” According to the New York Times, Meta executives even discussed “de-investing” in Llama, their open-source model, and potentially embracing closed models from competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic.

LeCun continues pushing the open-source message on social media, recently retweeting praise for Meta’s “open release of Llama that changed the field.” Yet his boss appears to be reconsidering that very strategy. [Continue reading…]