Meta has hired Scale CEO Alexandr Wang to oversee its AI efforts as it pursues superintelligence. With the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley out of the way, it's time to ponder one massive, nagging question: Can an effort that may depend on social media data really be superintelligent?
One of the tried and true axioms is "garbage in, garbage out," or GIGO. Any system that has low quality input is going to give you garbage. Let's face it there is nothing "super" about social media and spare me on the "intelligent" argument.
So now, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are revamping the AI strategy via the Scale AI investment and reportedly building an AI dream team. Wang reportedly is just the start of this AI supergroup. Meta has a bit of envy about big statements from the likes of OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei.
And just in case you think GIGO is so yesterday just check out TechCrunch's tale on the Meta AI app, which just might be a "viral mess."
Meta's reported $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, which is now valued at $29 billion, is one expensive acquihire. Maybe this bold move by Meta works, but I'm still stuck on GIGO. The secret sauce to any superintelligent model is going to be the proprietary data. In Meta's case that's Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp even if it's just a small subset of overall training data. If Meta's Llama models are all about the same data every other model uses there's no value add.
For what it's worth, I have the same GIGO concerns about Grok no matter how it seems to impress me with its responses. Why? I know there's X data in there somewhere.
Wang said the opportunity to lead Meta's AI efforts was a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Scale AI will name Jason Droege interim CEO. Droege has strong background and it wouldn't be surprising if Scale AI is the ultimate winner in the end. Wang noted that Meta's investment will be distributed among shareholders and vested equity holders.
