Mark Zuckerberg reveals NVIDIA and $10.5 billion will power new human-level AI

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has revealed the company's plans to develop Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), an artificial intelligence-powered system comparable to human-level intelligence.

In a new post published to Zuckerberg's Instagram account, the Facebook founder outlined the company's ambition to become a leader in the race to develop the world's first AGI. According to Zuckerberg, Meta will be betting big on its plan to develop an open-source AGI, with the company's CEO saying it will be purchasing an astonishing 350,000 NVIDIA H100 AI GPUs, which are each priced at approximately $30,000 ($10.5 billion total).

Additionally, Zuckerberg said that overall, nearly 600,000 H100-equivalent of compute power would eventually be established if you count all of the other GPUs the company will have under the hood. The announcement from Zuckerberg has many researchers worried about the repercussions of releasing an open-source AGI before ways of regulating it have been developed.

Speaking to The Guardian, Dame Wendy Hall, a computer scientist at the University of Southampton in England, said that if the technology were to get into the wrong hands, the result could be a great deal of harm. Hall added that it's "so irresponsible for the company to suggest it".

Furthermore, Hall said that despite Zuckerberg's announcement, the achievement of reaching a human-level AI is still "many years away," which will give regulators some time to draw up policies that protect society from any potential harm caused by the new technology.

"It is a matter of public safety that we progress this work with some urgency," said Hall

"There are deep and complex arguments about the merits of open-sourcing current AI models, pushing that into the realm of AGI could be world-saving or catastrophic. These decisions need to be taken by international consensus, not in the boardroom of a tech giant," said Andrew Rogoyski, one of the directors of the Institute for People-Centred AI at the University of Surrey