AI Scientist Raises Concerns to Mark Zuckerberg About Potential Extinction of Facebook and Instagram

When ChatGPT came out, the world got its first glimpse of what generative AI can do. When it started to take over the mainstream, rival companies like Google were said to be left behind by the unexpected competition. And according to reports, Google internally declared it a “code red.”

Meta, which is focused on its mixed reality metaverse goals, was another company feeling the heat. In fact, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was warned that Facebook and Instagram could become extinct if he didn’t act fast enough to create a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

According to the New York Times, Dr. LeCun, Meta’s chief A.I. scientist, had warned Zuckerberg about OpenAI’s moves. “He said Meta should match OpenAI’s technology and also push forward with A.I. an assistant that could do things on the Internet for you,” the New York Times reported. “Websites like Facebook and Instagram could become extinct, he warned. OH. was the future,” the report added.

Zuckerberg eventually came around to Dr. LeCun’s way of thinking. The model his Paris team built was known as LLaMa, or Large Language Model Meta AI. Meta has continued to invest heavily in AI ever since, and earlier this year the company released the next generation of the LlaMa model, called Llama 2.

Meta released the model as open source, meaning it is freely available for both commercial and research purposes. However, Meta’s model is less efficient than Google’s Bard and OpenAI’s GPT-4, and even Meta’s own research paper admits as much.

In addition to Llama 2, Meta has also doubled down on the launch of several new products equipped with artificial intelligence, such as the Meta AI chatbot. The new chatbot would be available in Meta applications such as WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and in the future it will also come to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Quest 3.