Meta is stepping up to lead us all into a bright and glorious future, where democracy reigns and everyone has access to a completely secure, constantly available AI assistant to help them invent pretty much whatever they want.
That’s at least what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised in a lengthy new essay, published this morning alongside the release of Meta’s latest AI model—Muse Glimmer—and less than a week after the company was fined $567 million by a New Mexico judge who blamed it for causing “a public nuissance” within the state.
The essay, running to around 6,500 words and titled “The Future is for Everyone,” is a not-so-subtle dig at Meta’s primary competitors, OpenAI and Anthropic. While Zuckerberg never explicitly calls out those two companies by name, he argues that the proprietary AI systems like the ones they’re known for (ChatGPT and Claude, respectively) threaten to usher the world into an era in which a tiny handful of corporate giants control the rest of humanity’s access to “superintelligence”—his preferred term for future AI systems. The antidote to such a dystopian oligarchy scenario, he argues, is to make AI freely available to as many people as possible, specifically through the free proliferation of open source models.
“Rather than centralizing superintelligence, we should distribute it widely and give every person the ability to direct it,” Zuckerberg wrote in his essay. “This has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where individuals can use this powerful new capability to reach their full potential, pursue their interests, and improve their lives and the world more than ever before.”
A new age for invention
AI, he writes, will soon enable invention on a mass scale. Whereas major technical breakthroughs of the past were achieved only sporadically, soon they’ll become commonplace: “Everyone will soon have invention superpowers.”
Sounds great, if human beings only invented things that benefited themselves and others, which is very rarely (if ever) the case; every technology—from writing, to the steam engine, to radios—has a dark side. Modern AI systems, which can be used to spread misinformation on an unprecedented scale and synthesize completely new viruses, can be especially dangerous. Zuckerberg’s essay pays lip service to the litany of concerns that many people have about the spread of AI, and responds by essentially arguing that the best way to deal with any hiccups that might arise is to trust people to do the right thing. “The arc of human civilization has bent towards putting more power in people’s hands to live and shape the world in the ways we believe are best,” he writes.
In response to fears that AI will displace huge numbers of humans in the job market, for example, Zuckerberg points to the Industrial Revolution, which “steadily freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits we choose,” he writes. “At each step, people used our newfound productivity to achieve more than was previously possible, as well as spending more time on creativity, culture, relationships, and enjoying life.” The implication is that AI will achieve much the same thing: By liberating us from the drudgery of mundane tasks, we’ll be free to focus on more meaningful, fulfilling pursuits. It’s a common refrain from Silicon Valley, one that tends to conveniently overlook the long shadow of industrialization: growing wealth disparity, ecological catastrophe, mechanized warfare, colonization, and so on.
Trust the free market
Meta has long sought to position itself as a champion of open source AI, which unlike proprietary models can be freely accessed and modified by third-party developers. Muse Glimmer, the new model released today by Meta, is not open source. It’s what’s known in the industry as “open weight,” meaning while external developers can view the parameters that were used to train the new model, they can’t actually view the underlying source code or use them to build a new model from the ground-up. As the psychologist (and outspoken AI industry critic) Gary Marcus put it in an edition of his email newsletter this morning: “open weights is open source with all the good press but far fewer advantages.”
In his essay, Zuckerberg repeatedly frames open source as humanity’s best chance of avoiding the most serious risks posed by AI, including not just mass job displacement but the rise of AI-assisted totalitarianism and civilization-scale destruction. Again, his argument boils down to the laissez-faire ethos of a free market. “A healthy balance of power is to ensure that there is no singular centralized superintelligence,” he writes, “but instead as many people and businesses as possible with different superintelligent agents aligned to their goals that check and compete with each other in the ways our natural economy behaves.”
Open source AI has become a political flashpoint in recent months in the wake of a flurry of new AI models from Chinese AI labs, many of them open source, that rival the capabilities of the most advanced American-made models. The Trump administration and some US tech leaders have accused Chinese AI developers of large-scale distillation of American models. Zuckerberg says that any federal crackdown on distillation would be a mistake, and that all publicly available tools are fair game for the development of new models. “This is how the world works,” he wrote.
In a closed-door meeting with American tech executives last week, White House officials reportedly shared a draft of their new framework for testing the safety of unreleased AI models. Open source models are currently exempt.