The top AI labs are furiously competing with one another to launch the best AI models, but Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes that there will be no single winner in the space.
Mark Zuckerberg has argued against the idea of a single dominant AI, instead envisioning a diverse ecosystem of AI agents catering to various needs and purposes. This stands in stark contrast to the current race amongst companies like Google, OpenAI, and Meta itself to build the most powerful and versatile large language model (LLM). His comments offer a compelling alternative narrative to the prevailing winner-takes-all mentality in the current AI landscape.
“One of my core beliefs on AI is that I don’t think there’s going to be one single AI that everyone wants to use,” Zuckerberg said on a podcast. “I think there’s going to be more diversity and interestingness of the content. This is sort of a different belief than I think every other major company in the space has right now,” he added.
“It’s like OpenAI is building ChatGPT and Google is building their thing, and we’re building Llama 2, and a lot of people use it. It’s like, okay, there’s 700 million people and growing quickly who use Meta AI,” he said.
“But my basic view is that there are going to be a lot of different [AIs]. It’s not just going to be Meta AI. I think every small business is going to want to have their own AI agent that can help out with customer support and sales for people who want to interact with them. So that’s hundreds of millions of agents. I think a lot of creators are going to want agents almost as a sort of piece of performance art, but a way to also engage with your community,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg then said how content creators could have their own AI models. “If you craft an experience through some kind of creator AI, then that could end up being a pretty compelling thing, maybe not quite as cool as talking to you directly, but better than just sending a message to your inbox and getting nothing,” he said.
Zuckerberg’s comment comes at a time when there are indeed several top players vying to be the best in the AI space. Google and OpenAI seem to be neck-and-neck, with xAI’s Grok snapping at their heels. Anthropic seems to have its niche with the best coding models, and there are other niche-focused startups, like Midjourney for image generation, Eleven Labs for audio, and Kling AI and Runway ML for video. Meta has its Llama models which have a large number of users, thanks to being deployed across Meta’s products.
As such, it does seem likely that there will not be any single dominant AI, but different AI programs for different use-cases. But there’s always the danger of generalized mutlimodal models getting better than niche models — many have been speculating that ChatGPT’s latest update is better than Midjourney for generating images. Also, Zuckerberg seems to be referring to unique AIs for unique people, which could end up becoming popular among creators and the like. These are still early days, but one of the biggest players in the AI race seems to be believe that AI won’t be a winner-take-all market — and will have room for lots of companies to innovate and win.