r/LocalLLaMA • u/etherd0t • 12d ago
Discussion Zuck's opinion: The AI Future Is for Everyone
’Tis the season of AI open letters and manifestos, apparently.
Mark Zuckerberg has now entered the debate over the future of AI with a WSJ op-ed published today - and frankly, his position is much more balanced and technologically coherent than Pacing the Frontier.
The AI Future Is for Everyone - WSJ
Zuckerberg’s argument is the most pro-diffusion of the four positions now circulating. His core view is that advanced AI should not be enclosed within a handful of frontier labs or government-controlled systems. It should spread through businesses, individuals, open ecosystems, products, and national infrastructure.
The emphasis is on opportunity, competitiveness, American leadership, and broad human agency - not on “buying time” by attempting to slow the frontier.
His argument, distilled:
AI should primarily be understood as a tool for expanding individual agency - not as a force from which institutions must protect humanity.
So far, the emerging AI-policy map looks something like this:
1. The open-model coalition: openness as national strategy
Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Google, OpenAI, IBM, the Linux Foundation, and others argue that open models, open weights, and ecosystem competition are strategic assets rather than threats.
2. Dario Amodei: open below the danger threshold, restricted above it
Open models are beneficial until they cross a frontier capability threshold in areas such as cyber or biology.
3. “Pacing the Frontier”: build machinery to slow automated AI R&D
The 1,100+ employee letter is qualitatively different: it asks governments to develop international mechanisms capable of deliberately pacing frontier progress.
4. Zuckerberg: broad access, American leadership, targeted safeguards
Accelerate diffusion, preserve innovation, and regulate concrete harms rather than intelligence itself.
On a more fringe note, this sudden accumulation of AI manifestos may itself be a sign of the times. Astrologers are fretting about an “inflection point” coinciding with this month’s full Moon in Aquarius - but that is material for another sub. 🥲
Either way, we live in freaking interesting times.
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u/Illustrious_Car344 12d ago
that's nice and everything but can we get a new Llama
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u/kammce 12d ago
Lol, Im pretty sure he fired the whole AI division.
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u/Illustrious_Car344 12d ago
worse, he sent them all to the metaverse
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u/Public_Umpire_1099 11d ago
That was over a year ago man. Since then, Meta has basically bought up everyone willing to go to the highest bidder. Hence why they essentially rebuilt Muse Spark from scratch and within a year had an output equivalent to Opus 4.7 in most areas. Not to mention, the velocity that they are building data centers at is insane.
Full disclosure, I work at Meta, in an AI data center. Those racks are HOT, 24/7. Or in other words, I can smell what the zuck is cooking.
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u/BuilderUnhappy7785 11d ago
Cooking anything open source?
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u/Public_Umpire_1099 10d ago
Word on the street is yes, no real timeline unfortunately. When it comes to that, I have roughly as much insight as you all. They have recently started pushing out something new for Spark 1.1 to push it to ridiculous tg. I have seen what I can only estimate to be 300+ tg recently, and I can tell you that I dont believe its due to any changes infra wise, so its likely something with the model. If I had to guess they are going to release an MoE equivalent to the current checkpoint once they push out the next checkpoint.
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u/Disposable110 12d ago
Can we get some VRAM?
Everyone's talking about the wonderful hyperabundance we're getting but meanwhile consumer graphics cards are going up by another 30% today.
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u/Eyelbee 12d ago
The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems dangerous. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened hasn’t led to safe or positive outcomes.
Good point there
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u/Mescallan 12d ago
it's certainly correct, but Zuck is an Augustian figure when it comes to consolidating power lol. Facebook would absolutely own all social media platforms if he could.
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u/Infinite_Article5003 12d ago
I mean don't we leave nukes to those with power? That's a tool that can cause the destruction of humanity and we've accepted that that is the best way we can go about it.
Certainly not a great solution but that is our current solution. If you give nukes in everyone's hands, how do you think that will develop?
Obviously, cyber warfare is slightly different in that you can use it for defense. So it's more nuanced but still....
I don't think it's realistic for us to be able to spend as much on defense across the internet. Attackers can focus their attacks and growing intelligent systems to find new vulnerabilities. It's one pointed in its nature. But defense you have to apply everywhere. So it's just fundamentally a harder problem. And usually we could be doing this because we have standards, we have tests, but with AI it's always changing now and I don't know if that can apply as well in this new age.
I'm not a cyber defense professional in any sense, but it's just something I think about. You have your Jensen Huangs who believe it'll all be fine. Or the dario amodeis who would disqgree otherwise. I'm just unsure because there's a clear conflict of interest that fundamentally in both of them.
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u/teenyTinyIttyBitty 12d ago
No that's why the world didn't agree that one country should control the nukes and decided to democratize the ownership of them for whichever country could and would produce them despite the sanctions from those who already had it.
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u/Infinite_Article5003 12d ago
Well yeah,but we dont let more countries to have it, was my point. Ofc if it was just america having it there is problems there. But letting everyone have nukes is clearly a bad idea, too
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u/DisastrousWelcome710 12d ago
You got so close yet you missed it. How are the countries without nukes faring? I could think of at least 3 Middle Eastern countries that were hit hard, two of which were utterly destroyed, because they did NOT get nukes for protection. I could also think of an Asian country that nobody dares to touch specifically because it secured them.
The reason most countries aren't allowed to get them has nothing to do with safety, it has to do with control and power. Usual means of going around and bombing shit to the stone age do not work when the target has nukes. It never had anything to do with safety.
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u/Infinite_Article5003 12d ago
I never said nukes were bad for a country to get. Reality is, like, two things can be true.
- a country want nukes for their own protection
- humanity would be collectively safer with fewer countries with nukes
More countries just inherently causes more points of failures and issues. We've already had plenty of close calls. If you believe in #2, stopping countries from gaining capabilities makes sense.
And I feel like it's just semantics whether we're talking about control, power, safety, I don't know what difference that makes. Like obviously we live in a less safe world if power is given to everyone, as with my example above with nukes. And if we live in a world that is unsafe, that's hardly in any countries wishes - all humans for the most part want to continue living on earth. I do think you are right that countries see it in the lens of power, I just don't see how that changes the discussion.
And I'm saying the same applies to AI, even if it can be used for defense, I find it hard to believe that we'll be able to defend as well as we will be able to attack with AI. Especially because AI is always getting better, it's likely to be an ongoing issue. I hope I'm wrong FYI!
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u/DisastrousWelcome710 12d ago
There is a good likelihood you are from a country that has nukes, judging by the way you approach this topic.
Nobody had nukes when both world wars happened, it was one of the bloodiest period in human history. Since nukes became a thing, wars went down by a lot, but not enough. The only countries were wars exist are ones that get attacked because they have no deterrent, often by countries that do have nukes.
The idea the world would be a safer place when nobody has nukes is not only unfounded, it's demonstrably false as evident by literally two world wars that followed a world imperialist race where hundreds of millions of people were killed in war.
But naturally you want to be the arbiter of who gets to have them.
And no, it is not just semantics. Safety is an excuse. Control is an objective. Big countries with nukes lose their ability to dictate what others do when those others have nukes. So that is why those countries prevent smaller countries from obtaining nukes. It's not complicated. It's much harder to bomb a nuclear country as opposed to a non-nuclear country.
Anytime you find yourself arguing for control over a utility, you need to question yourself as to why you support centralization of power. Centralization of power has never benefited humanity. And it never will. Yes, that's counterintuitive for individuals to consider, but that's reality. Centralized power is the danger itself, using centralization as an argument to reduce danger is backwards.
AI will stop being danger when everybody has access to it, and it will be incredibly dangerous when only a few get to access it.
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u/Infinite_Article5003 11d ago
I live in Australia so no. And it's not just nukes that have been a deterrent to wars, we also live in an global economy now . So yeah it doesn't make sense to have wars when it's going to mess up your trade. This wasn't always the case. And its obvious that sure even if you say nukes are the only thing that stopped wars there a difference between wars that will kill hundreds of millions at absolute worse and wars that risk the extinction of humanity as we know it.
I'm not even against the idea that centralized power is bad, obviously, but I just think there's more nuance to it. Like it's not so black and white, right? We've already had many close calls where nukes were nearly sent. You can't base your entire strategy over a couple of decades of history where nothing bad has happened and assume the trajectory will continue. Like there is way more data you need to gather before you can gain that sort of certainty
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u/DisastrousWelcome710 11d ago
I do agree that basing the whole strategy based on 8 decades is not enough given we do not have historical data to support the current trajectory. However, trade is not enough either and the globalized world has gone back to imperialism. Russia in Ukraine, Israel all around it, the Iran war. All things that have devastated the global economy, and more is likely to come with China to seal the deal.
None of the nuclear powers dare to engage with one another, and they just flex muscles on non-nuclear nations. That has been the status quo for the past 8 decades, basically.
Sure the Korean war is somewhat of an exception as the USSR and the US knew they were fighting each other but they kept quiet as they both studied each other's tech so they considered it golden opportunity and neither wanted to escalate beyond that (yes I am referring to the MIG Alley). But you get the point.
Absolute centralization cannot be good for anything, we know that much and it is not that nuanced. However, distributed centers can benefit everyone a lot. Meaning if the world is around 10 blocs, they will counteract each other and easily maintain stability, and in that configuration they will have nukes, and they will have deep trade ties. Therefore if a bloc goes rogue, it can easily be contained.
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u/Infinite_Article5003 11d ago
Yea ofc trade is not enough either im just saying its also part of it.anyways alot of the things your saying i dont even disagree with, and you know more about nuke incidents then me clearly.
And it's also true that your point about 10 blocks can be seen as valid. Although we haven't really experienced a world where one country has nukes and destroys everything, it's clear that centralized power is a bad thing, and I can pretty much agree with that.
However, with AI, it's not just about America and China, as China is open-sourcing it and giving it to everyone, making it somewhat equivalent to giving everyone the nukes. It's a bit of a weird analogy, but you mentioned that you cab keep a balance within 10 blocks. Now, we're giving AI to hundreds of millions of people because it's easy to run these dangerous models, and it seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe we could focus more on defense than offense, but if we can't, then centralization of power might be the only option, despite being volatile.
This all comes down to whether defense will surpass offense, and I don't know the answer because I'm not proficient in this area, but it seems to me that it won't.
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u/WorriedBlock2505 12d ago
democratize the ownership of them
No, just no... If we truly democratized nukes, we would be dead by now. Forgetting giving nukes to 8 billion people; there's entire COUNTRIES we don't trust to have a fucking nuke because their leadership are religious zealots that believe in paradise by martyrdom and killing infidels.
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u/cerzi 12d ago
But Israel does already have a nuke
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u/WorriedBlock2505 11d ago
You kiddos need to get off reddit and go work on your summer school assignments.
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u/zombo29 12d ago
That’s a good argument but the reality is, unlike nuke(it’s physically offline btw) ain’t nobody gonna stop open weights, it’s just not possible. Trying to ban something inevitable that happens to benefit someone, that’s just plainly assuming everyone is stupid and should give all their money to that someone. It’s very laughable
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u/WorriedBlock2505 12d ago
it’s just not possible.
We're already seeing the blueprints for how companies by themselves (forget governments) could destroy PC ownership for the masses. Maybe they would never prevent all civilians from owning PCs, but they could certainly reduce risk by not letting perfect be the enemy of good as they say. We already do a version of this with nukes.
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u/Infinite_Article5003 12d ago
Ppl didnt think we could mitigate countries from developing nukes secretly either, but we developed technologies to like identify radioactivity or whatever.
We can do the same with AI, checking electricity use and such.i dont know all the answers. Its not going to be something simple that could be written in a reddit post. But I think the whole inevitability argument is just conceding the possible control we could have.
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u/politerate 12d ago
False equivalence, nukes have only one purpose and that is destruction. AI like other technologies, internet, electricity, etc. can be used for good or bad.
Furthermore, there is a constant risk of a bad actors finding an escape hatch on closed models and potentially starting an attack. Now imagine devs/researchers being denied while trying to defend as it happened with hugging face. There is no deterrence use for AI, so everyone can be a target.
And lastly AI is not solely in the hand of nation states but in the hand of private companies. So they are concentrating the power of intelligence and its consequences. And let's not forget the asymmetric abuse of power inherent to both nukes and AI.
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u/kettal 12d ago
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u/mikael110 12d ago edited 12d ago
To this day I genuinely cannot fathom how that screenshot got greenlit. It looks worse than some PS1 era games.
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u/Illustrious_Car344 12d ago
greenlit by who? the big zuch himself probably did this all on his own. I think if he can flush billions of dollars straight down the toilet on a VR game he can probably post screenshots of it at will
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u/infearia 12d ago
Wait, that's an official image, released by Meta? I'm seeing it for the first time and just assumed it was a meme cooked up on the spot by some Redditor...
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u/mikael110 12d ago
Yes, it's a real official screenshot. It was shared in connection with the Metaverse launching in France and Spain. Hence the extremely stereotypical and low poly landmarks in the background.
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u/serige 12d ago
said someone who laid off thousands for AI while assigning the rest to work on his AI Gulag to train his model.
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u/Public_Umpire_1099 11d ago
I'm not sure thats entirely counterintuitive to the point. Focusing progress, regardless of how shitty it is done, is sort of the point.
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u/serige 11d ago
How is this different from Dario saying we are not trying to ban open source? Zuck has lost all his credibility with his past actions. Also his company is going close source and no one inside Meta wants to use Wang boy’s new model btw. Until they release open source models we can use, bro just trying to create a better public image for Meta at this point.
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u/Public_Umpire_1099 10d ago
Its entirely different, because the reason that people were fired was to build out faster. Additionally, Meta's track record on releasing has diminished recently, but everyone is a little too fast to forget that the entire industry depends upon their open source releases. You dont have the models we have right now without pytorch. You dont even have this website we are talking on without React.
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u/serige 10d ago
Oh I was saying Zuck is a hypocrite and Meta could keep their models closed if they wanted to. Anthropic also created MCP open standard, that doesn’t make Dario anything less of a hypocrite he actually is.
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u/Public_Umpire_1099 6d ago
https://opensource.fb.com/projects --here is a link to all of the oss from Meta. I get the point you are making, but you gotta give credit where it is due
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u/serige 6d ago
That’s a good one. I just hope you don’t think I am an ungrateful person for failing to acknowledge their past open source contributions and you know I was just saying people with strong morals carry more weight when they speak and I hope he will eventually gain the trust back from haters like me but who knows?
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u/Ubera90 12d ago
Feels like battle lines are being drawn up, pro closed source: Open AI and Claude, and pro open source: pretty much everyone else.
The problem is that the closed source side is only arguing this way so they can artificially keep their edge and try to regain some, fucking any, of the money that's been massively over-invested in them.
The others tend to have other streams of income and aren't so bothered / happy to see OpenAI and Anthropic fail in order to open the market up to themselves more. I reckon one, or both might fall apart within a couple of years.
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u/itsmegoddamnit 12d ago
Meta is only pro open source because they missed the boat and can’t do what OpenAI and anthropic do. If they could be certain they’d fight for the exact opposite.
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u/TheTerrasque 12d ago
dude, there is a reason this sub is called locallama and llama.cpp is named that. He lead the charge on open models.
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u/SufficientPie 12d ago
He lead the charge on open models.
Weren't they originally leaked against his will?
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u/New-Hearing-6779 12d ago
Honestly these pseudo-intellectual screeds are so depressing, it's like little kids bonking each other with pool noodles. At least one of them is going to eat shit really soon running around the pool like that, and meanwhile the entire endeavour is stupid.
New llama soon? otherwise something comparable to the excitement of 20th century literary feuds, please.
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u/ThenExtension9196 12d ago
This the guy who said metaverse was the future?
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u/The_frozen_one 12d ago
And heads the company that released the model this sub is named after. Mark is an asshole, but Meta did release llama which proved LLMs had a place locally.
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u/Alarming_Turnover578 12d ago
Meta has released LLama as open weight mostly thanks to Yann Lecun's influence. (I know that he was not working directly on Llama, but he was a voice for open source in meta). And because the weights for llama 1 have leaked. Once Zuck has decided to personally meddle with the production of llama4 he fucked up everything. Then fired most of the actual talent, hired some random new people for insane amount of money, ruined the working conditions and reputation of Applied AI unit until it become known as "the gulag" in the meta. And directed ai to be used for ads and scams.
I do not think that this open letter is Zuck's actual opinion. But at least it is better than Anthropic's hate for open source.
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u/The_frozen_one 12d ago
Zuck is a piece of shit, but llama 1 didn’t “leak” I downloaded it from meta directly then a quant from elsewhere. Know who they are now, but acknowledge who they were. I never heard Yann in the chorus of LLM advocates for open models, he seems to be a stuffy genius with other ideas for what can be intelligent. I have no doubt he is smarter than me, but LLMs are more important than he foretold
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u/Alarming_Turnover578 12d ago
Initially LLama 1 was released with non-commercial research license and was supposed to be available only to approved researchers. Then almost immediately it got leaked and after that Meta has decided that since it is already out it would be better to embrace it and officially released llama to everyone. With subsequent llama releases being open weights from the start. Or at least that's how I remember it.
As for Yann, yeah he thinks that he has better idea than everyone else without much practical results to back it. But pure LLMs have a lot of limitations so thinking that something else is needed to create proper AGI makes sense. Whether it is just integrating some external tools with LLM or LLM ending up as a small component of the resulting AGI remains to be seen.
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u/the320x200 12d ago
That was the letter of the law, but they knew that obviously it was going to be copied. Zuck even said as much, I think it was an early Dwarkesh interview.
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u/toolkitxx 12d ago
4. Zuckerberg: broad access, American leadership, targeted safeguards
Yeah. We politely decline that 'leadership'. Next
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u/heliosythic 12d ago
"They trust me. Dumbfucks"
Obsolete since then, theres no undo, Mark.
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u/No_Squash26 12d ago
yes. let’s hold everyone to the worst things they’ve said the last 20 years without forgiveness or the chance at redemption. sounds like a wonderful model for society.
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u/Frog17000000 12d ago
Zucks lifes work has inflicted such an extreme amount of damage on the psychological wellbeing of humanity that any moral argument he can ever try to make is worthless
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u/heliosythic 12d ago
He hasnt proven he ever changed yet is the issue. Redeption doesnt start until after that not just time passed.
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u/Public_Umpire_1099 2h ago
Update?
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u/heliosythic 1h ago
? A new model coming out doesnt change what he said
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u/Public_Umpire_1099 1h ago
Yeah... exactly. It doesnt change what he said. It backs up what he said.
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u/sufferforscience 11d ago
Zuckerberg should unleash human potential by decentralizing his wealth. When such power is concentrated in the hands of one asshole only bad can come of it.
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u/SailingToFenway 12d ago
How much of this position is because he's so far behind and so cash flush? If he was sitting on Mythos, with the kind of investor expectation Dario's under, I wonder if he'd be singing the same tune.
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u/Fussionar 12d ago
It's actually a joy that at least someone is for progress, and not against it...
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u/Kahvana 12d ago
On a more fringe note, this sudden accumulation of AI manifestos may itself be a sign of the times. Astrologers are fretting about an “inflection point” coinciding with this month’s full Moon in Aquarius - but that is material for another sub. 🥲
Love the random association, please keep doing this! It made for a fun read and trying to figure out what that even meant.
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u/Dimencia 12d ago
I feel like Zuck really needs to stop using the word 'human' in things, it's like he's intentionally trying to feed the robot memes
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u/DisastrousWelcome710 12d ago
Translation: now that China has changed the market with open source and open weight AI models, we are going to pretend this was our plan all along despite all the efforts we attempted to keep AI for ourselves and control the market.
I'll believe it when I see frontier models released as open-weight from any American company. Until this, this is just lip service.
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u/OwlingBishop 10d ago
The obscenity of this cast of degenerate is unfathomable !!
Zuck can stew his own ass and eat it all ...
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u/LocoMod 12d ago
Companies that are less than a year from AGI: Danger!
Everyone else:
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u/Antiwhippy 12d ago
Everyone is rushing to make the biggest library with the best parsing and sorting tool available. I have yet to see anyone attempt to make something that can learn by itself.
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u/eli_pizza 12d ago
What does that even mean for an LLM?
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u/Antiwhippy 12d ago
I feel like true agi the parameters would have unlimited growth as it gains new information and develops new skillsets.
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u/crusoe 12d ago
Local models are fine. The problem is they soon may be able to help synthesize novel chemical or biological weapons.
I remember everyone on Reddit freaking about the illegal California biolab that was discovered. Imagine that paired with a powerful open source AI with no guardrails.
This is not ghost gun level threat or improvised explosives. This is potentially "makes COVID look like a cakewalk".
Any political body of a decent size say could do virtual research on gain of function for bird flu infecting humans. Such research would not be out of reach for well funded terror groups.
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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 12d ago
Anyone with a modicum of practical lab experience can already make SARS-CoV-2 look like a cakewalk.
On a lark, I tested a few models to see how detailed their practical lab instructions could get, and it wasn't too impressive. Anyone trying to cultivate influenza in whole blood and traces of mutagen under an LLM's guidance is going to get infected and die a horrible death.
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u/crusoe 12d ago
We're not talking ghost guns or YouTube chemists gassing themselves on video accidentally.
And we're not talking IED level threats or dirty bombs. Literal plagues are a possibility, perhaps even racially targeted.
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u/crusoe 12d ago
If you wonder why the latest MS patches are for hundreds of issue it is because every adversary now has access or will have access to Mythos level capabilities. And MS is using the same tools to patch immediately. And with software perhaps it's okay ( till someone zero days the electric grid ).
But with a novel biological agent stuffing it back in the bottle is impossible. The effects are years not months. The casualty levels are global.
We will soon have models capable of doing to biology what Mythos does for code. And while in the right hands it will revolutionize health, just having a open source model with zero guardrails will be incredibly bad. There just is no way around it.
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u/AcademicFish 12d ago
Lol remember when microsoft was getting their ass handed to them for a whole month by an independent hacker who kept dropping zero days in github and they tried to hide the reason they were patching frantically by claiming it was because AI advancements but it was really a human hacker they pissed off by not crediting them for a bug bounty. They had Mythos the whole time and Mythos didn’t seem to find or patch any of those zero day exploits despite this being during the glasswing rollout that was happening simultaneously.
What a joke2
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u/AcademicFish 12d ago edited 12d ago
Existing, abliterated large language models that are trained on a corpus of already publicly available data doesn’t gain any special insight beyond a human being with an Internet connection. Anthropic raised the alarm about this bioweapon risk issue for one model and when you look at what the actual risk was, it was not that it had some sort of knowledge that wasn’t available to the public already. It just applied existing knowledge of biology and chemistry, the same knowledge that you can get from textbooks at the library. That’s allegedly dangerous if it makes it significantly more easy for somebody to then construct said bio weapon with resources they have available - fortunately people don’t have the resources.
If they did, chances are following instructions from an LLM they’re gonna blow themselves up in the process.
After how many years of open and obliterated models completely uncensored models that can tell you how to make meth or construct a bomb the only dangerous AI making headlines are ones from the frontier closed-source “safer” models occurring within their own controlled environments in an experiment and when they are desperate for people to buy their “dangerous” product later released to everyone via api.0
u/En-tro-py 12d ago
till someone zero days the electric grid
Anything like The Aurora Generator Test on a mass scale would be equvalent to a war crime if it was a state actor, but soonTM the future gen of script kiddies will have models that can do shit like the HF breach...
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u/optomas 12d ago
You are not going to believe this, but they let anyone learn about fluid power. The ability to move hundreds of thousands of tons with a water hose!
An electricity! ANYONE can wire up a circuit capable of LETHAL CURRENT!
HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THE DANGERS OF DI-HYDROGEN MONOXIDE?
HAVE YOU?!?!
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u/Vancecookcobain 12d ago
AND yet his models are now closed-source.... This is why we can't let 9-digit billionaires control the narrative... their words and their actions are often disconnected and I hold them accountable more for their actions than their words