THE SCENE In the high stakes, brutally competitive AI race, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has been an outlier. While most of the big foundation model players tightly guard their methods and charge fees for using their service, Meta’s offerings under the Llama umbrella are free and mostly open source, so almost anybody can experiment with them. That strategy has helped Meta quickly catch up to an early lead gained by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Cohere, and established it as a guiding light for those in the industry who feel open research is the right path for the development of AI. There’s another contributing factor to Meta’s against-the-grain approach, which has gone mostly unnoticed, even inside the company: Its Fundamental AI Research lab, responsible for Llama and other breakthroughs, is made up largely of women. Around 60% of its leadership team are women and some reporting chains, according to interviews with people inside the organization, are female from top to bottom. AI has helped revive the company’s business image after Zuckerberg’s turn to the metaverse. On Friday, the company reported 25% revenue growth in the fourth quarter of 2023, and issued its first dividend. In addition to its AI path, the gender diversity inside FAIR, as it’s called, is also an industry anomaly. For instance, Time Magazine’s list of the top 25 leaders in AI includes only six women. A December article in the New York Times titled “Who’s Who Behind the Dawn of the Modern Artificial Intelligence Movement” does not mention a single woman.  MetaIn a field in which counterintuitive insights have led to some of the greatest discoveries, a diverse set of researchers can be a superpower. “When you have a more diverse group of people, it’s not that they come up with totally different solutions, but they ask different questions,” said Joelle Pineau, who leads FAIR after becoming a prominent AI researcher and professor at McGill University. “Especially in research, the question you ask is really, in many ways, the most important thing.” It has also helped shape the company’s approach to building artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which Zuckerberg recently indicated is a central focus of the company. Pineau says the FAIR team looks at AGI differently than other research labs, and while she can’t be entirely sure, it may be connected to the team’s more diverse makeup and ability to ask different questions. For instance, many of the tech companies striving to create AGI talk about it as if the ultimate result is a singular entity with intelligence beyond that of any human. But part of the AGI agenda at Meta is focused on leveraging the effects of collaboration between multiple AI agents, none of which have superintelligence, but can collectively accomplish quite a lot. “If you look at humans and animals, a lot of our intelligence doesn’t reside in a single individual. It resides in a community — a collection of individuals and how we work together to solve harder problems and complex problems,” said Pineau, who played viola in the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra before studying engineering at the University of Waterloo and earning a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon. The multiple agent approach to AGI has other benefits, she said, because it would give humans more control over how the AGI operates by giving each agent limited abilities and siloing information so that no agent has all of it. “It flips around this conception that General Intelligence needs to be achieved in a single box, which has all of the world’s information and has control over all the world’s levers,” she said. “We don’t want that in companies. We don’t want that in governments, in individuals or in any of our institutions. So why would we want that in our AI system?” Read here for Reed's view on why Meta is zigging on AI while others are zagging. → |
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