After AI setbacks, Meta bets billions on undefined “superintelligence”

Meta has developed plans to create a new artificial intelligence research lab dedicated to pursuing "superintelligence," according to reporting from The New York Times. The social media giant chose 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of Scale AI, to join the new lab as part of a broader reorganization of Meta's AI efforts under CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Superintelligence refers to a hypothetical AI system that would exceed human cognitive abilities—a step beyond artificial general intelligence (AGI), which aims to match an intelligent human's capability for learning new tasks without intensive specialized training.

However, much like AGI, superintelligence remains a nebulous term in the field. Since scientists still poorly understand the mechanics of human intelligence, and because human intelligence resists simple quantification with no single definition, identifying superintelligence when it arrives will present significant challenges.

Computers already far surpass humans in certain forms of information processing such as ...