The race for AI talent may be fierce, but Mark Zuckerberg says breakthroughs in the artificial intelligence world don’t require armies of researchers.
Speaking on an episode of the “No Priors” podcast released Wednesday, the Meta boss argued that a small team of elite researchers can drive meaningful advances in AI, even as Silicon Valley firms shell out hefty sums to hire specialists.
“In order to make progress in AI, you don’t need like many, many hundreds of AI researchers or thousands or anything like that,” Zuckerberg said. “I think you can really make progress with a very strong group of a dozen or a couple dozen people.”
Zuckerberg made the comments alongside his wife, Priscilla Chan, as the pair discussed Biohub, their nonprofit medical research organization, and its mission to use AI and biology to help scientists cure, prevent, or manage all disease by the end of the century.
The Meta CEO said that while AI researchers have plenty of career options, Biohub’s work sets it apart from other organizations.
“It’s a very hot market for AI researchers,” the billionaire said. “They’re very in demand, and can work on the things that they want to work on.”
The AI researchers who work at Biohub, Zuckerberg said, “could go work on language models or things at any of the main labs, but those labs don’t have the frontier biology part attached to it, so I think that there’s like also just a very large mission component of this, which is like there’s an ability to do this unique work here that you just can’t really do at the other places.”
“If that’s what your focus is, then I don’t actually think that there’s any other organization in the world that’s doing both the frontier biology and the frontier AI,” said Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg said that thanks to advances in AI, he’s “optimistic” that Biohub’s quest could be achieved even sooner.
“It’s a dynamic system. So, if you fix something, there will obviously be future things that you need to work on. So, I don’t think that the current set of things that we’re aware of are going to be the only things that need to get worked out,” said Zuckerberg.
He added, “I think that the progress with AI is really, obviously, very exciting.”
Still, Zuckerberg acknowledged during the interview that access to computing power remains limited.
“In terms of what you decide to do next, I think this is like a pretty normal process of constraint management,” Zuckerberg said. “I think every lab in every field across the world probably feels compute-constrained. I think that’s probably true here, too.”
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg said the current AI moment has left him feeling a “combination of invigorated and exhausted.”
