{"id":303546,"date":"2025-07-30T09:19:20","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T09:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/303546\/"},"modified":"2025-07-30T09:19:20","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T09:19:20","slug":"how-zuckerbergs-prometheus-ai-project-could-change-the-world-as-we-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/303546\/","title":{"rendered":"How Zuckerberg\u2019s Prometheus AI project could change the world as we know it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since November 2022, the world of AI<\/a> has been near-synonymous <\/a>with one tool and one tool alone: ChatGPT<\/a>. Last week, we discovered that users pepper OpenAI\u2019s chatbot <\/a>with 2.5 billion prompts every single day, according to newly released data from the company, while a staggering half a billion people every week interact with the chatbot<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If social media was the marker of the last generation of big tech, then AI is the next one. And while it seems like OpenAI could become the household name, there\u2019s one person who wants to break that: Meta<\/a> CEO Mark Zuckerberg<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the last few years, Zuckerberg, who set up Facebook<\/a> in 2004 and is now worth $247bn, has expanded his digital empire to encompass WhatsApp, Instagram, and Threads. He has also made big pledges to try and wrest control of the AI narrative away from OpenAI, with the tech titan now offering billion-dollar deals to some of its top staff in an attempt to lure them to join his AI project called Prometheus. The venture is aiming to launch early next year and is named after the Greek who stole fire from the other gods and gave it to humanity.<\/p>\n

\u201cMeta has faced several setbacks with its generative AI strategy, prompting the company to spend more aggressively in an effort to catch up in the AGI race,\u201d says Stefan Slowinski, a research analyst at BNP Paribas. Driving the investment \u2013 which dwarfs at lot of what the company has previously spent on similar initiatives, at least in such a short time period \u2013 is the desire to try and make up lost ground against the competition, mostly OpenAI, which is supplanting Meta as the dominant force in terms of what we are interacting with on a daily basis. <\/p>\n

Similar threats are compelling Google to spend big in developing its own AI model, Gemini, and to fend off challenges from an OpenAI web browser to its Chrome app. Elon Musk is also ramping up his own work in AI through xAI, his firm, because of \u201coverwhelming\u201d<\/a> existential dread about AI. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe think internet CEOs are likely seeing a growing AI opportunity as 2025 progresses, and greater risk of missing out, and therefore the competitive capex cycle is far from over,\u201d says Justin Post, an analyst at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch.<\/p>\n

Meta is one of the few companies that can afford to spend such large figures on AI. While OpenAI and others aren\u2019t exactly short of money, they\u2019re reliant on funders who will want, at some point, to see a return on their investment. Meta, meanwhile, is flush with cash, earning $134bn profit last year \u2013 meaning its pockets are a little deeper than most.<\/p>\n

For that reason, Zuckerberg\u2019s desire to corner the AI market and make it Meta\u2019s own has to be taken seriously. Few other people can commit the amount of cash he has in the last few weeks alone \u2013 which is why social media commentary from rivals has been quite so catty about him buying up AI talent.<\/p>\n

Still, not everyone is convinced we\u2019ll soon be living in a world using AI under Zuckerberg\u2019s direction. \u201cMy personal conviction is that the world will not exist,\u201d says one former Meta employee, who was granted anonymity to speak freely and because their current employer does not allow them to speak to the press about their past role.<\/p>\n

\"ChatGPT<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

ChatGPT handles billions of user prompts every single day (Getty)<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not from a lack of trying by Zuckerberg, the former Meta staffer admits. \u201cA lot of people forget that when Google acquired DeepMind [in 2014], it was actually Mark Zuckerberg who wanted to buy DeepMind. He failed to do so, and then essentially went on a shopping spree, as he is doing right now, which involved hiring Yann LeCun.\u201d <\/p>\n

LeCun was a leading academic researcher before founding Facebook AI Research and is currently Meta\u2019s chief AI scientist. He has criticised OpenAI and Google DeepMind for being too closed or fear-driven and believes AI will augment humans, but will not replace them or pose apocalyptic risks. He is on the record saying: \u201cWe\u2019re working on the next generation of AI systems that can reason, plan, and understand the world the way animals and humans do.\u201d<\/p>\n

The former employee believes Zuckerberg is trying to recreate his tech shopping spree today \u2013 but will come up with issues because Meta isn\u2019t the same company it was in 2014. \u201cIt has a lot of big battle scars,\u201d the former employee says. \u201cIt\u2019s gone through a lot of corporate issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also working against Meta these days is that the financial situation has changed, with top AI talent requiring millions of dollars in compensation, as has the recognition of AI researchers as more akin to rock stars. Both of which make it more difficult \u2013 and more expensive \u2013 to try and attract talent.<\/p>\n

\"Meta\u2019s<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

Meta\u2019s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun at the World Economic Forum in January (AFP\/Getty)<\/p>\n

Meta has had some success in attracting talent to its AI arm: Alexandr Wang, the founder of ScaleAI, was brought into the tech giant in June through a $14.3bn deal to acquire a stake in his company. Wang now sits as chief AI officer within Meta, and was joined by Nat Friedman, former CEO of coding platform GitHub, who co-leads Meta\u2019s specific new Superintelligence Lab set up by Zuckerberg alongside another new hire, Daniel Gross. <\/p>\n

Nearly a dozen OpenAI staffers, including some of those who developed ChatGPT\u2019s most foundational models, have also been lured over to the company, as have some of Apple\u2019s top talent. The sums on offer to those researchers seem scarcely believable: up to $300m for individual staff members over the course of four years, according to some reports.<\/p>\n

Still, the cash isn\u2019t enough for some AI researchers to join Zuckerberg and his colleagues. Rumours abound within the industry that some top talent have been offered billion-dollar sums to make the leap to Meta, but have rejected them because they don\u2019t want to join Zuckerberg \u2013 figures confirmed by The Wall Street Journal, who said Zuckerberg personally offered a billion dollars to OpenAI\u2019s chief research officer, Mark Chen, to jump ship.<\/p>\n

Meta isn\u2019t just splashing the cash on talent. It\u2019s investing in the infrastructure that will be crucial to the successful adoption of AI at the scale Zuckerberg and others hope to make money from. Earlier in July, Zuckerberg announced via his social network, Threads, that Meta would be spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build gigantic data centres to help power its AI models. <\/p>\n

\"OpenAI<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pictured at an event in November 2023 (Getty)<\/p>\n

Prometheus will be located in Ohio and the footprint of the massive data centre will be nearly as big as the island of Manhattan, Zuckerberg has revealed. Another, similarly huge data centre, would be built in Louisiana by the end of the decade. Prometheus alone will need 1 gigawatt of energy to power it, enough to power nearly a million homes in the United States.<\/p>\n

The financial spend \u201csignifies a real commitment to push in that direction,\u201d says Carissa Veliz, an AI ethicist at the University of Oxford.<\/p>\n

The big question is that if Zuckerberg\u2019s big money bets pay off and Meta manages to leapfrog not just OpenAI but its slew of competitors \u2013 including the similarly flush Google \u2013 then what will the world look like? If the gloves have come off, will that include the guardrails too?<\/p>\n

Experts foresee a deeper integration of AI into our lives. \u201cMeta is already a platform deeply integrated into many features of people’s lives,\u201d says Michael Veale, an associate professor of law at University College London, pointing to everything from Facebook to Instagram and WhatsApp as platforms we rely on to interact with one another. \u201cAs a result, they have a much greater capability than OpenAI to deploy tools that access and use individuals\u2019 data and communications.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not necessarily a good thing, says Veale. \u201cAt this point, people\u2019s attention should be on how these products are going to be integrated into services designed to produce or extract value, rather than be too distracted by visions aimed at press coverage and marketing hype,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\"Zuckerberg<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg is offering up billions of dollars to try and corner the AI market (Getty)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a worry shared by Veliz. \u201cAt the moment, the kind of AI that we’re using and the kind of design that we’re seeing is incredibly invasive and Meta is perhaps the least trustworthy of them all, which is saying something.\u201d<\/p>\n

She points to its history with how Facebook was initially designed \u2013 including Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s infamous early comments that people who handed over data to him in the early days of the platform were \u201cdumb fucks\u201d to the controversy the company faced with Cambridge Analytica. \u201cThinking about a company that still has a business model based on surveillance, developing AI in this very surveillance-heavy design is a definite cause for concern,\u201d says Veliz. Meta did not respond to a request to comment on this story.<\/p>\n

If anyone is able to make a money-making enterprise out of AI, however, the experts say it\u2019s Zuckerberg. \u201cMeta, unlike OpenAI, has a track record of turning technology into profit rather than investor capital,\u201d explains Veale. \u201cIn a corporate sense, OpenAI is probably realising, as they did with Microsoft, that the adults are now in the room with it. Whether Zuckerberg counts among those adults in 2025 is something we have to wait and see.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since November 2022, the world of AI has been near-synonymous with one tool and one tool alone: ChatGPT.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":303547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-303546","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114941445130071476","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}