Zuckerberg says Meta delayed Muse for safety without asking rivals to follow suit

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemingly waded into the artificial intelligence pacing debate late Tuesday, saying the firm delayed its personal AI assistant product, Muse, for several months without calling on rivals to do the same.

Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had proposed slowing the pace of AI development, citing safety and alignment concerns. OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, and SpaceXAI's Elon Musk also signaled support for the direction.

"Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety and security," Zuckerberg posted on X. "We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would. We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us."

The Meta boss said that every AI lab has the responsibility to train its models at a safe pace, and is capable of taking its own actions to ensure that happens, adding that engaging independent evaluators and advisors is industry best practice.

Self-regulation incentives

As people don't want agents that are misaligned with them and don't do as they ask, labs already have a strong incentive to make their models more aligned. Additionally, labs face substantial liability if their models cause harm, so there is a strong incentive to prevent that too, the Meta CEO said.

"Any lab that doesn't focus on alignment will fall behind," he added.

Responding to Amodei's earlier comments, former White House AI czar David Sacks said frontier labs should slow development if they believe it is dangerous. However, he argued they should do so voluntarily rather than use safety concerns to justify regulation that may cement their market dominance.

"Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely," Zuckerberg said. "Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well."