Behind the coconut trees and well-trimmed hedges of Koolau Ranch, an XXL estate purchased by Mark Zuckerberg in Hawaii, hides a not quite ordinary construction site. According to Wiredthe founder of Facebook would build an autonomous underground shelter, with food, energy and a private network. The workers have signed confidentiality agreements, and a two-meter wall prevents them from seeing what is going on behind them.
The AI anxiety attack
When asked if he was building an anti-apocalypse bunker, Zuckerberg swore no: “ It’s just a small shelter, like a basement. » A basement of 460 square meters, a little bigger than a local supermarket all the same! In Palo Alto, he also had other similar spaces dug under several houses, to the point that some neighbors spoke of a “ Billionaire’s Batcave ».
And he’s not the only one who likes thick walls, as reported by BBC. Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) speaks bluntly “ d’assurance apocalypse “. Others prefer to Buy properties in New Zealand, reportedly for “ be calm “. Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, would have gone even further: he would have suggested building a shelter to protect the company’s researchers before launching too powerful an AI. “ We’re going to build a bunker before releasing the AGI (general AI more intelligent than humans, editor’s note) », he would have said, half amused and half serious.
This famous “AGI” is the Holy Grail of tech. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, promises his arrival “ sooner than most people imagine “. Dario Amodei (Anthropic) is aiming for 2026. For others, this all comes down to the Coué method: “ They move the finish line every time », quips British researcher Wendy Hall. Still, in the meantime, current AI already knows how to do a lot: spot tumors, write texts or plan a trip, sometimes better than an average human. And this is perhaps where the real question comes into play: why do the leaders who develop it seem so worried?
Elon Musk, true to his style, prefers to see the glass half full: according to him, the AIs of tomorrow will allow everyone to have their own personal “R2-D2”, and to live in an era of “sustainable abundance”. Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the web, is a little more down to earth: “ If AI becomes smarter than us, we must be able to turn it off. »
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