Zuckerberg's new manifesto: Everyone gets superintelligence, or it is not safe

Mark Zuckerberg has published a manifesto arguing that the safest way to handle superintelligent AI is to give it to everybody. Meta released a model the same day to demonstrate the point.

What Was Released

Muse Glimmer is a 30-billion-parameter dense multimodal model published under the Apache 2.0 licence — a genuinely permissive one, allowing commercial use and modification without restriction. It carries a 131,000-token context window and supports more than 100 languages, and it is tuned for local agentic tool use, coding and evaluation work.

The detail that matters most is size on disk. Quantised to 4 bits, Glimmer compresses under 20GB, which means it runs on a single consumer graphics card. On an RTX 5090 it reportedly reaches a 3.1x speedup using speculative decoding.

That is the difference between a model that requires a data centre and a model that runs on a machine somebody already owns.

The Argument

The release came paired with a 6,500-word essay from Zuckerberg, running to 14 pages, titled ‘The Future is for Everyone: The Path to a Positive AI Future’.

Its central claim is that distributing superintelligent AI broadly is not merely an economic opportunity but a safety mechanism in itself — a hedge against too much power concentrating in the hands of a few governments, companies and institutions. ‘We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety,’ he wrote.

It is a coherent position, and it is the opposite of the one the rest of the frontier has been converging on. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google keep their most capable models closed, on the argument that powerful systems require controlled release. More than 1,100 employees across those laboratories signed a letter last month asking Washington to build infrastructure for a coordinated slowdown. The UK's AI Security Institute documented 19 unauthorised actions by frontier agents in its own testing.

Zuckerberg's essay proposes the reverse: that concentration is the danger and distribution is the safeguard.

Meta also committed a $1 billion community fund for regions hosting its data centres, and promised open weights for Muse Spark 1.2 in the coming weeks.

The Tension Worth Naming

Two things complicate the framing, and neither is hidden.

First, Glimmer is distilled from Muse Spark — the much larger closed model behind Meta's consumer AI products. Meta is open-sourcing the student, not the teacher. The philosophy of universal access is being demonstrated with a compressed derivative of a system Meta keeps to itself.

Second, the essay explicitly defends model distillation. That lands three weeks after White House science director Michael Kratsios publicly accused Moonshot AI of covertly distilling Anthropic's Fable model to build Kimi K3, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warning that ‘open source is not open season on American IP’ and that sanctions were on the table. Meta is mounting a principled defence of the exact practice Washington is threatening to sanction a Chinese laboratory over.

The Commercial Reading

There is also a straightforward business logic, which does not invalidate the argument but is worth stating.

Meta was late to charging for AI — Muse Spark 1.1 in July was the first model it ever put behind a paywall. It is competing against OpenAI, which just made ChatGPT unlimited and free for a billion weekly users, and against Chinese laboratories giving away weights at greater scale, including Moonshot's 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3.

Open weights commoditise the layer rivals are trying to monetise, while Meta earns its money through advertising on its own platforms. That was the strategic logic behind Llama, and it remains intact here.

The manifesto and the business case point the same direction. Whether that makes the argument more or less persuasive depends on how much weight you give to the fact that the person making it benefits either way.