The age of AI is an era with no turning back. Far from regressing, the world is set for a period of relentless progression, ultimately culminating in “superintelligence.”
AI superintelligence is once again in the headlines as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicts the advent of superintelligence by 2028 in the AI Impact summit.
Altman said, “On the current trajectory, we believe we may be only a couple of years away from the early versions of true superintelligence.”
“If we are right, by the end of 2028 more of the world in electronic capacity could reside inside of data centers rather than outside of them,” he added.
When we talk about Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), the AI landscape has split into two competing philosophies for the next era of development.
The one is “personal superintelligence” advocated by Meta and the other one is “humanist superintelligence” championed by Microsoft.
While both tech giants aim for systems that exceed human intelligence and capabilities, their strategies for how that power is deployed and controlled are fundamentally different.
Last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his AI-powered vision and strategy in which he aimed to pursue “personal superintelligence.”
According to Zuckerberg, he views AI as a tool for personal empowerment over automation and efficiency.
On Thursday, while addressing delegates at the AI Impact summit in New Delhi, Meta’s AI chief officer Alexandr Wang, also propagated the same idea.
Our vision is personal superintelligence, an AI that knows your goals, your habits, interests and your blind spots. It serves you whoever you are and wherever you are….It won’t just be your admin. It’ll be one extension of you so you can be you, more, ”said Wang.
In a nutshell, Meta’s goal is to put a supercomputer-level personal assistant in the hands of every individual that empowers him in every task.
The tech company is planning to materialise this vision by leaning into open-source to make this intelligence accessible to everyone rather than gatekeeping it.
Moreover, with a consumer-focused strategy, Meta is also pursuing hardware integration through Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses and other wearable tech, allowing the AI to "see" what you see and help you in real-time.
The company is also investing roughly $115–$135 billion in 2026 to build its "Superintelligence Unit" and the "Meta Compute" infrastructure.
On the other hand, Microsoft CEO Mustafa Suleyman last year set out Microsoft AI's goal of “humanist superintelligence.”
The strategy is basically a reaction to unbounded Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). It prioritizes containment, safety, and societal problem solving over raw power.
The proposed framework is based on the vision that the pursuit of artificial superintelligence should remain grounded, controllable, and beneficial to humanity.
According to Microsoft, “We think of it as systems that are problem-oriented and tend towards the domain specific. Not an unbounded and unlimited entity with high degrees of autonomy – but AI that is carefully calibrated, contextualized, within limits.”
Hence, the ultimate goal of humanist superintelligence is to accelerate human progress in areas like medicine and energy.
The vision also consists of three core missions, including AI Companions for support, Medical Superintelligence, and AI for clean energy/fusion research.
According to Microsoft, in this type of superintelligence, humans will stay at the top of the “food chain”, while reining in AI and using it for their own benefits.
The tech company is pursuing its mission through different ways, such as working on an enterprise-first model by integrating AI into its cloud platform Azure. Microsoft’s AI spending strategy and partnership with OpenAI are also helping the tech giant.
Now a question comes to mind: Who will win and whose vision will prevail?
In the highly competitive tech landscape, it is difficult to predict the concrete outcomes given the rapidly evolving nature of technology.
Both tech companies have their strategic advantages which would help them to reach this point of development.
For instance, Meta’s strength lies in its huge user data, massive reach for AI, and ambitious long-term bets that could pay off big if new AI products take off.
On the other hand, Microsoft also excels in this race by capitalizing on ongoing AI revenues, enterprise and developer ecosystems and ambitions for sustainable AI commercialization.
Hence, the “winner” might not be a single mega-dominant company; instead, AI leadership could be shared across different domains, including enterprise, consumer, cloud, and specialized AI research.