US, Sept. 22 -- Recently, Mark Zuckerberg published a manifesto with a title that reads like a promise: "The Future is for Everyone." Its argument is elegant and, on first hearing, deeply appealing. Meta says it should not confine artificial superintelligence to a few labs or one single system. It argues for a "personal superintelligence" instead. This would be an agent built to understand you, including what you want and what matters to you.

The goal, Meta says, is to give control to regular people, not just governments or experts. In its view, this empowerment leads to more prosperity for everyone. AI's true purpose is invention, not automation. And safety comes not from centralized control but from a balance of power, where competing...