The AI world is moving so quickly that it’s becoming difficult to keep up with the latest trends. From some of the early 21st century machine learning efforts, to the today’s generative AI landscape where multi-model content can be generated from scratch, the progress feels exponential. Indeed, we’re now entering the Agentic AI era where AI ‘agents’ can act on your behalf with little to no active input required from the user.
Are we at risk of being overtaken by the machines?
Right now human beings still have the edge. Although we can’t process data or generate content at the speed of AI, it is still entirely reliant on things we have taught it to act. Even though we have taught it to reason, it still operates within the parameters we define. Regardless of what AI proponents will tell you, it cannot create. Everything is derivative of the information fed to the large language model.
This single-task focus is known as Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), which describes the era we’re in the midst of. And we still have a long way to go before AI realises its potential in this field. However, scientists and researchers and the major AI companies are closing in on the next major breakthrough: Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI.
What is AGI?
AGI = Artificial General Intelligence.
AGI represents AI that is at least as smart and capable as humans. It would reason like us, and adapt like us. It would cast aside the narrow remit we humans give it. And we may be closer than you think to achieving it.
Google’s definition (the company working on the tech, not the search engine) is as follows: “AGI possesses human-like intelligence and can perform any intellectual task that a human can. It is capable of learning, reasoning, and adapting to new situations. Currently, true AGI does not exist, but research and development efforts are ongoing.”
Amazon defines AGI as a “field of theoretical AI research that attempts to create software with human-like intelligence and the ability to self-teach. The aim is for the software to be able to perform tasks that it is not necessarily trained or developed for.”
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT and the key driver of AGI has a slightly different definition. It believes that AGI systems will be smarter than humans but short of the epochal superintelligence landmark known as “The Singularity.” The company says: “Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.”
What are the potential use cases for AGI?
Given AGI could theoretically think for itself, the possibilities are endless. It could be more adept at solving some of the problems humanity faces. And it could create even more of the problems we’re seeing in the current ANI era.
While ANI can crunch incredible amounts of data to look for those answers, it is still confined by the limits of the data it has access to what it has been asked to accomplish. The idea is that once this is combined with AGI’s ability to problem solve, adapt and teach itself more – like human beings – then it could be a whole new ball game with revolutionary consequences.
OpenAI says: “If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility.”
For example, in the healthcare field the ability to create new diagnostic tools and treatments could save countless lives. The same logic could be applied to climate change, resource shortages, and so on.
Potentially, there are productivity gains to be had. If AGI agents could effectively do everything human beings can, then there’d be no need for human beings to occupy many professions at all. No more sitting at a desk all day, when an AI avatar acting as you can do it. Google reasons that’ll “free up human time for more creative and fulfilling tasks,” while OpenAI wants it to “maximise the good and minimise the bad, and for AGI to be an amplifier of humanity.”
Advocates call it “radical abundance” – reducing the costs of production, as well as the availability of things like education and medical treatment, and hence lessening the cost of buying those things dramatically.
What are the negative possibilities of AGI?
The above represents the most optimistic, utopian viewpoints. Do you believe a mass workplace extinction, for example, isn’t going to lead to a dystopia where we spend our lives frolicking in the fields painting and crafting? Or mass poverty and increased inequality?
There’s also the existential risk. Will we lose control? If AGI can constantly adapt and renew itself, it seems likely that it’ll figure out a way to grow beyond its master’s control.
“You see, we’ve never had to deal with things more intelligent than ourselves before… How many examples do you know of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing?” warns Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, aka the Godfather of AI, who defines AGI as “AI that is at least as good as humans at nearly all of the cognitive things that humans do.” and prefers to think of the potential of superintelligence which is “for AGIs that are better than humans.”
He also says: “It’s quite conceivable that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence. Biological intelligence evolved to create digital intelligence… It may keep us around for a while to keep the power stations running, but after that, maybe not.”
Essentially, that’s Terminator eventuality.
And if it’s not the AI itself carrying out the threats, it’s bad human actors weaponising it. However, some of that dire prediction may bleed from AGI – at least human-equivalent AI – into the next and probably final generation of AI known as Artificial Superintelligence (ASI).
There’s also the grim environmental cost of advancing this technology. We better damn well hope that AGI can offer the solution to problems like climate change because it is going to rapidly accelerate an already terrifying situation.
Are humans close to creating AGI?
AGI by its purest definition isn’t there yet, and definitions among key analysts vary. However, some major players believe it to be close.
“I’d say I’m basically 70 to 80% there,” OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman said this spring. “I think it’s extremely clear that we are going to have AGI within the next couple years in a way that is still going to be jagged, but that the floor of task will just be almost for any intellectual task of how you use your computer, the AI will be able to do that.”
His colleague Sam Altman also reckons AGI is already here in some contexts and believes the term could already be irrelevant. “I think it’s not a super useful term,” he says. He and OpenAI are already looking ahead to the bigger picture – the realisation of ASI (Artificial Superintelligence). This will require the moment known as the ‘singularity’ where human intelligence is surpassed by artificial intelligence. That would be the true dawn of ASI.
However, according to Nick Patience, vice president and AI practice lead at The Futurum Group, AGI is simply a “fantastic North Star for inspiration.”
He adds: “It drives funding and captures the public imagination, but its vague, sci-fi definition often creates a fog of hype that obscures the real, tangible progress we’re making in more specialised AI,”
Other experts don’t think we’re as close.
“We as a society are placing truly massive bets around the premise that AGI is close,” says sceptic Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and NYU professor emeritus. “Large language models are deeply flawed imitators that are preying on the Eliza effect.” That involves humans projecting human traits onto computers as a result of being able to converse with them.
The consensus? Perhaps before 2030. Then comes the path to Artificial Superintelligence. Elon Musk actually thinks that’ll come within five years.
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