Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, recently predicted that artificial intelligence systems would achieve human-level cognition sometime between “the next few years” and “maybe a decade from now.”
Hassabis, who got his start in the gamingco-founded Google DeepMind (formerly DeepMind Technologies), the company known for developing the AI system AlphaGoresponsible for beating the best human Go players in the world.
In a interview Recently held during The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything festival, Hassabis told interviewer Chris Mims that he believes the arrival of machines with a human level of cognition is imminent:
“The progress of the last few years has been incredible. I don’t see any reason why that progress is going to slow down. I think it may even speed up. So I think we could be just a few years away, maybe a decade from now.”
These comments come just two weeks after an internal shakeup led Google to announce the merger of “Google AI” and “DeepMind” into the aptly named “Google DeepMind.”
Asked to define “AGI” – artificial general intelligence – Hassabis replied: “Human-level cognition.”
Currently, there is no standardized definition, test, or benchmark for AGI that is widely accepted by the STEM community. There is also no unified scientific consensus on whether AGI is even possible.
Some notable figures, such as Roger Penrose (Stephen Hawking’s research partner for many years), believe that AGI cannot be achieved, whereas others they think it could take scientists and engineers decades or centuries to figure it out.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, are among those who are betting on short-term AI, or some similar form of human-level AI.
Don’t Look Up … but AGI instead of comet
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2023
Artificial General Intelligence has become a very popular topic after the launch of ChatGPT and many other similar products and services in recent months. Often cited as the “holy grail” technology, experts predict that human-level AI will alter every facet of life on Earth.
If a human-level AI is ever achieved, it could upend various aspects of the cryptocurrency industry. In the world of cryptocurrencies, we could see fully autonomous machines capable of acting as entrepreneurs, high-level executives, advisers and traders with the intellectual reasoning capacity of a human being and the ability to retain information and execute code of a computer system.
Whether AGI Agents would serve us as AI-powered tools or compete with us for resources remains to be seen.
For his part, Hassabis did not speculate on any scenario, but did tell The Wall Street Journal that he “would advocate developing these types of AGI technologies cautiously using the scientific method, where you try to do very carefully controlled experiments to understand what what the underlying system does.
This could be juxtaposed against the current landscape, where products like his own company’s Google Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT have only recently become publicly available.
experts from sector as Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Nando de Freitas, of DeepMind, have stated that they believe that artificial intelligence could emerge on its own if developers continue to extend current models. Recently, a Google researcher parted ways with the company after claiming that a model called LaMDA was already smart.
Solving these scaling challenges is what will deliver AGI. Research focused on these problems, eg S4 for greater memory, is needed. Philosophy about symbols isn’t. Symbols are tools in the world and big nets have no issue creating them and manipulating them 2/n
— Nando de Freitas ï¸ (@NandoDF) May 14, 2022
Due to the uncertainty surrounding the development of these technologies and their potential impact on humanity, thousands of people, including Elon Musk and Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak, recently signed an open letter calling on companies and individuals building systems related to them to pause their development for six months so that scientists can assess their harmful potential.
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