Every major tech corporation is seemingly racing to hit the coveted AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benchmark ever since the emergence of the AI bubble. The technology promises to ship with superior cognitive capabilities that make it more intelligent than human beings, raising safety concerns among AI critics.
AI safety researcher Roman Yampolskiy revealed that there is a 99.999999% probability AI will end humanity, further indicating that the only way to avoid inevitable existential doom is not to build the technology in the first place.
However, Yampolskiy claimed that the AI race is up for grabs to anyone with the most money to finance its exorbitant computing power needs.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman downplayed the security and safety concerns, claiming we won't experience the threats cited by AI critics at the AGI moment. Instead, he indicated that he is confident the OpenAI team will develop AGI within the next five years, and that it will have surprisingly little societal impact.
While the impact of AGI on society remains unclear, there has been a call for guardrails and regulation to prevent the technology from spiraling out of control and spelling inevitable doom for humanity.
Sam Altman indicated that AGI won't be a new piece of hardware, but claimed that if it did, "you'll be happy to have a new device." Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, recently commented on the same topic, indicating that he's skeptical about the current hardware venturing the world into the AGI era (via @artificialintelligenceee on IG).
The executive says that it's "entirely possible" not to reach the coveted AGI benchmark with the current hardware. According to Pichai:
"I feel there's a lot of forward progress ahead with the paths we're on. Not only the set of ideas we are working on today, some of the newer ideas we are experimenting with. So I'm very optimistic on seeing a lot of progress. But you know, we've always had these technological curves where you may hit a temporary plateau."
As such, the executive says no one can confidently state that we're currently on an absolute path to AGI. He says the pace of progress is staggering, but foresees significant improvement in the future. However, he claims that the technology is somewhat limited, as it shows substantial progress in some fields, yet fails to deliver in other areas. "We are quite far from a generalized technology," Pichai concluded.
