Looks like AGI’s arrival is advanced by a year.
“We’re not quite there [yet], but we will be there, and by 2029 it [AI] will [be able to] match any person,” said Ray Kurzweil, the famous computer scientist, in a recent podcast with Joe Rogan, when asked about his views on AI and its capabilities. “I’m actually considered conservative. People think it might happen next year or the year after,” he added.
Kurzweil recalled his claim from 1999, when he had predicted that by 2029 AI would be able to match humans. “For 30 years, people thought that was totally crazy,” he added. “In fact, Stanford held a conference inviting several hundred people from around the world to talk about my prediction. People thought that this would happen, but not by 2029. They thought it would take 100 years.”
Elon Musk reposted on X agreeing with Kurzweil’s views. “By 2029 AI is probably smarter than all humans combined (sic),” he wrote. Lex Fridman reacted to this saying, “We are in for a few interesting years. I hope humanity wins in the end.”
AI will probably be smarter than any single human next year. By 2029, AI is probably smarter than all humans combined. https://t.co/RO3g2OCk9x
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 13, 2024
Kurzweil further explained that people often underestimate the rate at which technology grows. “It actually doubles in fourteen years,” whereas, he said, people think it only grows by 2% every year. Talking about the speed of computers, he said that the calculation speed has increased to 35 billion calculations per second, which is a 24 quadrillion fold increase from 0.00007 calculations per second in 1939.
In August last year, Saturnin Pugnet, founding member of Tools for Humanity, the company behind Worldcoin, started the AGI conversation claiming that “Fusion and AGI are probably happening by 2030″.
Stating that unlimited energy and intelligence will come to fruition by the end of the decade, he instantly takes you back to what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had predicted a couple of years ago. He said that the costs of intelligence and energy are going on a path towards near-zero and that by 2030 “AI revolution and renewable + nuclear energy will get us there”.
AGI has been achieved
The form of AGI has been the most-discussed topic online, with people giving their two cents about it.
The ongoing discussions has led to industry leaders weighing in their opinions as well. Elon Musk could not have chosen a better time to slap OpenAI with a lawsuit. Just as OpenAI and other tech titans invested in robotics company FigureAI, Musk filed a case against OpenAI and Altman, as it supposedly inches towards AGI.
The lawsuit claims that OpenAI has already achieved AGI with GPT-4.
Same was the case when OpenAI accidentally leaked Q* and everybody called it AGI. There is no doubt that OpenAI has been hung up on building AGI. Interestingly, the company took another step towards this goal and changed the “core values” listed on its website to add the focus on AGI, something that wasn’t explicitly mentioned on the page before.
Recently, NVIDIA head Jensen Huang shared his view on AGI as well, expressing his belief that its realisation is determined by how the goal is defined. “If I gave an AI every single test that you can possibly imagine, make the list of tests and put it in front of the computer science industry, I am guessing in five years’ time, we will do well on every single one,” he said.
Huang also emphasised that AGI could be farther away, and believes that it is hard to achieve it as an engineer, as engineers need defined goals. With the evaluation parameters still evolving, and with the moving definition of AGI, where tech experts are also divided on its goal, the road to AGI is still hazy.
But most recently, Cognition AI just introduced Devin, an autonomous coding agent that is able to complete tasks. Not just that, it is able to autocomplete tasks and write entire apps on its own in minutes. Developers on X have been concerned about losing their jobs and aiming to brush up on their skills to compete with this massive breakthrough.
Meta is also eyeing AGI with the release of Llama 3. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has thrown his hat into the ring in the pursuit of AGI. In his recent Instagram post, he announced, “Our long-term vision is to build general intelligence, open-source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit.”
“We had the opportunity to name our AGI, and we called it Devin,” said a user on X. Maybe AGI would wake up in 2029 (maybe sooner) and say “Hey, I’m Devin.” On the other hand, Yann LeCun on a recent podcast with Fridman said, “You turn on a machine and then we have AGI, that’s not going to happen. It is going to be gradual progress.”
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