Are we nearing the era of artificial general intelligence?
Image: Nature
AI systems can now match or exceed human performance across a range of basic tasks, per Stanford University’s annual AI trends report, signaling that artificial general intelligence – aka AI that’s as generally capable as humans across all cognitive tasks – could soon be on the horizon.
The report found AI systems today either match or exceed human performance in several basic areas, including reading comprehension, image classification, visual reasoning, and competition-level mathematics.
AI is also approaching PhD-level reasoning in advanced topics. As part of their research, the Stanford scientists ran most of the current AI systems on the market through a questionnaire called the GPQA to assess their reasoning capabilities.
The GPQA is designed to be tough; PhD-level scholars can correctly answer questions in their field ~65% of the time, and score an average of 34% in questions outside their field – despite having access to the internet during the test. For context, randomly selecting answers would yield a 25% score.
- Stanford researchers found the AI systems it studied scored between 30–40% on the overall test, led by GPT-4 with 41%.
- However, their report didn’t include Claude 3, the latest chatbot from Anthropic, which recently scored a 60% on the GPQA according to one of the test’s creators.
Many of the largest players in the AI industry are currently racing to build a system that represents artificial general intelligence. Achieving such a concept is the driving mission of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, and a main priority for the research wings of Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
👀 Looking ahead… Tesla CEO and early OpenAI-backer Elon Musk predicted this month that AI will be smarter than all humans within the next year or two – though some experts pushed back on his claim, arguing that current AI systems aren’t close to approximating the human mind.
📊 Flash poll: In your opinion, when – if ever – will an AI system achieve artificial general intelligence?
See a 360° view of what media pundits are saying →
Sprinkles in favor of AGI emerging soon
- Some commentators argue that AI systems like ChatGPT represent a turning point in the quest towards AGI, since they can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, medicine, law, psychology, and more without needing any special prompting.
- Others contend that the most important parts of AGI have already been accomplished, since today’s AI models are able to perform competently even on novel tasks they were not trained for – which previous systems were unable to do.
- “We’ve reached a turning point with AI, expert says” –Jessica Chia and Bethany Cianciolo, CNN
- “Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here” –Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Peter Norvig, Noema Magazine
- “Uncharted Territory: Artificial General Intelligence and Higher Ed” –Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
Sprinkles against AGI emerging soon
- Some commentators argue that the next phase of artificial intelligence isn’t AGI, but rather niche AI models that work extremely well in specific domains and contexts but aren’t able to approximate the features of the human mind.
- Others contend that researchers will likely never achieve AGI – not due to technological limitations, but rather the fact that every time an AI model manages to display some amazing capability previously thought impossible, humans downplay its magnitude to the level of simple automation.
- “The future of generative AI is niche, not generalized” –Ken Mugrage, MIT Technology Review
- “Why The Debate About Artificial General Intelligence Misses The Point” –Pawel Rzeszucinski, Forbes
- “The apocalypse isn’t coming. We must resist cynicism and fear about AI” –Stephen Marche, The Guardian
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