LONDON — Artificial intelligence that can match humans at any task is still some way off — but it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a reality, according to the CEO of Google DeepMind.
Speaking at a briefing in DeepMind’s London offices on Monday, Demis Hassabis said that he thinks artificial general intelligence (AGI) — which is as smart or smarter than humans — will start to emerge in the next five or 10 years.
“I think today’s systems, they’re very passive, but there’s still a lot of things they can’t do. But I think over the next five to 10 years, a lot of those capabilities will start coming to the fore and we’ll start moving towards what we call artificial general intelligence,” Hassabis said.
Hassabis defined AGI as “a system that’s able to exhibit all the complicated capabilities that humans can.”
“We’re not quite there yet. These systems are very impressive at certain things. But there are other things they can’t do yet, and we’ve still got quite a lot of research work to go before that,” Hassabis said.
Hassabis isn’t alone in suggesting that it’ll take a while for AGI to appear. Last year, the CEO of Chinese tech giant Baidu Robin Li said he sees AGI is “more than 10 years away,” pushing back on excitable predictions from some of his peers about this breakthrough taking place in a much shorter timeframe.
Some time to go yet
Hassabis’ forecast pushes the timeline to reach AGI some way back compared to what his industry peers have been sketching out.
Dario Amodei, CEO of AI startup Anthropic, told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January that he sees a form of AI that’s “better than almost all humans at almost all tasks” emerging in the “next two or three years.”
Other tech leaders see AGI arriving even sooner. Cisco’s Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel thinks there’s a chance we could see an example of AGI emerge as soon as this year. “There’s three major…
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