Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a hot topic of discussion among tech pundits and influencers. Those invested in the tech sphere are bursting to know when AGI will arrive and make human-level cognition possible. AGI is viewed differently by different people, stemming from varied motivations and the ambiguity of what constitutes intelligent machines. Thankfully, tech titans have weighed-in with their predictions as to when AGI will come.
DeepMind CEO and AI genius Demis Hassabis reveals that artificial cognitive capabilities may arrive within the next decade. The London-based DeepMind is one of the leading AI labs in the world, and its core mission is building AGI. At the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival, Hassabis said, “The progress in the last few years has been pretty incredible. I don’t see any reason why that progress is going to slow down. I think it may even accelerate. So I think we could be just a few years, maybe within a decade away.”
Geoffrey Hinton, the renowned deep learning legend and Google-ex, believes AI will surpass human intelligence in five to twenty years. Hinton took to Twitter to voice his concern, stating, “We live in very uncertain times. It’s possible that I am totally wrong about digital intelligence overtaking us. Nobody really knows which is why we should worry now.” He predicts that by 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence, and this will have drastic implications by connecting them to the cloud and expanding human horizons.
Ben Goertzel is another well-known figure in tech circles and one of the first proponents of AGI. At a conference in 2018, he suggested that no major algorithm upgrades are needed in order to attain human-level intelligence, and we may be only a decade away from realizing it.
Jürgen Schmidhuber, referred to as the “father of AI,” takes an even more ambitious view. He relates AGI to “the singularity”, arguing that it will be here within the next 30 years.
Lastly, Nobel Prize-winner Herbert A. Simon shares his 1965 prediction of AGI. He said, “Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.” His estimation of 1985 clearly fell short, but his ideas and predictions on Artificial General Intelligence still offer valuable insight.
All in all, tech titans have unveiled their optimistic outlooks on AGI’s arrival. DeepMind, Google, and the “father of AI” have all weighed in on AGI, and their predictions vary. Demis Hassabis refers to artificial cognitive capabilities being a few years, potentially within a decade away while Jürgen Schmidhuber goes as far as claiming “the singularity” is predicted to arrive in 30 years. In the meantime, let us hope for the best and stay on the lookout for the latest advancements in the tech industry.
