Firms, scientists at odds over super AI

Hype is growing from leaders of major AI companies that “strong” computer intelligence will imminently outstrip humans, while many researchers in the field describe claims as marketing pap.

- TOM BARFIELD

The belief that human-on-better intelligence – often called “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) – will emerge from current machine learning techniques fuels hypes for the timeline, ranging from near-termdelivered hyperabundance to human extinction.

“Systems that start to point to AGI are coming into view,” OpenAI chief Sam Altman wrote in a blog post last month. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has said the milestone “could come as early as 2026”.

Such predictions help justify the hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into computing hardware and the energy supplies to run it.

Others, though, are more sceptical. Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun told AFP last month that “we are not going to get to human-level AI by just scaling up LLMs – the large language models behind current systems like ChatGPT or Claude.

Mr LeCun’s view appears backed by a majority of academics in the field.

Over three-quarters of 1650 attendees to a recent survey by the AI-Based Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) agreed that “scaling up current approaches” was unlikely to produce AGI.

‘LETTING THE GENIE OUT’