Tech Giants, Stop Trying To Build Godlike AI

Tilting at the ill-defined holy grail of artificial general intelligence opens the door to unintended consequences.

- Parmy Olson

We have ChatGPT because Mr Sam Altman wanted to build a god. For all the buzz, the chatbot is only a prototype along the way to a loftier goal of AGI, or "artificial general intelligence", that surpasses the cognitive abilities of humans.

When Mr Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, he made it the non-profit's goal. Five years earlier, Mr Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind Technologies, now Google's core AI division, with the same AGI objective. Their reasons were utopian: AGI would create financial abundance and be "broadly beneficial" to humanity, according to Mr Altman. It would cure cancer and solve climate change, according to Mr Hassabis.

There are problems with these noble goals. First, the financial incentives of large tech firms are likely to skew AGI efforts towards benefiting their coffers, first and foremost.

Those early altruistic objectives of Mr Altman and Mr Hassabis have fallen by the wayside in the last few years as the generative-AI boom sparked a race to "win", whatever that means.

In the last few years, DeepMind's website has removed content on health research or discovering new forms of energy creation to become more product-focused, spotlighting Google's flagship AI platform Gemini. Mr Altman still talks about benefiting humanity, but he's no longer a non-profit "free from financial obligations" per his 2015 founding statement, and more of a product arm of Microsoft, which has since sunk roughly US$17 billion (S$23 billion) into his company.

The other issue is that even the people who are building AGI are fumbling in the dark, despite how sure they are of their timeline predictions.