The group included Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, and computer scientists Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li and Bill Dally, all of whom won the annual Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering this week.
“For the first time, AI is intelligence that augments people, it addresses labor, it does work,” Huang said, per the report. “We have enough general intelligence to translate the technology into an enormous amount of society-useful applications in the coming years; we are doing it today.”
Achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), where systems can perform at levels similar to those of humans, is among the most key questions facing the AI sector, according to the report. While there is some debate about how long it will take AGI to arrive, as some say years and others argue decades, the panel said the milestone won’t be marked by a single moment.
“It is not going to be an event because the capabilities are going to expand progressively in various domains,” Meta’s LeCun said, per the report.
“We are already there … and it doesn’t matter because at this point, it’s a bit of an academic question,” Huang said, according to the report.
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The group diverged on whether AI systems will surpass human capabilities on every front, the report said.
“Machine-based intelligence will do a lot of powerful things, but there is a profound place for human intelligence to always be critical in our human society,” said Fei Fei Li, co-founder of AI startup World Labs, per the report.
Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote earlier this year about the implications of AGI for the business world. Today’s AI models can perform tasks like fraud detection or image generation, but they can’t make the leap to perform unrelated tasks like following up on sales calls or figuring out which prospect is more likely to purchase a product.
“AGI would change the game completely,” the report said. “It would possess human-like general problem-solving abilities and cognitive flexibility. Just as a human who learns to cook can apply those organizational and timing skills to project management, an AGI system could take lessons from one domain and apply them to completely different challenges. This adaptability is what makes AGI such a transformative concept for business.”
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