OpenAI Director Says Artificial General Intelligence May Be 5 Years Out

How long will it take for artificial intelligence to be as smart as human beings?

According to OpenAI board member Adam D’Angelo, that milestone is likely to happen “within five to 15 years,” Seeking Alpha reported Monday (July 29).

D’Angelo, CEO and co-founder of Quora, made that prediction during an event last week, the report added. He said the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be a “very, very important change in the world when we get there.”

His comments follow reports from earlier this month that OpenAI had developed a way to track its progress toward building AGI, with the company sharing a new five-level classification system with employees.

The company believes it is now at Level 1, where AI that can interact in a conversational way with people, and is approaching Level 2, or systems that can solve problems as well as a human with a doctorate-level education.

The next levels involve AI systems that can spend several days acting on a user’s behalf, develop innovations, and finally — at level five — do the work of an organization.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Mira Murati said last fall that AGI will be reached within the next 10 years.

“We’re big believers that you give people better tools, and they do things that astonish you,” Altman said. “And I think AGI will be the best tool humanity has yet created.”

As PYMNTS wrote recently, the reports of these efforts have sparked buzz in the business world of the possibility of AI-powered commerce that could rewrite the rules of global trade, assuming the technology can live up to the hype.

“OpenAI’s pursuit of human-level reasoning isn’t just a technological marvel; it’s a narrative of pushing boundaries and sparking new possibilities in every sector,” Ghazenfer Mansoor, founder and CEO of Technology Rivers, told PYMNTS. “In business, AI can dramatically change how supply chains are managed, forecast market trends with great accuracy, and make customer experiences very personal on a big scale.”

Earlier this year, OpenAI staffers reportedly showed demos of AI models that could answer tricky science and math questions, with one model scoring more than 90% on a championship math dataset. The company also recently showcased a project with new human-like reasoning skills at an internal meeting.

“The way such an algorithm can work is by creating multiple options, following a tree of possibilities, and then reasoning about the outcome and choosing the best path,” SmythOS CTO Alexander De Ridder told PYMNTS. “This is similar to how chess players think different steps ahead before choosing to move their piece.”

He suggested that OpenAI’s innovation likely involves “an algorithmic breakthrough in how to do this efficiently and scalably,” potentially combining “autonomous web research and tool usage to arrive at a reasoning breakthrough.”