If you are taking even a passing curiosity in artificial intelligence, you’ll inevitably have come throughout the notion of artificial general intelligence. AGI, as it is usually recognized, has ascended to buzzword standing over the previous few years as AI has exploded into the general public consciousness on the again of the success of enormous language fashions (LLMs), a type of AI that powers chatbots akin to ChatGPT.
That is largely as a result of AGI has turn into a lodestar for the businesses on the vanguard of one of these expertise. ChatGPT creator OpenAI, for instance, states that its mission is “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity”. Governments, too, have turn into obsessive about the alternatives AGI may current, in addition to doable existential threats, whereas the media (together with this journal, naturally) report on claims that now we have already seen “sparks of AGI” in LLM methods.
Despite all this, it isn’t at all times clear what AGI actually means. Indeed, that is the topic of heated debate within the AI neighborhood, with some insisting it is a useful aim and others that it is a meaningless figment that betrays a misunderstanding of the character of intelligence – and our prospects for replicating it in machines. “It’s not really a scientific concept,” says Melanie Mitchell on the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.
Artificial human-like intelligence and superintelligent AI have been staples of science fiction for hundreds of years. But the time period AGI took off round 20 years in the past when it was utilized by the pc scientist Ben Goertzel and Shane Legg, cofounder of…