SAN FRANCISCO: Observers say the rise of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – now seen as inevitable in Silicon Valley – will bring about a change “orders of magnitude” greater than anything the world has seen so far. Is. But are we ready?
AGI—defined as artificial intelligence (AI) with human cognitive capabilities, as opposed to more narrow [AI], such as the headline-grabbing ChatGPT—can liberate people from menial tasks and be creative. could usher in a new era of talent.
But experts warn that such a historical paradigm shift could also threaten jobs and create insurmountable social problems.
Seki Chen, chief executive of San Francisco’s Startup Runway, says that previous technological advances, from electricity to the Internet, have sparked powerful social change.
“But what we’re seeing now is intelligence itself… This is the first time we’ve been able to create intelligence ourselves and increase the amount of it in the universe,” he told JEE News. “
The change, as a result, will be “orders of magnitude greater than every other technological change we’ve had in history.”
And such an exciting, scary change is a “double-edged sword,” Chen said, envisioning the use of AGI to combat climate change, for example, but also cautioning that it’s a There is a device that we want to be “as playable as possible”.
It was the release of ChatGPT late last year that brought the long-held dream of AGI a giant leap closer to reality.
OpenAI, the company behind the creative software that generates computing code on subjects, rhymes, and command, this week released an even more powerful version of the technology that drives it — GPT 4.
He says the technology will be able to process not only text but also images and produce complex content such as legal complaints or video games.
The company said it thus “demonstrates human-level performance” on some benchmarks.
AI replacing hard work
The success of Microsoft-backed OpenAI has sparked an arms race in Silicon Valley as tech companies look to take their generative AI tools to the next level — though they remain wary of chatbots.
Already, AI-powered digital assistants from Microsoft and Google can summarize meetings, draft emails, create websites, craft ad campaigns and more — giving us a glimpse of what AGI is capable of in the future. Will be.
“We spend a lot of time on labor,” said Jared Spatrow, a Microsoft corporate vice president.
With AI Spataro wants to “rediscover the spirit of work,” he said during a Microsoft presentation on Thursday.
Some suggest that AI can also help reduce costs.
British landscape architect Joe Perkins tweeted that he used GPT 4 for a coding project, which a “very nice” developer told him would cost 5,000 pounds [$6,000] and take two weeks.
“GPT 4 delivered in 3 hours, for $0.11,” he tweeted. “Truly mind boggling.”
Not only did it write the scripts, it also provided step by step instructions of how to set up and run on @Replit
— Joe Perkins (@joeprkns) March 15, 2023
Every single script worked perfectly first time, and then I iterated by using new prompts to add additional complexity.
But that raises the question of the threat to human jobs, with entrepreneur Chen acknowledging that technology could one day create a startup like his — or an even better version.
“How am I going to make a living and not be homeless?” he asked, adding that he was counting on solutions to emerge.
Question of survival in AI world
Ubiquitous AI also calls into question creative authenticity as songs, photos, art and more are produced by software rather than people.
Will humans abandon education by relying on software to think for them?
And, who can be trusted to make AI unbiased, accurate and adaptable to different countries and cultures?
AGI is “probably coming to us faster than we can process it,” says Sharon Zhou, co-founder of a generative AI company.
The technology raises an existential question for humanity, he told JEE News.
“If someone is going to be more powerful than us and more intelligent than us, what does that mean for us?” Chow asked.
“And do we use it? Or does it use us?”
OpenAI says it plans to gradually build AGI with the goal of benefiting all of humanity, but has acknowledged that the software has security flaws.
In an interview with MIT Technology Review, OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever said that safety is a “process,” adding that it would be “highly desirable” for companies to have “a process come along that allows for slow release models. These are completely unprecedented capabilities.”
But for now, Zhou says, being lazy isn’t part of the ethic.
“The power is concentrated around the people who can build the thing. And they make decisions around it, and they tend to move quickly,” she says.
She points out that the international system itself may be at risk.
“The pressure between the US and China has been very high,” Zhou says, adding that the [AI] race invokes the Cold War era.
“Certainly there is a risk with AGI that if one country gets it out quickly, will they dominate?” she asks.
“And so I think the fear is, don’t stop because we can’t lose.”
