This post was originally published on IT Pro Today
(Bloomberg Opinion/Gideon Lichfield) — If you’ve heard the term artificial general intelligence, or AGI, it probably makes you think of a humanish intelligence, like the honey-voiced AI love interest in the movie Her, or a superhuman one, like Skynet from The Terminator. At any rate, something science-fictional and far off.
But now a growing number of people in the tech industry and even outside it are prophesying AGI or “human-level” AI in the very near future.
These people may believe what they are saying, but it is at least partly hype designed to get investors to throw billions of dollars at AI companies. Yes, big changes are almost certainly on the way, and you should be preparing for them. But for most of us, calling them AGI is at best a distraction and at worst deliberate misdirection. Business leaders and policymakers need a better way to think about what’s coming. Fortunately, there is one.
How Many Years Away?
Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Elon Musk of xAI (the thing he’s least famous for) have all said recently that AGI, or something like it, will arrive within a couple of years. More measured voices like Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and Meta’s Yann LeCun see it being at least five to 10 years
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