Science & Technology
Google AI chief says there’s a 50% chance we’ll hit AGI in just 5 years
More than a decade ago, the co-founder of Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence lab predicted that by 2028, AI will have a half-and-half shot of being about as smart as humans — and now, he’s holding firm on that forecast.
In an interview with tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg said that he still thinks that researchers have a 50-50 chance of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), a stance he publicly announced at the very end of 2011 on his blog, Futurism reported.
It’s a notable prediction considering the exponentially growing interest in the space. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long advocated for an AGI, a hypothetical agent that is capable of accomplishing intellectual tasks as well as a human, that can be of benefit to all. But whether we’ll ever be able to get to that point — let alone agree on one definition of AGI — remains to be seen.
Legg apparently began looking towards his 2028 goalpost all the way back in 2001 after reading “The Age of Spiritual Machines,” the groundbreaking 1999 book by fellow Google AI luminary Ray Kurzweil that predicts a future of superhuman AIs.
“There were two really important points in his book that I came to believe as true,” he explained. “One is that computational power would grow exponentially for at least a few decades. And that the quantity of data in the world would grow exponentially for a few decades.”
Paired with an understanding of the trends of the era, such as the deep learning method of teaching algorithms to “think” and process data the way human brains do, Legg wrote back at the start of the last decade that in the coming ones, AGI could well be achieved — so long as “nothing crazy happens like a nuclear war.”
Today, the DeepMind co-founder said that there are caveats to his prediction that the AGI era will be upon us by the end of this decade.
The first, broadly, is that definitions of AGI are reliant on definitions of human intelligence — and that kind of thing is difficult to test precisely because the way we think is complicated.
“You’ll never have a complete set of everything that people can do,” Legg said — things like developing episodic memory, or the ability to recall complete “episodes” that happened in the past, or even understanding streaming video. But if researchers could assemble a battery of tests for human intelligence and an AI model were to perform well enough against them, he continued, then “you have an AGI.”
When Patel asked if there could be a single simple test to see whether an AI system had reached general intelligence, such as beating Minecraft, Legg pushed back.
“There is no one thing that would do it, because I think that’s the nature of it,” the AGI expert said. “It’s about general intelligence. So I’d have to make sure [an AI system] could do lots and lots of different things and it didn’t have a gap.”
The second biggest caveat, Legg added, was the ability to scale AI training models way, way up — a worthy point given how much energy AI companies are already using to churn out large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.
“There’s a lot of incentive to make a more scalable algorithm to harness all this computing data,” Legg explained. “So I thought it would be very likely that we’ll start to discover scalable algorithms to do this.”
Asked where he thought we stand today on the path to AGI, Legg said that he thinks computational power is where it needs to be to make it happen, and the “first unlocking step” would be to “start training models now with the scale of the data that is beyond what a human can experience in a lifetime” — a feat he believes the AI industry is ready to achieve.
All that said, Legg reiterated his personal stance that he only believes there’s a 50 percent chance researchers will achieve AGI before the end of this decade, and Futurism has reached out to DeepMind to see if the Google subsidiary has anything to add to that prognosis.
“I think it’s entirely plausible,” he said, “but I’m not going to be surprised if it doesn’t happen by then.”
Science & Technology
Ethiopian volcano erupts for first time in nearly 12,000 years
Ash from the eruption drifted across the region, spreading over Yemen, Oman, India, and parts of Pakistan.
The Hayli Gubbi volcano in Ethiopia’s Afar region has erupted for the first time in almost 12,000 years, sending massive ash plumes soaring up to 14 kilometres into the atmosphere, according to the Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre.
The eruption began on Sunday and lasted several hours. Hayli Gubbi, located around 800 kilometres northeast of Addis Ababa near the Eritrean border, sits within the geologically active Rift Valley, where two major tectonic plates meet. The volcano rises roughly 500 metres above the surrounding landscape.
Ash from the eruption drifted across the region, spreading over Yemen, Oman, India, and parts of Pakistan. Satellite imagery and social-media videos captured a towering column of white smoke billowing into the sky.
The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program notes that Hayli Gubbi has no recorded eruptions during the Holocene, the period dating back about 12,000 years to the end of the last Ice Age.
Volcanologist Simon Carn of Michigan Technological University also confirmed on Bluesky that the volcano had “no record of Holocene eruptions.”
A global outage at web-infrastructure firm Cloudflare began to ease on Tuesday afternoon after preventing people from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT.
Cloudflare, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, said it started to investigate the internal service degradation around 6:40 a.m. ET. It has deployed a fix but some customers might still be impacted as it recovers service.
The incident marked the latest hit to major online services. An outage of Amazon’s cloud service last month caused global turmoil as thousands of popular websites and apps, including Snapchat, were inaccessible due to the disruption.
Cloudflare – whose shares were down about 5% in premarket trading – runs one of the world’s largest networks that helps websites and apps load faster and stay online by protecting them from traffic surges and cyberattacks.
The latest outage prevented users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, and ChatGPT, prompting users to log outage reports with Downdetector.
Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources. “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors,” the company said in an emailed statement.
“We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
X and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment. – REUTERS
China’s Shenzhou-21 space rocket and its crew including the youngest member of its astronaut corps blasted off on Friday atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China, Chinese state media reported.
It was the seventh mission to the permanently inhabited Chinese space station since it was completed in 2022, Reuters reported.
Missions on China’s Shenzhou-21 spacecraft involve trios of astronauts on six-month stays in space, with veteran astronauts increasingly replaced by younger faces. First-timers Zhang Hongzhang, 39, and Wu Fei, 32 – China’s youngest astronaut to be sent to space – were picked to participate in the programme in 2020.
Commander Zhang Lu, 48, flew on the 2022 Shenzhou-15 mission.
FIRST SMALL MAMMALS ON SPACE STATION
The Shenzhou-21 astronauts will take over from the Shenzhou-20 crew who had lived and worked on board Tiangong, or “Heavenly Palace”, for more than six months. The Shenzhou-20 astronauts will return to Earth in the coming days.
The Shenzhou-21 crew were also joined by four black mice, the first small mammals to be taken to the Chinese space station. The mice will be used in experiments on reproduction in low Earth orbit.
Biannual launches have become the norm for the Shenzhou programme, which has in the past year reached new milestones with the deployment of Chinese astronauts born in the 1990s, a world-record spacewalk, and plans to train and send the first foreign astronaut, from Pakistan, to Tiangong next year.
The rapid advances have raised alarm bells in Washington, which is now racing to put a U.S. astronaut on the moon again before China does.
Both countries are also competing in nascent institution-building efforts, with the U.S.-led Artemis Accords on lunar exploration matched up against the Chinese and Russian-led International Lunar Research Station.
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