GenAI Isn’t Scary, But Its Bigger Sibling AGI Will Be

Your news feed is saturated with AI, and perhaps for good reason as many believe this is a real inflection point.

Although it’s been around for years, the real buzz came with GenAI (that’s AI that can generate ‘stuff’).

For students, that’s perhaps their homework, in IT service management, it could be case notes or solution recommendations, and in the creative industry it could be movie scripts (hence the year-long strike in Hollywood).

I’m excited by where this goes. If GenAI is basically a variety of large language models (LLMs) fronted with natural language understanding (NLU), then advancements with both of those will produce incremental changes.

The fun part is change that previously took one to three years is now every six months.

Why Jensen Huang is right about what’s coming next

As excited as I am about that, it’s what’s ‘around the corner’ that really piques my interest….

In the next few years, industry leaders like Jensen Huang suggest that we could witness artificial general intelligence (AGI).

If you panicked and thought GenAI was the end of the world, I’m afraid you over-reacted. The Terminator had little interest in solving IT tickets and HAL wasn’t interested in scripting the next blockbuster movie. The scary AI is AGI.

AGI is defined as a form of AI that possesses the ability to understand, learn and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks and domains (Gartner).

We are talking about technology that can pass the Turing test. The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, is designed to assess a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour that is indistinguishable from that of a human (Turing, 1950).

However when technology does reach this level, consider that its ability won’t be limited by the physical boundaries of the human brain, so an IQ of 1,500 could be possible (where a current genius is perhaps 170)

AGI can not only create (as we have with GenAI currently) but also handle:

* Abstract thinking

* Understand cause and effect

* Apply common sense

* Transfer learning

So while I had only excitement for GenAI, I share a healthy amount of nervousness around the coming of AGI.

Surely it’s just a futurists dream? I am not so sure of that. Jensen Huang built Nvidia to be the sixth largest company in the world (by market cap).

That’s right, at $1.6tn, it’s larger than Meta (Facebook) and less than $100bn from Alphabet (Google). Based upon that track record I’d be inclined to trust his judgement.

Change is the only certainty so I’d be prepared to get real comfortable with all types of artificial intelligence because it’s not going away.