4 - 6 minute read
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic for years, with predictions and concerns about its impact on society. However, the CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, recently made a bold prediction that AI systems would reach human-level cognition in the next few years to a decade.
“The progress in the last few years has been pretty incredible. I don’t see any reason why that progress is going to slow down. I think it may even accelerate. So I think we could be just a few years, maybe within a decade away.”
Hassabis, who co-founded Google DeepMind, is known for developing the AlphaGo AI system that beat the world’s top human Go players. In a recent interview at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything festival, Hassabis shared his belief that machines with human-level cognition were imminent. He stated, “The progress in the last few years has been pretty incredible. I don’t see any reason why that progress is going to slow down. I think it may even accelerate. So I think we could be just a few years, maybe within a decade away.”
Hassabis’s prediction comes just two weeks after Google announced the merging of “Google AI” and “DeepMind” into the aptly named “Google DeepMind.” When asked to define “AGI” – artificial general intelligence – Hassabis stated that it was “human-level cognition.” However, there is no standardized definition or test for AGI widely accepted by the STEM community. Nor is there a unified scientific consensus on whether AGI is even possible.
Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are among those who are bullish on AGI in the near term or some similar form of human-level AI. However, some notable figures, such as Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking’s longtime research partner, believe AGI cannot be achieved, while others think it could take decades or centuries for scientists and engineers to figure it out.
Hassabis did not speculate on the potential scenarios that could result from the development of AGI. He did mention that he would advocate for developing AGI technologies cautiously, using the scientific method to try and understand what the underlying system does.
If human-level AI is ever achieved, it could disrupt various aspects of the crypto industry. In the cryptocurrency world, we could see fully autonomous machines capable of acting as entrepreneurs, C-suite executives, advisers, and traders with the intellectual reasoning capacity of a human and the ability to retain information and execute code of a computer system. However, it remains to be seen whether AGI agents would serve us as AI-powered tools or compete with us for resources.
Don’t Look Up … but AGI instead of comet
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2023
Despite the potential benefits of AGI, thousands of people, including Elon Musk and Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak, recently signed an open letter asking companies and individuals building related systems to pause development for six months so scientists can assess the potential for harm.
Someone’s opinion article. My opinion: It’s all about scale now! The Game is Over! It’s about making these models bigger, safer, compute efficient, faster at sampling, smarter memory, more modalities, INNOVATIVE DATA, on/offline, … 1/N https://t.co/UJxSLZGc71
— Nando de Freitas 🏳️🌈 (@NandoDF) May 14, 2022
The Bottom Line
Hassabis’s prediction that AI systems will reach human-level cognition in the next few years to a decade is significant news for traders. The development of AGI technologies could disrupt various aspects of the crypto industry. While there are potential opportunities for traders, there are also significant risks. The potential for harm needs to be assessed by scientists before further development occurs. Traders should remain vigilant and keep an eye on developments in the AI industry to make informed decisions.
