(Web Desk) - Several of the leading minds in tech and artificial intelligence have warned attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos that machines with an intelligence on a par or beyond that of even the smartest humans are practically inevitable and on the horizon.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez, as well as Lila Ibrahim, chief operating officer of Google’s AI lab DeepMind all gave their two cents on what is known as artificial general intelligence — basically, super smart AI — at Davos.
While the invention of a super-intelligent AI that was able to teach itself new skills and approach problems like a human might seemed inevitable to them, what was far more murky is what such an AI might look or act like.
OpenAI's Altman said that while human-like AI is coming in the "reasonably close-ish future," he predicted "it will change the world much less than we all think and it will change jobs much less than we all think," according to a CNBC report.
Meanwhile, Cohere founder Gomez said that any such technology will take decades to become widespread — particularly because that kind of powerful AI will need a lot of computing power to run. And, as DeepMind's Ibrahim pointed out, no one can agree on a definition for artificial general intelligence yet, either.
Given that limitation, Ibrahim stressed that the focus should be on how to develop and apply the technology responsibly.
"We’re already seeing areas where AI has the ability to unlock our understanding... where humans haven’t been able to make that type of progress," she said.
"So it’s AI in partnership with the human, or as a tool."
To that end, earlier this month Google DeepMind researchers revealed their AI can solve complex geometry problems — a major advance for the field as previous AI models have been notoriously poor at math.