About to create super human-like artificial intelligence?

A world-leading scientist said it is possible to build an AI (artificial intelligence) that demonstrates general intelligence like humans by 2027. This could open the door to " super intelligence". " in a very short time.

Ben Goertzel, a computer scientist and CEO of SingularityNET, made this statement in his closing keynote at the 2024 AGI Summit in Panama City, Panama. He is known as the "father of AGI" after helping popularize the term artificial general intelligence (AGI) in the early 2000s.

Ben Goertzel believes that we are on track to create an artificial intelligence as intelligent as humans by 2027. (Photo: SingularityNET)

The best AI systems being deployed today are considered "narrow AI" because they may be more capable than humans in one area, based on training data, but cannot outperform humans Generally speaking. These narrow AI systems, which range from machine learning algorithms to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, struggle to reason and understand context like humans.

However, Goertzel notes that AI research is entering a period of exponential growth and evidence points to artificial general intelligence (AGI) – where AI has capabilities equal to humans on a number of things. Field independent with original training data – at hand.

Goertzel thinks 2029 or 2030 might be the most likely years for humanity to build the first AGI agent, but that could happen as early as 2027.

If such an agent were designed to have access to and rewrite its own code, it could quickly evolve into artificial super intelligence (ASI) - which Goertzel defines as AI capable of recognizing knowledge and calculations of the entire human civilization.

"No one has created human-level artificial general intelligence yet. It's reasonable that we could achieve human-level AGI within the next three to eight years," Goertzel said .

He points to three pieces of evidence to support his thesis, the first of which is modeling by computer scientist Ray Kurzweil in his book ' The Singularity is Near' (Viking USA, 2005), which has distilled in his forthcoming book 'The Singularity is Nearer ' (Bodley Head, June 2024).

In his book, Kurzweil built predictive models showing that AGI will be achievable by 2029 , focusing mainly on the exponential nature of technological growth in other sectors.

Goertzel also pointed to the improvements made to LLM over the course of a few years, which have awakened many people around the world to the potential of AI.

The third piece of evidence, Goertzel said, lies in the work building the "OpenCog Hyperon" infrastructure , as well as related software systems and the upcoming AGI programming language, dubbed "MeTTa" . to support it.

OpenCog Hyperon is a form of AI infrastructure that involves combining existing and new AI models, including LLM as a component.

However, Goertzel admits that he could be wrong and might need a quantum computer with a million qubits or something.

Goertzel added: 'Once human-level AGI is reached, within the next few years it may be possible to have fully superhuman AGI - unless AGI threatens to stifle its own development out of conservatism.'