We need to slow down the race for general artificial intelligence

In an article for the Financial Times (£), a longtime investor in artificial intelligence (AI) and co-author of the annual State of AI report writes that we must slow down the race to invent artificial general intelligence (AGI) or God-like AI—that can generate new scientific knowledge and perform any task in the same way humans can. Having invested in over 50 AI startups, Ian Hogarth writes how he recently asked an AI researcher how far away from reaching this milestone. His reply was, “it’s possible from now onwards.”

In related news, Reuters reports Meta is scrambling to catch up with the AI advancements made by rivals based on an internal memo from September 2022. The memo states the company needs to invest heavily to catch up with the "significant gap in our tooling, workflows and processes." However, in the company's latest quarterly earnings forecast (£), Mark Zuckerberg said, "We are no longer behind building out our AI infrastructure, and to the contrary, we now have the capacity to do leading work in this space at scale.”

Meanwhile, WIRED reports that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said future developments in AI will require new ideas rather than making models bigger. "I think we're at the end of the era where it's going to be these, like, giant, giant models," Altman said. "We'll make them better in other ways." AI platform Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst said researchers are exploring other avenues, like new AI models and learning based on human feedback. 

Elsewhere, in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal (£), Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy Co-Director Cara LaPointe said: "In terms of public consciousness of AI, we are at an inflection point."