Regarding artificial global intelligence, or AGI, are you unclear? That is the ultimate creation that OpenAI is fixated on making in a way that “benefits all of humanity.” They recently funded $6.6 billion to get closer to that objective, so you might want to give them some serious thought.
However, you're not alone if you're still baffled by the concept of AGI.
During a comprehensive conversation on Thursday at Credo AI's responsible AI leadership summit, eminent researcher Fei-Fei Li—often referred to as the “godmother of AI”—admitted that she is also ignorant of the definition of artificial general intelligence. Other topics Li covered included how she contributed to the development of contemporary AI, the need for society to safeguard itself against sophisticated AI models, and why she believes her new unicorn business World Labs is going to change everything.
But when asked what she thought about an “AI singularity,” Li was just as lost as the rest of us.
“I come from academic AI and have been educated in the more rigorous and evidence-based methods, so I don’t really know what all these words mean,” said Li to a packed room in San Francisco, beside a big window overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. “I frankly don’t even know what AGI means. Like people say you know it when you see it, I guess I haven’t seen it. The truth is, I don’t spend much time thinking about these words because I think there’s so many more important things to do…”
Fei-Fei Li is most likely the person who is most knowledgeable about AGI. She was the driving force behind the present AI boom when she developed ImageNet in 2006, the first large-scale AI training and benchmarking dataset in history. She was Google Cloud's Chief Scientist for AI/ML from 2017 to 2018. Li is now the director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute (HAI), and she is developing "large world models" through her firm, World Labs. (In my opinion, the word is almost as perplexing as AGI.)
In an interview with The New Yorker last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attempted to define artificial intelligence. The "equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a coworker" is how Altman put AGI.
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