bbc | At the start of the 2010s, one of the world leaders in AI, DeepMind,
often referred to something called AGI, or "artificial general
intelligence" being developed at some point in the future.
Machines
that possess AGI - widely thought of as the holy grail in AI - would be
just as smart as humans across the board, it promised.
DeepMind's
lofty AGI ambitions caught the attention of Google, who paid around
£400m for the London-based AI lab in 2014 when it had the following
mission statement splashed across its website: "Solve intelligence, and
then use that to solve everything else."
Several others started to
talk about AGI becoming a reality, including Elon Musk's $1bn AI lab,
OpenAI, and academics like MIT professor Max Tegmark.
In 2014,
Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, went one step further
with his book Superintelligence. It predicts a world where machines are
firmly in control.
But those conversations were taken less and
less seriously as the decade went on. At the end of 2019, the smartest
computers could still only excel at a "narrow" selection of tasks.
Gary
Marcus, an AI researcher at New York University, said: "By the end of
the decade there was a growing realisation that current techniques can
only carry us so far."
He thinks the industry needs some "real innovation" to go further.
"There
is a general feeling of plateau," said Verena Rieser, a professor in
conversational AI at Edinburgh's Herriot Watt University.
One AI researcher who wishes to remain anonymous said we're entering a period where we are especially sceptical about AGI.
"The public perception of AI is increasingly dark: the public believes AI is a sinister technology," they said.
For
its part, DeepMind has a more optimistic view of AI's potential,
suggesting that as yet "we're only just scratching the surface of what
might be possible".
"As the community solves and discovers more,
further challenging problems open up," explained Koray Kavukcuoglu, its
vice president of research.
"This is why AI is a long-term scientific research journey.
"We
believe AI will be one of the most powerful enabling technologies ever
created - a single invention that could unlock solutions to thousands of
problems. The next decade will see renewed efforts to generalise the
capabilities of AI systems to help achieve that potential - both
building on methods that have already been successful and researching
how to build general-purpose AI that can tackle a wide range of tasks."
