Do We REALLY Have a Long Way to Go and a Short Time to Get There?

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."