Scenario Planning for an AGI Future-Anton Korinek

AI may be on a trajectory to surpass human intelligence; we should be prepared Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly advancing, and the pace of progress has accelerated in recent years. ChatGPT, released in November 2022, surprised users by generating human-quality text and code, seamlessly translating languages, writing creative content, and answering questions in an informative way, all at a level previously unseen. Yet in the background, the foundation models that underlie generative AI have been advancing rapidly for more than a decade. The amount of computational resources (or, in short, “compute”) used to train the most cutting-edge AI systems has doubled every six months over the past decade. What today’s leading generative AI models can do was unthinkable just a few years ago: they can deliver significant productivity gains for the world’s premier consultants , for programmers , and even for economists (Korinek 2023). Conjecture about AI acceleration Recent advances in artificial intelligence have prompted leading researchers to project that the pace of current progress may not only be sustained but may even accelerate in coming years. In May 2023, Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist who laid the theoretical foundations of deep learning, described a significant shift in his perspective: “I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us.” He conjectured that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—AI that possesses the ability to understand, learn, and perform any intellectual task a human being can perform—may be realized within a span of 5 to 20 years.