Monthly Archives: March 2024

A few weeks ago, I was having a chat with my neighbor Tom, an amateur chemist who conducts experiments in his apartment. I have a longtime fascination with chemistry, and always enjoy talking with him. But this conversation was scary. If his latest experiment was successful, he informed me, it might have some part to play in curing cancer. If it was a failure, however, there was a reasonable chance, according to his calculations, that the experiment would trigger an explosion that levels the entire apartment complex.

Perhaps Tom was lying, or maybe hes delusional. But what if he really was just one test tube clink away from blowing me and dozens of our fellow building residents sky high? What should one do in this situation? After a brief deliberation, I decided to call 911. The police rushed over, searched his apartment and decided after an investigation to confiscate all of his chemistry equipment and bring him in for questioning.

The above scenario is a thought experiment. As far as I know, no one in my apartment complex is an amateur chemist experimenting with highly combustible compounds. Ive spun this fictional tale because its a perfect illustration of the situation that we all of us are in with respect to the AI companies trying to build artificial general intelligence, or AGI. The list of such companies includes DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, all of which are backed by billions of dollars. Many leading figures at these very companies have claimed, in public, while standing in front of microphones, that one possible outcome of the technology they are explicitly trying to build is that everyone on Earth dies. The only sane response to this is to immediately call 911 and report them to the authorities. They are saying that their own technology might kill you, me, our family members and friends the entire human population. And almost no one is freaking out about this.

Its crucial to note that you dont have to believe that AGI will actually kill everyone on Earth to be alarmed. I myself am skeptical of these claims. Even if one suspects Tom of lying about his chemistry experiments, the fact of his telling me that his actions could kill everyone in our apartment complex is enough to justify dialing 911.

One doesnt need to accept this line of reasoning to be alarmed when the CEO of the most powerful AI company thats trying to build AGI says that superintelligent machines might kill us.

What exactly are AI companies saying about the potential dangers of AGI? During a 2023 talk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was asked about whether AGI could destroy humanity, and he responded, the bad case and I think this is important to say is, like, lights out for all of us. In some earlier interviews, he declared that I think AI willmost likely sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies created with serious machine learning, and probably AI will kill us all, but until then were going to turn out a lot of great students. The audience laughed at this. But was he joking? If he was, he was also serious: the OpenAI website itself states in a 2023 article that the risks of AGI may be existential, meaning roughly that they could wipe out the entire human species. Another article on their website affirms that a misaligned superintelligent AGI could cause grievous harm to the world.

In a 2015 post on his personal blog, Altman wrote that development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. Whereas AGI refers to any artificial system that is at least as competent as humans in every cognitive domain of importance, such as science, mathematics, social manipulation and creativity, a SMI is a type of AGI that is superhuman in its capabilities. Many researchers in the field of AI safety believe that once we have AGI, we will have superintelligent machines very shortly after. The reason is that designing increasingly capable machines is an intellectual task, so the smarter these systems become, the better able theyll become at designing even smarter systems. Hence, the first AGIs will design the next generation of even smarter AGIs, until those systems reach superhuman levels.

Again, one doesnt need to accept this line of reasoning to be alarmed when the CEO of the most powerful AI company thats trying to build AGI says that superintelligent machines might kill us.

Just the other day, an employee at OpenAI who goes by roon on Twitter/X, tweeted that things are accelerating. Pretty much nothing needs to change course to achieve AGI Worrying about timelines that is, worrying about whether AGI will be built later this year or 10 years from now is idle anxiety, outside your control. You should be anxious about stupid mortal things instead. Do your parents hate you? Does your wife love you? In other words, AGI is right around the corner and its development cannot be stopped. Once created, it will bring about the end of the world as we know it, perhaps by killing everyone on the planet. Hence, you should be thinking not so much about when exactly this might happen, but on more mundane things that are meaningful to us humans: Do we have our lives in order? Are we on good terms with our friends, family and partners? When youre flying on a plane and it begins to nosedive toward the ground, most people turn to their partner and say I love you or try to send a few last text messages to loved ones to say goodbye. That is, according to someone at OpenAI, what we should be doing right now.

A similar sentiment has been echoed by other notable figures at OpenAI, such as Altmans co-founder, Ilya Sutskever. The future is going to be good for the AIs regardless, he said in 2019. It would be nice if it would be good for humans as well. He adds, ominously, that I think its pretty likely the entire surface of the Earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers once we create AGI, referencing the idea that AGI is dangerous partly because it will seek to harness every resource it can. In the process, humanity could be destroyed as an unintended side effect. Indeed, Sutskever tells us that the AGI his own company is trying to build probably isnt,

going to actively hate humans and want to harm them, but its just going to be too powerful, and I think a good analogy would be the way humans treat animals. Its not that we hate animals. I think humans love animals and have a lot of affection for them, but when the time comes to build a highway between two cities, we are not asking the animals for permission. We just do it because its important for us. And I think by default thats the kind of relationship thats going to be between us and AGIs, which are truly autonomous and operating on their own behalf.

The good folks by which I mean quasi-homicidal folks at OpenAI arent the only ones being honest about how their work could lead to the annihilation of our species. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, which recently received $4 billion in funding from Amazon, said in 2017 that theres a long tail of things of varying degrees of badness that could happen after building AGI. I think at the extreme end is the fear that an AGI could destroy humanity. I cant see any reason in principle why that couldnt happen. Similarly, Elon Musk, the co-founder of OpenAI who recently started his own company to build AGI, named xAI, declared in 2023 that one of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI, and has previously said that, being very close to the cutting edge in AI scares the hell out of me. Why? Because advanced AI is capable of vastly more than almost anyone knows and the rate of improvement is exponential.

Even the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, told Sky News last year that advanced AI can be very harmful if deployed wrongly, and that with respect to safety issues, we dont have all the answers there yet, and the technology is moving fast. So does that keep me up at night? Absolutely.

Google currently owns DeepMind, which was cofounded in 2010 by a computer scientist named Shane Legg. During a talk one year before DeepMind was founded, Legg claimed that if we can build human level AI, then we can almost certainly scale up to well above human level. A machine well above human level will understand its design and be able to design even more powerful machines, which gestures back at the idea that AGI could take over the job of designing even more advanced AI systems than itself. We have almost no idea how to deal with this, he adds. During the same talk, Legg said that we arent going to develop a theory about how to keep AGI safe before AGI is developed. Ive spoken to a bunch of people, he reports, none of them, that Ive ever spoken to, think they will have a practical theory of friendly artificial intelligence in about 10 years time. We have no idea how to solve this problem.

Either these AI companies need to show, right now, that the systems theyre building are completely safe, or they need to stop, right now.

Thats worrying because many researchers at the major AI companies argue that as roon suggested AGI may be just around the corner. In a recent interview, Demis Hassabis, another co-founder of DeepMind, says that when we started DeepMind back in 2010, we thought of it as a 20-year project, and actually I think were on track. So, I wouldnt be surprised if we had AGI-like systems within the next decade. When asked what it would take to make sure that an AGI thats smarter than a human is safe, his answer was, as one commentator put it, a grab bag of half-baked ideas. Maybe, he says, we can use less capable AIs to help us keep the AGIs in check. But maybe that wont work who knows? Either way, DeepMind and the other AI companies are plowing ahead with their efforts to build AGI, while simultaneously acknowledging, in public, on record, that their products could destroy the entire world.

This is, in a word, madness. If youre driving in a car with me, and I tell you that earlier today I attached a bomb to the bottom of the car, and it might or might not! go off if we hit a pothole, then whether or not you believe me, you should be extremely alarmed. That is a very scary thing to hear someone say at 60 miles an hour on a highway. You should, indeed, turn to me and scream, Stop this damn car right now. Let me out immediately I dont want to ride with you anymore!

Right now, were in that car with these AI companies driving. They have turned to us on numerous occasions over the past decade and a half and admitted that theyve attached a bomb to the car, and that it might or might not! explode in the near future, killing everyone inside. Thats an outrageous situation to be in, and more people should be screaming at them to stop what theyre doing immediately. More people should be dialing 911 and reporting the incident to the authorities, as I did with Tom in the fictional scenario above.

I do not know if AGI will kill everyone on Earth Im more focused on the profound harms that these AI companies have already caused through worker exploitation, massive intellectual property theft, algorithmic bias and so on. The point is that it is completely unacceptable that the people leading or working for these AI companies believe that what theyre doing could kill you, your family, your friends and even your pets (who will feed your fluffy companions if you cease to exist?) yet continue to do it anyway. One doesnt need to completely buy-into the AGI might destroy humanity claim to see that someone who says their work might destroy humanity should not be doing whatever it is theyre doing. As Ive shown before, there have been several episodes in recent human history where scientists have declared that were on the verge of creating a technology that would destroy the world and nothing came of it. But thats irrelevant. If someone tells you that they have a gun and might shoot you, that should be more than enough to sound the alarm even if you believe that they dont, in fact, have a gun hidden under their bed.

Either these AI companies need to show, right now, that the systems theyre building are completely safe, or they need to stop, right now, trying to build those systems. Something needs to change about the situation immediately.

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The Madness of the Race to Build Artificial General Intelligence - Truthdig

Companies like Morgan Stanley are already laying the groundwork for so-called organizational AGI. Maxim Tolchinskiy/Unsplash

Whether its being theorized or possibly, maybe actualized, artificial general intelligence, or AGI, has become a frequent topic of conversation in a world where people are now routinely talking with machines. But theres an inherent problem with the term AGIone rooted in perception. For starters, assigning intelligence to a system instantly anthropomorphizes it, adding to the perception that theres the semblance of a human mind operating behind the scenes. This notion of a mind deepens the perception that theres some single entity manipulating all of this human-grade thinking.

This problematic perception is compounded by the fact that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Bard, Claude and others make a mockery of the Turing test. They seem very human indeed, and its not surprising that people have turned to LLMs as therapists, friends and lovers (sometimes with disastrous results). Does the humanness of their predictive abilities amount to some kind of general intelligence?

By some estimates, the critical aspects of AGI have already been achieved by the LLMs mentioned above. A recent article in Noema by Blaise Agera Y Arcas (vice president and fellow at Google Research) and Peter Norvig (a computer scientist at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered A.I.) argues that todays frontier models perform competently even on novel tasks they were not trained for, crossing a threshold that previous generations of A.I. and supervised deep learning systems never managed. Decades from now, they will be recognized as the first true examples of AGI.

For others, including OpenAI, AGI is still out in front of us. We believe our research will eventually lead to artificial general intelligence, their research page proclaims, a system that can solve human-level problems.

Whether nascent forms of AGI are already here or are still a few years away, its likely that businesses attempting to harness these powerful technologies might create a miniature version of AGI. Businesses need technology ecosystems that can mimic human intelligence with the cognitive flexibility to solve increasingly complex problems. This ecosystem needs to orchestrate using existing software, understand routine tasks, contextualize massive amounts of data, learn new skills, and work across a wide range of domains. LLMs on their own can only perform a fraction of this workthey seem most useful as part of a conversational interface that lets people talk to technology ecosystems. There are strategies being used right now by leading enterprise companies to move in this direction toward something we might call organizational AGI.

There are legitimate reasons to be wary of yet another unsolicited tidbit in the A.I. terms slush pile. Regardless of what we choose to call the eventual outcome of these activities, there are currently organizations using LLMs as an interface layer. They are creating ecosystems where users can converse with software through channels like rich web chat (RCW), obscuring machinations happening behind the scenes. This is difficult work, but the payoff is huge: rather than pogo-sticking between apps to get something done on a computer, customers and employees can ask technology to run tasks for them. Theres the immediate and tangible benefit of people eliminating tedious tasks from their lives. Then theres the long term benefit of a burgeoning ecosystem where employees and customers are interacting with digital teammates that can perform automations leveraging all forms of data across an organization. This is an ecosystem that starts to take the form of a digital twin.

McKinsey describes a digital twin as a virtual replica of a physical object, person, or process that can be used to simulate its behavior to better understand how it works in real life. They elaborate to say that a digital twin within an ecosystem similar to what Ive described can become an enterprise metaverse, a digital and often immersive environment that replicates and connects every aspect of an organization to optimize simulations, scenario planning and decision making.

With respect to what I said earlier about anthropomorphizing technology, the digital teammates within this kind of ecosystem are an abstraction, but I think of them as intelligent digital workers, or IDWs. IDWs are analogous to a collection of skills. These skills come from shared libraries, and skills can be adapted and reused in multitudes of ways. Skills are able to take advantage of all the information piled up inside the organization, with LLMs mining unstructured data, like emails and recorded calls.

This data becomes more meaningful thanks to graph technology, which is adept at creating indexes of skills, systems and data sources. Graph goes beyond mere listing and includes how these elements relate to and interact with each other. One of the core strengths of graph technology is its ability to represent and analyze relationships. For a network of IDWs, understanding how different components are interlinked is crucial for efficient orchestration and data flow.

Generative tools like LLMs and graph technology can work together in tandem, to propel the journey toward digital twinhood, or organizational AGI. Twins can encompass all aspects of the business, including events, data, assets, locations, personnel and customers. Digital twins are likely to be low-fidelity at first, offering a limited view of the organization. As more interactions and processes take place within the org, however, the fidelity of the digital twin becomes higher. An organizations technology ecosystem not only understands the current state of the organization. It can also adapt and respond to new challenges autonomously.

In this sense every part of an organization represents an intelligent awareness that comes together around common goals. In my mind, it mirrors the nervous system of a cephalopod. As Peter Godfrey-Smith writes in his book, Other Minds (2016, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), in an octopus, the majority of neurons are in the arms themselvesnearly twice as many in total as in the central brain. The arms have their own sensors and controllers. They have not only the sense of touch but also the capacity to sense chemicalsto smell or taste. Each sucker on an octopuss arm may have 10,000 neurons to handle taste and touch. Even an arm that has been surgically removed can perform various basic motions, such as reaching and grasping.

A world teeming with self-aware brands would be quite hectic. According to Gartner, by 2025, generative A.I. will be a workforce partner within 90 percent of companies worldwide. This doesnt mean that all of these companies will be surging toward organizational AGI, however. Generative A.I., and LLMs in particular, cant meet an organizations automation needs on its own. Giving an entire workforce access to GPTs or Copilot wont move the needle much in terms of efficiency. It might help people write better emails faster, but it takes a great deal of work to make LLMs reliable resources for user queries.

Their hallucinations have been well documented and training them to provide trustworthy information is a herculean effort. Jeff McMillan, chief analytics and data officer at Morgan Stanley (MS), told me it took his team nine months to train GPT-4 on more than 100,000 internal documents. This work began before the launch of ChatGPT, and Morgan Stanley had the advantage of working directly with people at OpenAI. They were able to create a personal assistant that the investment banks advisors can chat with, tapping into a large portion of its collective knowledge. Now youre talking about wiring it up to every system, he said, with regards to creating the kinds of ecosystems required for organizational A.I. I dont know if thats five years or three years or 20 years, but what Im confident of is that that is where this is going.

Companies like Morgan Stanley that are already laying the groundwork for so-called organizational AGI have a massive advantage over competitors that are still trying to decide how to integrate LLMs and adjacent technologies into their operations. So rather than a world awash in self-aware organizations, there will likely be a few market leaders in each industry.

This relates to broader AGI in the sense that these intelligent organizations are going to have to interact with other intelligent organizations. Its hard to envision exactly what depth of information sharing will occur between these elite orgs, but over time, these interactions might play a role in bringing about AGI or singularity, as its also called.

Ben Goertzel, the founder of SingularityNET and the person often credited with creating the term, makes a compelling case that AGI should be decentralized, relying on open-source development as well as decentralized hosting and mechanisms for interconnect A.I. systems to learn from and teach on another.

SingularityNETs DeAGI Manifesto states, There is a broad desire for AGI to be ethical and beneficial for all humanity; the most straightforward way to achieve this seems to be for AGI to grow up in the context of serving and being guided by all humanity, or as good an approximation as can be mustered.

Having AGI manifest in part from the aggressive activities of for-profit enterprises is dicey. As Goertzel pointed out, You get into questions [about] who owns and controls these potentially spooky and configurable human-like robot assistants and to what extent is their fundamental motivation to help people as opposed to sell people stuff or brainwash people into some corporate government media advertising order.

Theres a strong case to be made that an allegiance to profit will be the undoing of the promise for humanity at large that these technologies afford. Weirdly, the skynet scenario in Terminatorwhere a system becomes self-aware, determines humanity is a grave threat, and exterminates all lifeassumes that the system, isolated to a single company, has been programmed to have a survival instinct. It would have to be told that survival at all costs is its bottom line, which suggests we should be extra cautious developing these systems within environments where profit above all else is the dictum.

Maybe the most important thing is keeping this technology in the hands of humans and pushing forward the idea that the myriad technologies associated with A.I. should only be used in ways that are beneficial to humanity as a whole, that dont exploit marginalized groups, and that arent propagating synthesized bias at scale.

When I broached some of these ideas about organizational AGI to Jaron Lanier, co-creator of VR technology as we know it and Microsofts Octopus (Office of the Chief Technology Officer Prime Unifying Scientist), he told me my vocabulary was nonsensical and that my thinking wasnt compatible with his perception of technology. Regardless, it felt like we agreed on core aspects of these technologies.

I dont think of A.I. as creating new entities. I think of it as a collaboration between people, Lanier said. Thats the only way to think about using it wellto me its all a form of collaboration. The sooner we see that, the sooner we can design useful systemsto me theres only people.

In that sense, AGI is yet another tool, way down the spectrum from the rocks our ancestors used to smash tree nuts. Its a manifestation of our ingenuity and our desires. Are we going to use it to smash every tree nut on the face of the earth, or are we going to use it to find ways to grow enough tree nuts for everyone to enjoy? The trajectories we set in these early moments are of grave importance.

Were in the anthropocene. Were in an era where our actions are affecting everything in our biological environment, Blaise Aguera Y Arcas, the Noeme article author, told me. The Earth is finite and without the kind of solidarity where we start to think about the whole thing as our body, as it were, were kind of screwed.

Josh Tyson is the co-author of Age of Invisible Machines, a book about conversational A.I., and Director of Creative Content at OneReach.ai. He co-hosts two podcasts: Invisible Machines and N9K.

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Companies Like Morgan Stanley Are Already Making Early Versions of AGI - Observer

The use and scope of Artificial Intelligence dont need a formal introduction. Artificial Intelligence is no more just a buzzword; it has become a reality that is part of our everyday lives. As companies deploy AI across diverse applications, it's revolutionizing industries and elevating the demand for AI skills like never before.You will learn about the various stages and categories of artificial intelligence in this article on Types Of Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence is the process of building intelligent machines from vast volumes of data. Systems learn from past learning and experiences and perform human-like tasks. It enhances the speed, precision, and effectiveness of human efforts. AI uses complex algorithms and methods to build machines that can make decisions on their own. Machine Learning and Deep learning forms the core of Artificial Intelligence.

AI is now being used in almost every sector of business:

Now that you know what AI really is, lets look at what are the different types of artificial intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence can be broadly classified into several types based on capabilities, functionalities, and technologies. Here's an overview of the different types of AI:

This type of AI is designed to perform a narrow task (e.g., facial recognition, internet searches, or driving a car). Most current AI systems, including those that can play complex games like chess and Go, fall under this category. They operate under a limited pre-defined range or set of contexts.

A type of AI endowed with broad human-like cognitive capabilities, enabling it to tackle new and unfamiliar tasks autonomously. Such a robust AI framework possesses the capacity to discern, assimilate, and utilize its intelligence to resolve any challenge without needing human guidance.

This represents a future form of AI where machines could surpass human intelligence across all fields, including creativity, general wisdom, and problem-solving. Superintelligence is speculative and not yet realized.

These AI systems do not store memories or past experiences for future actions. They analyze and respond to different situations. IBM's Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov at chess, is an example.

These AI systems can make informed and improved decisions by studying the past data they have collected. Most present-day AI applications, from chatbots and virtual assistants to self-driving cars, fall into this category.

This is a more advanced type of AI that researchers are still working on. It would entail understanding and remembering emotions, beliefs, needs, and depending on those, making decisions. This type requires the machine to understand humans truly.

This represents the future of AI, where machines will have their own consciousness, sentience, and self-awareness. This type of AI is still theoretical and would be capable of understanding and possessing emotions, which could lead them to form beliefs and desires.

AI systems capable of self-improvement through experience, without direct programming. They concentrate on creating software that can independently learn by accessing and utilizing data.

A subset of ML involving many layers of neural networks. It is used for learning from large amounts of data and is the technology behind voice control in consumer devices, image recognition, and many other applications.

This AI technology enables machines to understand and interpret human language. It's used in chatbots, translation services, and sentiment analysis applications.

This field involves designing, constructing, operating, and using robots and computer systems for controlling them, sensory feedback, and information processing.

This technology allows machines to interpret the world visually, and it's used in various applications such as medical image analysis, surveillance, and manufacturing.

These AI systems answer questions and solve problems in a specific domain of expertise using rule-based systems.

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AI research has successfully developed effective techniques for solving a wide range of problems, from game playing to medical diagnosis.

There are many branches of AI, each with its focus and set of techniques. Some of the essential branches of AI include:

We might be far from creating machines that can solve all the issues and are self-aware. But, we should focus our efforts toward understanding how a machine can train and learn on its own and possess the ability to base decisions on past experiences.

I hope this article helped you to understand the different types of artificial intelligence. If you are looking to start your career in Artificial Intelligent and Machine Learning, then check out Simplilearn's Post Graduate Program in AI and Machine Learning.

Do you have any questions regarding this article? If you have, please put in the comments section of this article on types of artificial intelligence. Our team will help you solve your queries at the earliest!

An AI model is a mathematical model used to make predictions or decisions. Some of the common types of AI models:

There are two main categories of AI:

The father of AI is John McCarthy. He is a computer scientist who coined the term "artificial intelligence" in 1955. McCarthy is also credited with developing the first AI programming language, Lisp.

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Types of Artificial Intelligence That You Should Know in 2024 - Simplilearn

A new report commissioned by the US State Department warns the exponential development of artificial intelligence may pose a significant risk to national security and even humanity.

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The new report titled "An Action Plan to Increase the Safety and Security of Advanced AI" recommends the US government move "quickly and decisively" with implementing measures that hinder the rise of artificial intelligence-powered systems being developed, even to the point of potentially limiting compute power used to train such models. The report goes on to say that if these hindering measures aren't implemented, there is a chance of AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) being an "extinction-level threat to the human species."

The US State Department report involved more than 200 experts in the field, which included officials from companies that are big players in the AI game, such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, Google DeepMind, and government workers. The report goes on to recommend the US government implement limitations on how much compute power any given party developing AI is able to have at one time while also requiring AI companies to request permission from the US government to train any new AI model.

"The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons," the report reads

Surprisingly, the report recommends the US government make it illegal to open source any powerful AI model, as the information within these models may result in "potentially devastating consequences to global security."

"I think that this recommendation is extremely unlikely to be adopted by the United States government," Greg Allen, director of the Wadhwani Center for AI and Advanced Technologies, told TIME

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US government warns AI may be an 'extinction-level threat' to humans - TweakTown