In December 2022, Open AI introduced ChatGPT to the public and ultimately ushered us into the new era of technological, economical and societal paradigm. While neural networks and LLM (Large Language Model) are not new and when it comes to academia and research, they have been around for decades, the introduction of ChatGPT and now GPT-4 to the public took everyone outside of those areas by surprise. And actually, even the creators themselves are being surprised everyday by the capabilities of this new technology.
We live in a time of social media, of short dramatic episodes and their usually unreasonable hyperboles. When it comes to AI, it is becoming very clear that while there is a lot of sensational news and clickbaits, overestimates of the AI etc., we are all entering an unknown territory. The growth is exponential, technological advancement is always speeding up and one thing Stephen Hawking warned us about was creating a self-developing AI – which is basically what the majority of people interested in AI is doing right now.
Terms like “AGI” and “Singularity” suddenly shifted from science fiction to reality. Ray Kurzweil has been predicting singularity in 2030 for decades while other researchers and scientists either assumed it will take much longer or that it is not possible to achieve at all. Well, each decade and especially in the last few years, the general consensus in the scientific community is getting much closer to Kurzweil’s original prediction. So what are AGI and singularity?
AGI stands for Artificial Global Intelligence. Personally I heard this term for the first time in December while listening to Sam Altman (Open AI CEO) during an interview. As it stands, currently we are having narrow AI systems – intelligences that can operate within a specific domain or with specific tools, for example AI that can identify cats in images or recommend movies in whatever online streaming service you are using. And these have been evolving rapidly over the last years, but they are still narrow systems in principle. AGI is then supposed to be something that surpasses specific domain, therefore being general intelligence, the all knowing entity that understands everything about society, the world and the universe. And we are on that path as well, especially now with the current LLM technology.
I just watched this TED talk from Ray Kurzweil himself, recorded 8 years ago. Not only did he predict with 100% accuracy the ChatGPT, Bing and Bard technology we are just now experiencing, he also predicted the advancement of nanobots which we can implement into our bodies for various purposes, one of them being the ability of these nanobots to connect to the cloud and use additional computational resources and information other then the brain currently has. In other words, your mind would be directly connected to other sources of information and computation so not only you can know more, you can think faster.
Ultimately this could lead to the possibility of detaching our bodies from our minds, thus achieving immortality and this is what is called Singularity. So while prediction on LLM technology was 100% accurate, I cannot judge how far we are with nanobots, but the progress is clear and the path suggested by Ray Kurzweil years ago seems to be entangled with our daily lives more and more each day.
