Welcome to The Future of AI, another episode in the series Beyond Global Waves, where we explore the exciting world of Artificial Intelligence or AI in simple, relatable terms. In this episode, we dive into the current state of AI and what’s coming next. Here’s the scoop:
Today, AI is like a super-smart high schooler – great at writing, coding, and solving challenging problems but not quite ready to think or work independently. Tools like GPT-4 are brilliant at natural language processing but primarily respond to questions – they don’t honestly “think” independently. That’s changing, though, as researchers focus on making AI more capable. This includes:
- Helping AI understand context better so it knows what it’s working with.
- Teaching AI to reason and plan enables it to tackle more significant projects.
- Empowering AI to use tools like we do – browsing the internet, sending emails, and more.
The power of AI is advancing rapidly, thanks to “order of magnitude” (OOM) improvements. Think of this as a 10x leap in capabilities, driven by three main factors:
- Compute – the raw power of AI hardware.
- Algorithmic efficiency – how quickly and smartly AI learns.
- Unhobbling – innovations that let AI do more complex tasks.
Looking ahead, the road leads to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), i.e. AI that can think and learn like humans, and eventually superintelligence, where AI surpasses human intelligence. This could happen faster than we think, especially if AI starts doing its research.
As AI evolves, it could take on many jobs, especially remote ones, and we’ll need to scale up infrastructure like data centres to support it. But with great power comes responsibility: we’ll need to ensure AI is safe, secure, and aligned with our goals. This has become a global priority, likened to the Manhattan Project, because of its enormous potential impact on society and national security.
For further reading, refer to Situational Awareness by Leopold Aschenbrenner.
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