SAN FRANCISCO: The rise of artificial general intelligence - now seen as inevitable in Silicon Valley - will bring change orders of magnitude greater than anything the world has ever seen, observers say. AGI -- defined as artificial intelligence with human cognitive abilities, as opposed to more narrow artificial intelligence, such as the headline-grabbing ChatGPT -- could free people from menial tasks and usher in a new era of creativity.
Such a paradigm shift could also threaten jobs and raise insurmountable social issues, experts warn.
Siqi Chen, chief executive of San Francisco start-up Runway, said that previous technological advances from electricity to the internet ignited powerful social change.
He said that this is the first time that we can increase the amount of intelligence in the universe.
As a result of the release of ChatGPT last year, the long dreamt of the idea of AGI will bring a giant leap closer to reality, Chen said that the change will be orders of magnitude greater than every other technological change we've ever had in history.
OpenAI released an even more powerful version of the tech that operates it - GPT 4, the company behind the generative software that churns out essays, poems and computing code on command.
It says the technology will not only be able to process text but also images, but it will also be able to produce more complex content, such as legal complaints or video games.
The company said that it exhibits human-level performance on some benchmarks.
The success of OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, has ignited an arms race in Silicon Valley as tech giants try to push their generative AI tools to the next level - even though they remain wary of chatbots going off the rails.
Digital assistants from Microsoft and Google can summarize meetings, write emails, create websites, create ads, and more, giving us a glimpse of what AGI will be capable of in the future.
Jared Spataro, Microsoft's corporate vice president, said that we spend too much time consumed by the drudgery.
Spataro wants to rediscover the soul of work with artificial intelligence, according to a Microsoft presentation on Thursday, Mar 16. Artificial intelligence can cut costs, some suggest.