A Monash University expert is available to comment on NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s claim that artificial general intelligence (AGI) ‘has arrived’, what AGI means, whether the claim can be substantiated and what its emergence could mean for the world.
Professor James Bailey, Head of Department of Data Science and AI, Faculty of Information Technology
Note: Professor Bailey is available for responses via email only
Contact via: +61 450 501 248 or [email protected]
- Machine learning and artificial intelligence
- Data mining and data analytics
The following can be attributed to Professor Bailey:
“Jensen Huang may yet be proved right, but this launch doesn't show that AGI has arrived.
“Today's AI systems are strikingly broad and on some tasks they beat us, but breadth is not the same as general intelligence. An AGI system that deserved the name would cope with problems it hadn't seen before, learn from its mistakes and correct them, see a long, messy project through without much supervision and do all of this while weighing conflicting goals against social norms and the law, as people do.
“At the same time, the progress is significant. A doctor with no coding background can now build a working application prototype over a weekend. A tenant can drop a 50-page lease into a chatbot and find out which clauses need a lawyer. Researchers are using AI to speed up discovery, teachers to tailor lessons to individual pupils, engineers to attack problems that were simply too big to model before.
“My own view is that AI will mostly extend us rather than replace us. Machines can search, calculate and compare at a scale no person can match. People decide what's worth doing, judge what the results mean and carry the responsibility. The gains come from putting the two together, not from a contest between them.
“Benchmarks, demos and vast quantities of compute tell us the field is moving fast. They don't tell us AGI is here. What we have is already powerful and useful and likely to be transformative. These are grounds for optimism, so long as we're clear about what it can't yet do and are careful about how we use it.”
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