Experts in artificial intelligence (AI) have shared their views on its future, Financial Times reports. These experts include Nvidia chief Jensen Huang, Meta AI chief Yann LeCun, and computer scientists Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Bill Dally. They are among the winners of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering this year. They spoke at the Financial Times' Future of AI summit in London about how machines are already as smart as humans in some areas. For example, Jensen Huang said AI now helps people by doing work and solving problems in society. He added that it has enough general smarts to create useful tools right now.
The talk focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can handle any task as well as a human. Many companies are investing billions to build this, and countries like the US and China are competing to get there first. Stock values of AI firms are rising because people think big changes are coming. Mentions of AGI in business reports jumped over 50 percent this year compared to last. Some predict AGI in two years, while others say it could take decades.
Views on surpassing human intelligence
Not everyone agrees on when or if machines will beat humans in everything. Yann LeCun said it won't be a sudden event but a slow growth in skills across fields, and we're already seeing it. Fei-Fei Li pointed out that machines can already spot thousands of objects or translate many languages better than people. But she stressed that human smarts will always matter in society. Geoffrey Hinton, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize for physics for his pioneering AI research, predicted that machines will always win debates against humens within 20 years. Yoshua Bengio said there's no reason machines couldn't do all human tasks eventually, though they're not there yet. Bill Dally was part of the group but did not share specific quotes.
Yoshua Bengio warned against bold claims about the future, saying we should stay open-minded because many paths are possible. Overall, these leaders see artificial intelligence advancing fast but urge careful thinking about its impacts.