Yuval Levin explores one of the key questions about the development of artificial intelligence.
Implicit in much of the thinking of those working to frame the direction of the field, and also in the arguments of those expressing the most intense hopes and fears about its implications for mankind, is the presumption that, as AI grows more capable, its scope of competence will grow more general.
This view takes the progress of AI to point in the direction of increasingly generalizable capacities, and ultimately perhaps toward so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which would resemble the broad multi-domain competence of the human mind but at much higher levels of analytical and intellectual ability. In this conception, AGI might be different in kind from what the world has come to understand as artificial intelligence over the past half-decade, but it would plausibly evolve out of today’s AI as a natural extension of the path the technology has followed.
The pursuit of AGI has shaped the culture of the field of artificial intelligence from its earliest conceptual origins, and so preceded a lot of the specific technical breakthroughs that have created the technology that has begun to revolutionize the human experience. The way the field now approaches its own work is deeply shaped by that long formation. …
… But is today’s AI really moving in the direction of a generalized intelligence?
There are reasons to think so. The extraordinary reach of AI in its present forms is undeniable. Because it has been trained on a body of data that consists of nearly the entire corpus of recorded human knowledge and expression, and because it has ready access to the vast body of knowledge available on the Internet, today’s AI displays an impressive command of a staggeringly broad range of subjects. It is conversant in the parlance of every field of endeavor, and is able not only to call upon existing materials in these fields but also to draw new connections, propose innovations, and articulate complex ideas at many levels of specificity and generality.
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