The top leaders in AI have very lofty expectations for the future of artificial intelligence.
“By 2026 or 2027, we will have AI systems that are broadly better than almost all humans at almost all things,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said earlier this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Elon Musk posited late last year that we will have AI systems that are more intelligent than any single human by the end of this year, and we will “100%” have an AI system that exceeds the intelligence of all human beings combined by 2030. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Bloomberg earlier this year that he thinks artificial general intelligence (AGI) will “probably get developed” before the end of Trump’s presidential term.
Superintelligence or AGI is a super-powered future AI system that could theoretically outperform human intelligence on all fronts, and it has become the North Star of the tech industry. Meta, for example, has a whole division and a multibillion-dollar spending spree dedicated to building superintelligence, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims it is “in sight.”
Although most of the AI leaders with the loudest microphones claim that artificial superintelligence is imminent, a new study paints a differing picture of expert sentiment.
According to the Forecasting Research Institute’s “The Longitudinal Expert AI Panel” research report, the timeline for superintelligent AI will be much slower than what’s been promised. Led by multi-disciplinary experts like Federal Reserve Board of Chicago economist Ezra Karger, the fact-finders say they reached out to computer scientists, economists, industry professionals, and AI researchers “whom policymakers, business and nonprofit leaders, and other stakeholders would be most inclined to consult regarding the progression of AI capabilities and its technological impact.”
The experts gave the tech leaders’ timeline of rapid progress only a 23% chance of actually happening.
The rapid progress described in the study is one in which “AI writes Pulitzer Prize-worthy novels, collapses years-long research into days and weeks, outcompetes any human software engineer, and independently develops new cures for cancer.” So, pretty much mirroring how Silicon Valley describes artificial superintelligence.
“Radical change in major systems just takes longer than 4-5 years. I also think that [in] many of these domains, even unexpectedly fast advancement in AIs will not easily translate to improvements for quite some time because of unexpected barriers,” one expert respondent wrote. “To paraphrase an old saying, every job looks easy for those not actually doing it.”
Another expert thought that bottlenecks would intervene before AI’s impact could scale up to the level predicted.
“The force of its impact will likely be slowed by bottlenecks in areas AI hasn’t yet conquered,” the expert wrote. “There likely exist thousands (millions?) of potential bottlenecks in the economy which will only become legible as other processes are sped up by orders of magnitude.”
Some of the advances in AI model capabilities have also been brought into question recently, after a new Oxford study found that a lot of the popular benchmarking tools used to test the performance of AI models were unreliable or misleading.
Not all tech leaders have the same, unwavering belief in the future of superintelligence, though. Microsoft’s AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, is famously a non-believer, going so far as to call the pursuit of superintelligence “absurd.” Another tech titan, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, recently called the hype around artificial general intelligence an example of “hypnosis.”
Meanwhile, some tech experts that do believe superintelligence is imminent are not particularly thrilled about that possibility. In October, a statement calling for the prohibition on the development of superintelligence until certain conditions are met was signed by more than 100,000 people, including the likes of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and computer scientists Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, both of whom are considered “the godfathers of AI.”
Even though most experts in the study disagreed that AI will evolve at light speed to reach superintelligence by the end of the decade, the average expert still believes in its transformational power.
According to the study, experts predict that AI will have a significant impact by 2040, labeling it as the “technology of the century” akin to electricity. And by 2030, experts believe that AI will provide daily companionship for roughly 15% of adults and assist in 18% of work hours in the U.S.
Some of the experts included in the study are described by the researchers as “superforecasters.” But AI is a tricky thing to forecast, even for so-called superforecasters, as it turns out.
A past study of AI experts and superforecasters, also conducted by the Forecasting Research Institute, found that both groups had underestimated just how fast AI could progress. For example, experts thought in 2022 that AI would get a gold medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2030, and superforecasters said 2035. But a Google-built AI system won that gold in July of this year.
