Building a machine more intelligent than ourselves. It’s a centuries-old theme, inspiring equal amounts of awe and dread, from the agents in “The Matrix” to the operating system in “Her.”
To many in Silicon Valley, this compelling fictional motif is on the verge of becoming reality. Reaching artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. (or going a step further, superintelligence), is now the singular aim of America’s tech giants, which are investing tens of billions of dollars in a fevered race. And while some experts warn of disastrous consequences from the advent of A.G.I., many also argue that this breakthrough, perhaps just years away, will lead to a productivity explosion, with the nation and company that get there first reaping all the benefits.
This frenzy gives us pause.
It is uncertain how soon artificial general intelligence can be achieved. We worry that Silicon Valley has grown so enamored with accomplishing this goal that it’s alienating the general public and, worse, bypassing crucial opportunities to use the technology that already exists. In being solely fixated on this objective, our nation risks falling behind China, which is far less concerned with creating A.I. powerful enough to surpass humans and much more focused on using the technology we have now.
The roots of Silicon Valley’s fascination with artificial general intelligence go back decades. In 1950 the computing pioneer Alan Turing proposed the imitation game, a test in which a machine proves its intelligence by how well it can fool human interrogators into believing it’s human. In the years since, the idea has evolved, but the goal has stayed constant: to match the power of a human brain. A.G.I. is simply the latest iteration.
In 1965, Mr. Turing’s colleague I.J. Good described what’s so captivating about the idea of a machine as sophisticated as the human brain. Mr. Good saw that smart machines could recursively self-improve faster than humans could ever catch up, saying, “The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.” The invention to end all other inventions. In short, reaching A.G.I. would be the most significant commercial opportunity in history. Little wonder that the world’s top talents are all devoting themselves to this ambitious endeavor.
The current modus operandi is build at all cost. Every tech giant is in the race to reach A.G.I. first, erecting data centers that can cost more than $100 billion and with some like Meta offering signing bonuses to A.I. researchers that top $100 million. The costs of training foundation models, which serve as a general-purpose base for many different tasks, have continued to rise. Elon Musk’s start-up xAI is reportedly burning through $1 billion a month. Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, expects training costs of leading models to go up to $10 billion or even $100 billion in the next two years.
To be sure, A.I. is already better than the average human at many cognitive tasks, from answering some of the world’s hardest solvable math problems to writing code at the level of a junior developer. Enthusiasts point to such progress as evidence that A.G.I. is just around the corner. Still, while A.I. capabilities have made extraordinary leaps since the debut of ChatGPT in 2022, science has yet to find a clear path to building intelligence that surpasses humans.
In a recent survey of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, an academic society that includes some of the most respected researchers in the field, more than three-quarters of the 475 respondents said our current approaches were unlikely to lead to a breakthrough. While A.I. has continued to improve as the models get larger and ingest more data, there’s concern that the exponential growth curve might falter. Experts have argued that we need new computing architectures beyond what underpins large language models to reach the goal.
The challenge with our focus on A.G.I. goes beyond the technology and into the vague, conflicting narratives that accompany it. Both grave and optimistic predictions abound. This year the nonprofit AI Futures Project released “A.I. 2027,” a report that predicted superintelligent A.I. potentially controlling or exterminating humans by 2030. Around the same time, computer scientists at Princeton published a paper titled “A.I. as Normal Technology,” arguing that A.I. will remain manageable for the foreseeable future, like nuclear power.
That’s how we get to this strange place where Silicon Valley’s biggest companies proclaim ever shorter timelines for how soon A.G.I. will arrive, while most people outside the Bay Area still barely know what that term means. There’s a widening schism between the technologists who feel the A.G.I. — a mantra for believers who see themselves on the cusp of the technology — and members of the general public who are skeptical about the hype and see A.I. as a nuisance in their daily lives. With some experts issuing dire warnings about A.I., the public is naturally even less enthused about the technology.
Now let’s look at what’s happening in China. The country’s scientists and policymakers aren’t as A.G.I.-pilled as their American counterparts. At the recent World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Premier Li Qiang of China emphasized “the deep integration of A.I. with the real economy” by expanding application scenarios.
While some Silicon Valley technologists issue doomsday warnings about the grave threat of A.I., Chinese companies are busy integrating it into everything from the superapp WeChat to hospitals, electric cars and even home appliances. In rural villages, competitions among Chinese farmers have been held to improve A.I. tools for harvest; Alibaba’s Quark app recently became China’s most downloaded A.I. assistant in part because of its medical diagnostic capabilities. Last year China started the A.I.+ initiative, which aims to embed A.I. across sectors to raise productivity.
It’s no surprise that the Chinese population is more optimistic about A.I. as a result. At the World A.I. Conference, we saw families with grandparents and young children milling about the exhibits, gasping at powerful displays of A.I. applications and enthusiastically interacting with humanoid robots. Over three-quarters of adults in China said that A.I. has profoundly changed their daily lives in the past three to five years, according to an Ipsos survey. That’s the highest share globally and double that of Americans. Another recent poll found that only 32 percent of Americans say they trust A.I., compared with 72 percent in China.
Many of the purported benefits of A.G.I. — in science, education, health care and the like — can already be achieved with the careful refinement and use of powerful existing models. For example, why do we still not have a product that teaches all humans essential, cutting-edge knowledge in their own languages in personalized, gamified ways? Why are there no competitions among American farmers to use A.I. tools to improve their harvests? Where’s the Cambrian explosion of imaginative, unexpected uses of A.I. to improve lives in the West?
The belief in an A.G.I. or superintelligence tipping point flies in the face of the history of technology, in which progress and diffusion have been incremental. Technology often takes decades to reach widespread use. The modern internet was invented in 1983, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that it reshaped business models. And although ChatGPT has seen incredible user growth, a recent working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that most people in the United States still use generative A.I. infrequently.
When a technology eventually goes mainstream, that’s when it’s truly game changing. Smartphones got the world online not because of the most powerful, sleekest versions; the revolution happened because cheap, adequately capable devices proliferated across the globe, finding their way into the hands of villagers and street vendors.
It’s paramount that more people outside Silicon Valley feel the beneficial impact of A.I. on their lives. A.G.I. isn’t a finish line; it’s a process that involves humble, gradual, uneven diffusion of generations of less powerful A.I. across society.
Instead of only asking “Are we there yet?” it’s time we recognize that A.I. is already a powerful agent of change. Applying and adapting the machine intelligence that’s currently available will start a flywheel of more public enthusiasm for A.I. And as the frontier advances, so should our uses of the technology.
While America’s flagship tech companies race to the uncertain goal of getting to artificial general intelligence first, China and its leadership have been more focused on deploying existing technology across traditional and emerging sectors, from manufacturing and agriculture to robotics and drones. Being too fixated on artificial general intelligence risks distracting us from A.I.’s everyday impact. We need to pursue both.
Eric Schmidt, a former chief executive and chairman of Google, is the chairman and chief executive of Relativity Space. Selina Xu leads China and A.I. research in the Office of Eric Schmidt.
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