What Would Artificial General Intelligence be Capable of Doing?

Dario Amodei, AnthropicCEO, has some useful observations about the development of what he refers to as  powerful AI (and which he suggests lots of people call  Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). As a one-sentence summary, Amodei suggests powerful AI has the capabilities of  a “country of geniuses in a datacenter”.

It would be “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields – biology, programming, math, engineering, writing and so forth,” he says.” This means it can prove unsolved mathematical theorems; write extremely good novels; write difficult codebases from scratch.”

It would have “all the “interfaces” available to a human working virtually, including text, audio, video, mouse and keyboard control, and internet access. 

It could engage in any actions, communications, or remote operations enabled by this interface, including taking actions on the internet, taking or giving directions to humans, ordering materials, directing experiments, watching videos, making videos, and so on. It does all of these tasks with, again, a skill exceeding that of the most capable humans in the world.

It would not just passively answer questions. “Instead, it can be given tasks that take hours, days, or weeks to complete, and then goes off and does those tasks autonomously, in the way a smart employee would, asking for clarification as necessary,” Amodei argues.

The resources used to train the model can be repurposed to run millions of instances of it and the model can absorb information and generate actions at roughly 10 times to 100 times human speed. 

However, It may be limited by the response time of the physical world or of software it interacts with. There could well be energy availability constraints; hardware and software cost issues or deficiencies in mimicking human sensory or “fuzzy” reasoning capabilities. 

Also, since such a system would interact with the real physical world, it would remain within the constraints of the physical world. “Cells and animals run at a fixed speed so experiments on them take a certain amount of time which may be irreducible,” he notes. 

Also, “sometimes raw data is lacking and in its absence more intelligence does not help,” he says. In addition, “some things are inherently unpredictable or chaotic and even the most powerful AI cannot predict or untangle them substantially better than a human or a computer today.”

Ethically and legally, “many things cannot be done without breaking laws, harming humans, or messing up society,” he notes. “An aligned AI would not want to do these things.”

The points are that powerful AI (or AGI, as some would call it) will face constraints from the physical world and ethical, moral and legal constraints that could limit its application in many instances as a means of affecting output. 

Analyzing is one thing; the ability to translate that knowledge into outcomes is more tricky. Biological systems offer a case in point. “it’s very hard to isolate the effect of any part of this complex system, and even harder to intervene on the system in a precise or predictable way,” Amodei says.