Most recent expert surveys indicate AGI is technically feasible and likely with further innovation.

Artificial intelligence scares and intrigues us. Almost every week, there’s a new AI scare on the news like developers afraid of what they’ve created or shutting down bots because they got too intelligent. Most of these AI myths result from research misinterpreted by those outside the AI and GenAI fields.

The greatest fear about AI is singularity (also called Artificial General Intelligence or AGI), a system that combines human-level thinking with rapidly accessible near-perfect memory. According to some experts, singularity also implies machine consciousness.

Regardless of whether it is conscious or not, such a machine could continuously improve itself and reach far beyond our capabilities. Even before artificial intelligence was a computer science research topic, science fiction writers like Asimov were concerned about this. They were devising mechanisms (i.e. Asimov’s Laws of Robotics) to ensure the benevolence of intelligent machines which is more commonly called alignment research today.or those who came to get quick answers:

Will AGI / singularity ever happen? According to most AI experts, yes.

When will the singularity / AGI happen? Before the end of the century. The consensus view was that it would take around 50 years in 2010s. After the advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), some leading AI researchers updated their views. For example, Hinton believed in 2023 that it could take 5-20 years.1

What is our current status? While there are narrow AI solutions that exceed humans in many tasks, a generally intelligent machine doesn’t exist even though some researchers believe that large language models exhibit emerging, more generalist capabilities than other existing AI models.2

The more nuanced answers are below. There have been several surveys and research of AI scientists asking about when such developments will take place.

We looked at the results of 5 surveys with around 1700 participants where researchers estimated when singularity would happen. In all cases, the majority of participants expected AI singularity before 2060. In the 2022 Expert Survey on Progress in AI, conducted with 738 experts who published at the 2021 NIPS and ICML conferences, AI experts estimate that there’s a 50% chance that high-level machine intelligence will occur until 2059.