Tech execs say a type of AI that can outdo humans is coming, but have no idea what it looks like

Executives at some of the world’s leading artificial intelligence labs are expecting a form of AI on a par with — or even exceeding — human intelligence to arrive sometime in the near future. But what it will eventually look like and how it will be applied remain a mystery.

Leaders from the likes of OpenAI, Cohere, Google’s DeepMind, and major tech companies like Microsoft and Salesforce weighed the risks and opportunities presented by AI at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

AI has become the talk of the business world over the past year or so, thanks in no small part to the success of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular generative AI chatbot. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are powered large language models, algorithms trained on vast quantities of data.

That has stoked concern among governments, corporations and advocacy groups worldwide, owing to an onslaught of risks around the lack of transparency and explainability of AI systems; job losses resulting from increased automation; social manipulation through computer algorithms; surveillance; and data privacy.

Altman was temporarily booted from OpenAI in November in a shock move that laid bare concerns around the governance of the companies behind the most powerful AI systems.

In a discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Altman said his ouster was a “microcosm” of the stresses faced by OpenAI and other AI labs internally. “As the world gets closer to AGI, the stakes, the stress, the level of tension. That’s all going to go up.”

Aidan Gomez, the CEO and co-founder of artificial intelligence startup Cohere, echoed Altman’s point that AI will likely be a real outcome in the near future.

“I think we will have that technology quite soon,” Gomez told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal in a fireside chat at the World Economic Forum.

But he said a key issue with AGI is that it’s still ill-defined as a technology. “First off, AGI is a super vaguely defined term,” Cohere’s boss added. “If we just term it as ‘better than humans at pretty much whatever humans can do,’ I agree, it’s going to be pretty soon that we can get systems that do that.”

Hinton left his role as a Google vice president and engineering fellow last year, raising concerns over how AI safety and ethics were being addressed by the company.

Benioff said that technology industry leaders and experts will need to ensure that AI averts some of the problems that have beleaguered the web in the past decade or so — from the manipulation of beliefs and behaviors through recommendation algorithms during election cycles, to the infringement of privacy.

“We really have not quite had this kind of interactivity before” with AI-based tools, Benioff told the Davos crowd last week. “But we don’t trust it quite yet. So we have to cross trust.”

“We have to also turn to those regulators and say, ‘Hey, if you look at social media over the last decade, it’s been kind of a f—ing s— show. It’s pretty bad. We don’t want that in our AI industry. We want to have a good healthy partnership with these moderators, and with these regulators.”