A group of pioneering AI experts say machines have achieved intelligence equivalent to humans in specific sectors.
The “godparents of AI” addressed AI’s journey to superintelligence at the Financial Times’ Future of AI summit.
Among those recognized with the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering were Nvidia’s (NVDA) Jensen Huang, Meta (META) AI’s Yann LeCun, and top computer scientists Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li and Bill Dally.
Huang emphasized AI’s transformative potential, noting that it is capable of augmenting human capabilities and performing complex tasks.
“For the first time, AI is intelligence that augments people, it addresses labor, it does work,” he said. According to Huang, the advancements in AI are already translating into numerous useful applications across various societal domains.
The concept of achieving Artificial General Intelligence — where machines possess human-like cognitive abilities — remains a central theme. But the group indicated it would not be a singular moment.
“It is not going to be an event because the capabilities are going to expand progressively in various domains,” said Meta’s LeCun.
Fei-Fei Li, a founder of World Labs, highlighted that AI’s potential to perform powerful operations coexists with the indispensable role of human intellect.
Geoffrey Hinton, meanwhile, anticipates a future where machines could dominate in debates within two decades.
However, Yoshua Bengio cautioned against making definitive predictions, urging a balanced understanding of AI’s evolving capabilities.
“You should be really agnostic and not make big claims because there’s a lot of possible futures now.”