Hitting the Trifecta for AGI: When Will We Hit Artificial General Intelligence?

AGI is likely around the corner.  We need to mentally prepare for it.  Here are three avenues as I see this unfold.  

Recently at a talk in Boston, I walked through these concepts with the audience.  

Quick Step Back:

The adult brain has approximately 100 billion neurons, it orchestrates over 100 trillion connections—far outstripping the complexity of what we have seen with all connected devices and content on the Internet. That said, our current most powerful transformer model, the T in GPT, only handles 1.2 trillion connections, but seriously, looky at what it can do now with only 1.2% of the connections of our human brain.  

This staggering neural network we are seeing unfold continues to confound the best scientists.  We still have the most basic questions left to answer, such as, how do we experience intuition?  That sudden, seemingly magical understanding of something without conscious reasoning is a puzzle.  Some researchers argue that intuition is the brain’s way of drawing on subconscious memories and knowledge, while others suggest it’s simply a cognitive shortcut our minds take to save time. Regardless, it remains a mystery how we process such insights with so little conscious effort.

Then there's memory—how can a melody or scent suddenly transport me back to 2nd grade when on the playground and someone shouts, “rover red rover, send Joe right over,” and I ran full speed into my teacher’s back?  She returned later that afternoon to the classroom, thankfully.  Now every time I smell Bengay, I think of that moment.  Despite extensive research into brain structures involved in memory, we are only just barely sniffing the surface of how memories are truly coded, saved, and recalled.