If someone like Demis Hassabis speaks his mind on AI the world is forced to sit up and listen. They have listened but it has ended there itself. The responses are very feeble and barely anything in concrete terms. We have always applauded his achievements but never gave a thought about how to prepare the world for the AI revolution. Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and has remained its CEO since then. His contribution to AI has by far been pioneering by any standards. Google took over DeepMind in 2014 but with the boss remaining the same even to this day.
The journey beyond with products being delivered with astounding regularity has kept the world in awe. Starting with AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AlphaStar and the one that made waves for the last few years is AlphaFold. It addresses the protein folding issue and facilitates drug discovery. It earned Demis 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Being in this game for more than 15 years in the global public domain at a pioneering and cutting edge level and decades ahead of him, how to manage the AI revolution is the biggest issue which has unsettled his mind for quite some time.
It is also enmeshed with the fact as to how far away are we from Artificial General Intelligence, AGI? He is of the firm opinion that AI systems capable of human level cognitive abilities are one five to ten years away. For him that is not the issue, the challenge is that the society is not ready for human-level artificial intelligence. The question nagging him is the one of international standards and cooperation not just between countries but also ,between companies while we reach AGI. What is of critical importance are the dual issues of controllability of these systems and the access granted to these systems, to ensure all goes well.
The world’s leading AI brain and a futurist par excellence, Demis Hassabis, said he would advocate for a kind of CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) for AGI – international research focused on high-end collaboration to make it as safe as possible. He added, “You would also have to pair it with an institute like IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), to monitor unsafe projects and sort of deal with those.Besides these two, some kind of a supervening body is required that involves many countries around the world. An umbrella organisation of sorts, that is fit for this purpose, you may call it a technical UN.* Is the world really listening?
WHY RUN THE UNKNOWN RISK OF AGI, IT'S TIME TO GUIDE ITS TRAJECTORY.