'The Game is Over!' Google's DeepMind says it is close to achieving 'human-level' artificial intelligence – but it still needs to be scaled up

From Daily Mail.co.uk (May 18):

DeepMind, a British company owned by Google, may be on the verge of achieving human-level artificial intelligence (AI).

Nando de Freitas, a research scientist at DeepMind and machine learning professor at Oxford University, has said 'the game is over' in regards to solving the hardest challenges in the race to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI).

AGI refers to a machine or program that has the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can, and do so without training.

According to De Freitas, the quest for scientists is now scaling up AI programs, such as with more data and computing power, to create an AGI.

Earlier this week, DeepMind unveiled a new AI 'agent' called Gato that can complete 604 different tasks 'across a wide range of environments'.

Gato uses a single neural network – a computing system with interconnected nodes that works like nerve cells in the human brain.

It can chat, caption images, stack blocks with a real robot arm and even play the 1980s home video game console Atari, DeepMind claims.

De Freitas comments came in response to an opinion piece published on The Next Web that said humans alive today won't ever achieve AGI.

De Freitas tweeted: 'It's all about scale now! The Game is Over! It's about making these models bigger, safer, compute efficient, faster...'

However, he admitted that humanity is still far from creating an AI that can pass the Turing test – a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to or indistinguishable from that of a human.

After DeepMind's announcement of Gato, The Next Web article said it demonstrates AGI no more than virtual assistants such as Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri, which are already on the market and in people's homes.

'Gato's ability to perform multiple tasks is more like a video game console that can store 600 different games, than it's like a game you can play 600 different ways,' said The Next Web contributor Tristan Greene.

'It's not a general AI, it's a bunch of pre-trained, narrow models bundled neatly.'

Gato has been built to achieve a variety of hundreds of tasks, but this ability may compromise the quality of each task, according to other commentators. [read more]

Is this how the AI Overlords gets “born?” Not sure if scaling DeepMind up is a good idea. Then again maybe I watched too many sci-fi movies about evil AIs.

Another Deep Mind article: DeepMind AI learns simple physics like a baby