The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

Rather than get too distracted by questions of consciousness, then, we should refocus the entire debate around near-term capabilities and how they will evolve in the coming years. As we have seen, from Hinton’s AlexNet to Google’s LaMDA, models have been improving at an exponential rate for more than a decade. These capabilities are already very real indeed, but they are nowhere near slowing down. While they are already having an enormous impact, they will be dwarfed by what happens as we progress through the next few doublings and as AIs complete complex, multistep end-to-end tasks on their own. I think of this as “artificial capable intelligence” (ACI), the point at which AI can achieve complex goals and tasks with minimal oversight. AI and AGI are both parts of the everyday discussion, but we need a concept encapsulating a middle layer in which the Modern Turing Test is achieved but before systems display runaway “superintelligence.” ACI is shorthand for this point. The first stage of AI was about classification and prediction—it was capable, but only within clearly defined limits and at preset tasks. It could differentiate between cats and dogs in images, and then it could predict what came next in a sequence to produce pictures of those cats and dogs. It produced glimmers of creativity, and could be quickly integrated into tech companies’ products. ACI represents the next stage of AI’s evolution. A system that not only could recognize and generate novel images, audio,...

From Knowing to Doing: Enter ACI