In a recent interview when asked when he expects to see the appearance of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Elon Musk replied . Google’s DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis now believes AGI is as stated on the The Wall Street Journal’s Way forward for All the pieces Festival.

These numbers are considered to be optimistic in comparison with most AI industry pundits who consider that AGI is usually a decade, if not a century away. A few of this pessimism is from fear of committing to a shorter timeline to only be eventually proven incorrect. In spite of everything in 1956, on the Dartmouth Summer Research Project the term “Artificial Intelligence” was coined and commenced as a field, with the expectation that a machine as intelligent as a human being would exist in not more than a generation (25 years).

Others comparable to Geoffrey Hinton who is thought because the godfather of AI have a rather more nuanced view.

The AI industry has advanced rapidly over the past few yr because of the rapid development of deep reinforcement learning algorithms, many who power today’s Large Language Models (LLMs).

Nonetheless, all of those breakthroughs have only led to narrow AI applications comparable to chatbots, and language translation. That is as compared to AGI, a form of artificial intelligence that possesses the power to grasp, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide selection of tasks at a level comparable to that of a human being.

The missing link to AGI for a lot of seems unattainable, but to a number of who consider in what is known as “The Law of Accelerating Returns”, it’s inevitable that we’ll eventually construct an AGI.

The Law of Accelerating Returns was conceptualized by none aside from Ray Kurzweil, creator, inventor, and futurist. He’s involved in fields comparable to optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and he was hired by Google after publishing his AI Book “ Create a Mind”. This groundbreaking book illustrates how we want to grasp the human brain to be able to reverse engineer it to create the final word pondering machine. This book was so instrumental to the long run of AI, that Eric Schmidt recruited Ray Kurzweil to work on AI projects after he ending reading this seminal book. 

Probably the most relevant Ray Kurzweil book is none aside from “The Singularity is Near“, since being published in 2005, its predictions have mirrored technological growth over the past 2 many years. Most significantly Ray Kurzweil predicts that we’ll achieve AGI by 2029, a timeline that’s consistent with the recent opinion shared by Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis.

The law posits that the speed of change in a wide range of evolutionary systems (including but not limited to the expansion of technologies) tends to extend exponentially.

Within the context of technological growth, the law implies that we will expect rapid technological advances in the long run since the pace of technological innovation is itself accelerating. Ray Kurzweil argues that every latest generation of technology builds on the previous one, increasing the potential for innovation at an exponential rate.

This law showcases how an explosive growth of accelerating technologies, which is currently led by Generative AI, will ride other waves of other converging exponential technologies comparable to chip manufacturing, and 3-D printing.  This convergence is the catapult for AI to change into essentially the most powerful application ever built.

In 2001, Ray Kurzweil predicted the next:

An evaluation of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the commonsense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress within the twenty first century — it would be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” comparable to chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the speed of exponential growth. Inside a number of many years, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, resulting in The Singularity — technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the material of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward within the universe on the speed of sunshine.

This technological explosion is because of Moore’s Law which predicted that the variety of transistors on a given chip would double roughly every two years. This compounded with other technological breakthrough illustrates that the Law of Accelerating Returns is flourishing.  These are Ray Kurzweil observations for what this can mean for the long run of humanity:

• Evolution applies positive feedback in that the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the following stage. In consequence, the
• rate of progress of an evolutionary process increases exponentially over time. Over time, the “order” of the knowledge embedded within the evolutionary process (i.e., the measure of how well the knowledge matches a purpose, which in evolution is survival) increases.
• A correlate of the above remark is that the “returns” of an evolutionary process (e.g., the speed, cost-effectiveness, or overall “power” of a process) increase exponentially over time.
• In one other positive feedback loop, as a selected evolutionary process (e.g., computation) becomes more practical (e.g., cost effective), greater resources are deployed toward the further progress of that process. This ends in a second level of exponential growth (i.e., the speed of exponential growth itself grows exponentially).
• Biological evolution is one such evolutionary process.
• Technological evolution is one other such evolutionary process. Indeed, the emergence of the primary technology creating species resulted in the brand new evolutionary strategy of technology. Subsequently, technological evolution is an outgrowth of–and a continuation of–biological evolution.
• A selected paradigm (a technique or approach to solving an issue, e.g., shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit as an approach to creating more powerful computers) provides exponential growth until the strategy exhausts its potential. When this happens, a paradigm shift (i.e., a fundamental change within the approach) occurs, which enables exponential growth to proceed.

Readers should read Kurzweil’s blog, afterwards they need to reflect on the implications of this exponential growth, and the way it matches and differs from what they’ve personally experienced because the blog was initially published.

The Law of Accelerating Returns while not as popular as Moore’s Law, stays as relevant today as when it was initially published.