Not a day passes without AI getting the eulogies. It is expected that sooner, rather than later, the AI system will outperform humans at various cognitive tasks.

Huang, CEO, Nvidia suggested the arrival of AGI in the next five years. Ben Goertzel, the father of AGI shortens the period of the arrival to three years. Elon Musk sees AGI coming by the end of 2025. All are not so bullish. Yann LeCun, Facebook’s chief AI scientist argues there is no such thing as AGI, since human intelligence is nowhere near general. He prefers to call it human-level AI. He calls it a port of distant call.

There are challenges — reasoning, planning, persistent memory and understanding of the physical world. These are essential requirements of human-level intelligence or even animal-level intelligence. Current AI systems cannot perform all these tasks.

LLMs are restricted for their knowledge to text. Their understanding of reality is superficial. They are trained on data. If a human being has to absorb so much data, he may take 1 lac years. However, this is not our primary method of learning. Our learning of the world is through our interactions with the physical world around us. A child can have more data than the biggest LLM. LeCun calls it objective- driven AI. There is training through our senses and training through visuals. These impact our actions. Our memory gets constantly updated.

Ultimately, machines will surpass human intelligence, but it will take a while. It is not just round the corner.