What is the AI Singularity?

This article is based on my video of the same topic which is available at https://youtu.be/n816hcs-j3A.

While the term singularity is not new related to Artificial Intelligence, it is coming up more frequently because of the advancements in AI, especially generative AI and we seem to close to this "singularity" event. But what is it?

Human Intelligence

If we think about intelligence there are vast variances in intelligence just for humans. If an average IQ is 100 then we have people down well below that average, 25 is lowest I think, we also have people very high, around the 190's. Hawking and Einstein are believed to be around 160. As someone definitely in that average range I can't comprehend the level of intelligence of those people and struggle to understand many things they worked on. We have these vast scales of intelligence just in humans. Then think outside of humans. I would think an ant would have no ability to comprehend the intelligence of even the least intelligent human.

Now what is intelligence a product of? Our intelligence could be considered to be the product of a number of things:

• The information we have been given/trained on. It starts at birth, continues through school and we continue to learn. The quality of that information is a big part of our intelligence.
• In our brains we have connections between the neurons in our brains. The ability to connect those neurons and to be able to change them help in our cognitive abilities, i.e. our thinking! The better the neuroplasticity (that ability to form and reorganize connections), the higher our intelligence.
• Then we have the speed we can perform operations. Our organic brain is about 1011 instructions per second (but these are beyond just basic math operations which computer operations consist of)

But our brain is very energy efficient with minimal heat wasted :-)

Artificial Intelligence

AI can be thought of as a digital brain. For the neurons that make up that digital brain it has parameters for the weights and bias that form the connections between all those digital neurons. These parameters and their strengths are trained based on the information given during its training phase.

So, like our human brain the quality of the AI is largely based on the information it is trained on and the number and quality of those parameters.

In terms of speed of operations, a computer can do 100's of millions of math operations a second. While more basic than human brain operations the difference in performance is huge.

The number of those neurons, the number of layers and the number of parameters is limited only by the hardware we can throw at it and our engineering advances are increasing the scale and speed of the operations performed. This advancements in the capacity we can make available doesn't show signs of slowing. Based on these factors driving the intelligence, there is no limit.

What is the Singularity?

Today, the AI models and performance get better as us humans continue to refine them. We continue to refine the information we train them on, both in terms of the quantity and quality. We make more and better hardware available for their training and then their inferencing. We tweak how the parameters are changed; we refine the neural networks.

Today, we the humans improve these digital brains.

The AI singularity is where these digital brains surpass human intelligence and will then start improving themselves, both the software and hardware designs it runs on. It would recursively self-improve every aspect of itself. Likely we would see exponential improvements once this starts. It would improve the hardware it runs on, improve its models, improve how it trains itself, create better training data for its next version.

It would be able to improve many other aspects of technological development as well. Hopefully for the betterment of the entire world!

If we think again of those spectrums of intelligence the AI would rapidly accelerate their intelligence way beyond what we could likely even comprehend nor understand how it functions. We could/would lose control of that advancement as it just continues to evolve.

This is why it's the singularity, the point, where in math, existing models break down and the outputs undefined.

Once we have the AI singularity, it surpasses human intelligence and self improves, we cannot predict what the future holds anymore. Many believe it would be the biggest change in the history of human civilization.