Where is AI Going?

Where is AI going ? I don't claim to know. In my 25 year career in the tech industry, I've seen quite a few innovations claiming to be the "paradigm shift" which will change all our lives. From PC's to smartphones and from mainframes to cloud computing - all of these have had an impact on how we live and work.

We may not be sure where AI is taking us, but we can see clearly that the pace of development is so much faster than any other technical wave we have seen before.

In a recent interview, Sam Altman (CEO of Open AI) discussed how we are moving through the 5 levels of AI:

1. Chatbots
2. Reasoners - a system that can solve basic problems at the level of a person with a PhD
3. Agents capable of taking actions on a user’s behalf.
4. Innovators
5. Organisations - AI that can perform the work of entire organizations of people.

At level 5, we will be in the era of AGI - artificial general intelligence, or AI with human-like intelligence. OpenAI has defined AGI as “a highly autonomous system surpassing humans in most economically valuable tasks.”

If all of this sounds a long way away, then think again. Sam Altman estimates that we are “five years, give or take,” before reaching AGI. So there's he prospect of a radically different future coming to your business. And it's coming very soon.

My aim as an AI consultant is to help clients understand what this may mean for their industry - and what they need to do to stay ahead of the AI tsunami coming their way.

My advice ? "Let's wait and see how this pans out" is not a good plan. "Let's get started now and see how we can use this" is a better one.