Tech CEOs and futurists have long described Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, as one of the ultimate goals of artificial intelligence.
Now, Integral AI, a company founded by ex-Google veteran Jad Tarifi, claims to have cracked the AGI code. The company, based in Tokyo, Japan, says its AI model can learn new tasks “without pre-existing datasets or human intervention.”
Integral AI’s ‘world first’ AGI achievement
Though tech moguls and CEOs have touted AGI as the next great technological milestone for humanity, recent events show that skepticism is important when it comes to “world first” claims.
Take “quantum supremacy”, for example. Google and other large companies have claimed to have achieved the quantum computing milestone, only for rivals to dispute their definition of quantum supremacy.
Perhaps, in an effort to avoid this problem, Integral AI has provided its own clear definition of AGI. In a press statement, the company claims that AGI is determined by meeting three fundamental qualifiers: autonomous skill learning, safe and reliable mastery, and energy efficiency.
Autonomous skill learning is defined as a system that “must teach itself entirely new skills in novel domains without pre-existing datasets or human intervention.” Safe and reliable mastery means learning without “catastrophic risks or unintended side effects.” Energy and efficiency, meanwhile, refer to the total energy cost of the system learning being roughly equal to that of a human acquiring the same skill.
The company said its engineers used these principles as “fundamental cornerstones and developmental benchmarks during the inception and testing of this first-in-its-class AGI learning system.”
A ‘fundamental leap’ for AI
Integral AI says it has conducted robot trials using its new system. During these trials, the firm claims that the robots learned new skills without human supervision.
“Today’s announcement is more than just a technical achievement; it marks the next chapter in the story of human civilization,” Jad Tarifi, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Integral AI, claimed in the statement. “Our mission now is to scale this AGI-capable model, still in its infancy, toward embodied superintelligence that expands freedom and collective agency.”
In a recent Business Insider interview, Tarifi said he left Google after a decade at the company to launch Integral AI. He decided to form the company in Japan rather than in Silicon Valley because of Japan’s position as a world leader in robotics technology.
Whether Integral AI truly did build the world’s first AGI-capable model will no doubt be up for debate. In its press release, Integral AI said its new system marks a “fundamental leap beyond the limits of current AI technologies”. The company also claimed its system mirrors the multi-layered neocortex—a region of the human brain responsible for conscious thought, perception, and language. All of this is hard to substantiate, though it sure does sound impressive.
