Superintelligence, roughly defined as an AI algorithm that can solve all problems better than people, will be a watershed for humanity and tech.
Even the best human experts have trouble making predictions about highly probabilistic, wicked problems. And yet those wicked problems surround us. We are all living through immense change in complex systems that impact the climate, public health, geopolitics and basic needs served by the supply chain. Just determining the best way to distribute COVID-19 vaccines without the help of an algorithm is practically impossible. We need to get smarter in how we solve these problems — fast. Superintelligence, if achieved, would help us make better predictions about challenges like natural disasters, building resilient supply chains or geopolitical conflict, and come up with better strategies to solve them. The last decade has shown how much AI can improve the accuracy of our predictions. That’s why there is an international race among corporations and governments around superintelligence.<div class="article-block block--pullout block--right">
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In the next year and a half, we’re going to see increasing adoption of technologies, which will trigger a broader industry shift, much as Tesla triggered the transition to EVs. </blockquote>
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Highly credible think tanks like Deepmind and OpenAI say that the path to superintelligence is visible. Last month, Deepmind said reinforcement learning (RL) could get us there, and RL is at the heart of embodied AI.