I think a very conservative prediction would be that we will see Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in the next 5 years. In other words, there will be AI agents, working with recursive self-improvement, that will learn how to do new tasks outside the realm of its training, faster than a human could. But when this actually happens will be open for debate.

The reason for this is that there isn’t going to be some magical threshold that AGI suddenly passes, but rather a continuous moving of the bar that defines what AGI is. There will be a working definition of AGI that puts up an artificial threshold, then an AGI model will achieve that definition and experts will admit that this model surpasses that definition, but will still think the model lacks some sufficient skills or expected outputs to truly call it AGI.

And so over the next 5 years or so we will have far more sophisticated AI models, all doing things that today we would define as AGI but will not meet the newest definition. The thing is that these moving goal posts will not be adjusted incrementally but rather exponentially. What that means is that the newer definition of AGI is going to include significantly greater output expectations. Then looking back, we will be hard pressed to say “this model’ was the one or ‘this day’ was the day that we achieved AGI.

Sometime soon there will be an AI model put out into the world that will build its own AI agent that starts a billion dollar company without the aid of a human… but that might happen even before consensus that AGI has been achieved. There will be an AI agent that costs lives or endangers lives with its decisions made in the real world, but that too might happen before consensus that AGI has been achieved.

Because the goal posts will keep moving while the technology is on an exponential curve, we are not going to have a magic threshold day when AGI occurred. Instead, in less than 5 years, well before 2030, we are going to be looking back in amazement wondering when we passed the threshold? But make no mistake, that’s going to happen and we don’t have an on/off switch to stop it when it does. This is both exciting and scary.