US gov quizzes AI experts about when the machines will take over

A panel of AI experts have been grilled on the impact and importance of artificial general intelligence by the US House of Representatives on Tuesday. The hearing was ominously named "Artificial Intelligence – With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility." Narrow AI for specific tasks has been rapidly advancing and the committee wanted to know how far off artificial general intelligence (AGI), where a system can learn multiple actions and do them better than humans, would be. Greg Brockman, co-founder and CTO at OpenAI, defined AGI as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". Progress is spearheaded by three areas: data, computation, and algorithms. A recent OpenAI study estimated there had been a 300,000-times increase in the amount of compute used to train AI systems since 2012.