The AGI Arms Race

Beyond narrow AI applications, researchers now sprint towards artificial general intelligence - mastering nearly any intellectual task at human levels like logical reasoning, creativity and general knowledge. Attaining AGI promises to transform technology and society - for better or worse.

Utopian Hopes and Existential Fears

AGI supporters envision abundant prosperity from automating most occupations and scientific advances accelerated a millionfold. But others warn superhuman autonomy could spell disaster, allowing a single system to wreak unprecedented global havoc either deliberately or accidentally.

Scale Drives Smarter AI

Recent breakthrough models like DeepMind's Gato point towards AGI by exhibiting multi-task aptitude from playing games to controlling robots. Leading labs bet that sheer neural network size - now numbering in the trillions of parameters - may eventually cascade into broadly general abilities.

Combining Complementary Models

No one architecture likely achieves AGI alone. Experts speculate that integrating different algorithms with complementary strengths could yield versatile overall intelligence. For example, Anthropic's Constitutional AI "self-supervises" a base model called Claude by quizzing solution-finding modules.

The Common Sense Barrier

However major challenges remain like attaining the implicit reasoning humans accumulate through experience about how the world works. Tests also confirm advanced models still struggle even matching a 2-year-old’s basic common sense. Breakthroughs around social aptitude and fluid thinking stay scarce.

Managing the Coming Wave

As AI autonomy marches forward, experts emphasize importance of governance for managing societally-impactful systems. Researchers propose alignment techniques to instill models with human values and policy discussions around oversight. While the finish line stays vague, the AGI race shows no signs of slowing down.