The predictions for when AGI will arrive seem to be getting more and more aggressive as time goes by.
Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son has said that he expects that AGI will be achieved “much sooner” than in 2-3 years. He also said that AGI would be first built in corporations, thanks to the vast troves of data they already have stored, and will then be available for everyday users. Son also said that AGI will be achieved in Japan through Softbank’s partnership with OpenAI.
“First of all, I think AGI will be achieved in the very near future,” he said while announcing the joint venture named SB OpenAI Japan in partnership with OpenAI. “I think that just a year ago, I thought that AGI would arrive within 10 years. I also mentioned this at the event a few months ago, when I said that AGI would arrive within two or three years. But now I have corrected that statement and I feel that AGI will actually arrive much sooner than that,” he said.
“I would like to comment once again that, and this AGI is related to today’s announcement, but I believe that it will start in companies especially large companies, before it begins in world of individuals. The reason is that within world of individuals, there are all kinds of phenomena, and they are all so different…but if we focus on a single company, there is a vast amount of data to achieve AGI,” he added.
Masayoshi Son is the latest person in tech to give an extremely aggressive timeline for the achievement of AGI. Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun has said that AGI is possible in 5-10 years, while Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has said that AGI will be achieved in 2026-2027. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, on the other hand, says his company knows what it has to do to create AGI, but it might be hard for humanity to tell when it’s been achieved. Elon Musk has said that AI systems will be smarter than any single human being by the end of 2025, and will likely be smarter than all human beings combined by 2027 or 2028. And with Masayoshi Son having changed his AGI predictions from 10 years out to 2-3 years out to “much less” than 2-3 years in rapid succession, it’s clear that people with a ringside view to the action in the AI space have seen things that are making them believe that the development of AGI is indeed imminent.