The development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has long been viewed as a holy grail of technology, the pinnacle of Artificial Intelligence (AI) achievement. Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind which recently merged with Google AI, had broken that silence by recently predicting that this paradigm-shifting technology could potentially reach human-level cognition within the next few years.

Estimates on the arrival of AGI vary widely, with some prominent figures such as Stephen Hawking's research partner Roger Penrose claiming it can not be achieved and others such as Elon Musk predicting we could see its realization within this decade. A standardized definition, test, or benchmark for AGI is yet to be established by the scientific community and there is also disagreement whether it is even achievable.

To put it in context, AGI is essentially a computer system with the intellectual reasoning capacity and data retention capabilities of a human. It would have major implications for the cryptocurrency world, where machines programmed with AGI could act as entrepreneurs, C-suite executives, advisers and traders, although it is predicted not all effects would be beneficial.

To alleviate these concerns, a call for a six month pause of development was recently issued by many industry leaders to allow scientists to assess the implications of AGI, with companies such as OpenAI and DeepMind taking steps to ensure mitigated risk through internal restructuring.

Despite this, researchers like Google Bard's Gerry Baker claim that AGI may be achieved without human interference and models like OpenAI's LaMDA are being built to further this cause. Understanding the underlying system of AGI and working to solve additional challenges like memory scaling is key to achieving this breakthrough technology and philosophical analysis will not speed up this process.



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