Oren Etzioni

I believe that large language models are beginning to understand the content they process. Their ability to interpret context and generate coherent responses suggests a form of comprehension that is a stepping stone towards true understanding.

While AGI, or artificial general intelligence, represents a significant advancement in AI capabilities, I disagree with the notion that AGI will quickly lead to superintelligence. The path from AGI to superintelligence involves profound complexities and unsolved technical challenges. It’s important to focus on the practical, ethical, and safety considerations at each step, rather than presuming a rapid escalation to superintelligent AI.

While large language models are impressive and yield many functional benefits in narrow tasks, they fundamentally lack understanding and reasoning capabilities. Expanding these models alone is not sufficient for achieving artificial general intelligence. We need breakthroughs in other areas of AI that incorporate cognitive architectures, common sense reasoning, and more sophisticated forms of learning and adaptation.