Will AI ever become conscious?

The question of whether artificial intelligence is capable of understanding reality as humans do is more philosophical than technical. It depends entirely on how we even define consciousness. Since neural networks utilize neurons similarly to our brains, a sufficiently complex model could theoretically operate exactly the same way as a human brain.

The closest analogy for consciousness in the world of AI research is artificial general intelligence (AGI). It’s a theorized form of AI capable of transforming multimodal inputs into the output that most efficiently achieves its goals. In other words, the term “AGI” is a computational way of defining sentience.

The prevailing belief within the AI community is that we’re still far away from creating any form of AGI. But recent innovations in natural language processing models like GPT-3 might be a step in the right direction.

“There’s a huge debate on whether or not large language models are truly along the path towards AGI,” Dr. Tandon said. “Now we have started to work at the scale of global information. In some sense, they have extremely high dimensional data and figured out the real data is probably lying in a much lower manifold or subspace. Obviously there are lots of challenges; the main issue with large language models is that they hallucinate [false information]. But I think they’re a very critical component, a great advancement moving towards AGI.”

It’s difficult to estimate when AGI will arrive, if it’s even possible to create. The ambiguity around what exactly “general” intelligence entails means there’s no way to gauge if current research is even heading in the right direction. And given how quickly the field has transformed over the past few years, there’s no telling where AI technology might be in the near future.

“Tomorrow, if we can have a machine which takes in different kinds of data modalities and is able to understand the similar signal patterns across them, I think that that would be a complete game changer,” Dr. Tandon said. “We are living in a really exciting time where we genuinely don’t know what kind of disruptions of daily life are going to happen in the next five to 10 years.”

Even if machine learning researchers continue to innovate at the unbelievable pace they’ve set for themselves, we probably won’t see a Hollywood-style AI revolution any time soon. But day by day, we’re teaching our computers to become better thinkers than we are. Capable of deterministically replicating our emotion and imagination, these models may soon challenge the line between man and machine. And some day, we’ll have to answer the most difficult question of all: what exactly is it that makes us alive?