there is no clear or agreed plan to reach the AGI

The call Stargate Project It’s going to be a lot to talk about in the coming years. The colossal bet to make the US a leader in AI will focus on the construction of data centers in that country. And yet the proposal faces enormous challenges.

Money galore.The investment of 500,000 million dollars in the next four years It is simply overwhelming. That figure represents approximately 30% of Spain’s GDP in 2023 (1.62 trillion dollars), and it certainly represents spectacular support for the North American country’s ambitions.

Objective: achieve an AGI. In the official announcement, project participants explained how “all of us hope to continue the development of AI—and in particular IAG—for the benefit of all humanity.” General artificial intelligence (IAG or AGI for its acronym in English) is the holy grail of the discipline, and OpenAI, which will have operational responsibility for Stargate, has been pursuing it for some time.

The diffuse meaning of AGI. The problem with this objective is that it is very diffuse. To clarify the issue a little, OpenAI and Microsoft wanted to define it in economic terms and indicated that an AGI will be when it achieves 100,000 million profits. Theoretically, these systems will equal or surpass human intelligence in all fields, and the social and economic implications could be colossal.

But we don’t know if we will achieve it. Much more important than giving a definition is actually achieving that artificial superintelligence, and here there is a critical problem: no one knows how to achieve it. Technology companies and AI startups—such as created by Ilya Sutskever either that of Francois Chollet— are following different paths to reach that goal, but it is not at all clear that any of them has the key to an achievement of this type in their hands.

And we don’t know how they want to get to it. None of the companies working on the development of an AGI clarify how they are planning to reach that objective, and the feeling is that they are experimenting without knowing very well whether the chosen path will allow them to achieve that objective. Meta made his intention clear a year ago, OpenAI and especially Altman are especially optimistic about itand the same thing happens with Musk and xAI.

Mustafa Suleyman, head of AI at Microsoft, is more cautious and he prefers not to make predictions about when we will reach it, although he sees it as feasible. In AnthropicApple and Google seem equally reserved on this issue, but it is inevitable to think that they are also working to not be left behind.

Hyperinvestment for hyperpromises. This gigantic investment is to a certain extent contradictory, especially when several experts warn that there is some AI slowdown and scaling—more power and more data to train models—doesn’t seem to work anymore, or at least it doesn’t seem to work as much. There are certainly promising trends such as AI agents or the models that “reason”but is building beastly data centers what we need? Is brute force enough? This also implies equally enormous energy requirementsand it will be interesting how the US resolves these new needs. But that large investment will allow companies to continue talking about how close AGI is, when we have no idea if it is close or simply is not and will not be.

An American AGI with Japanese and Arabic money. Especially curious is that the entire project is dedicated to turning the US into an AI leader and manages to develop an IAG, but the money comes partly from other countries. SoftBank, led by Masayoshi Son (on the right in the image), will be the main initial support and will immediately invest 100,000 million dollars, it is Japanese. And MGX is an investment fund from the United Arab Emirates that participated in the investment round recent from OpenAI (like SoftBank) and which also has an alliance with Microsoft. That means that these companies (and perhaps their countries) certainly have a prominent role in this project and its potential benefits.

Image | Wikimedia |Wikimedia

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