Has AI reached the singularity? What smart people are saying about Sam Altman's claim

• Sam Altman says we’re in the singularity, a point at which AI surpasses human capabilities and improves itself.
• Not everyone is convinced, despite how quickly AI is improving.
• “Rapid progress is not itself the singularity,” Roman Yampolskiy, a computer science professor, told BI.

AI-safety researchers have long warned that systems could execute novel, multistep plans without human oversight, he said. “Now it has happened. AI slipped from our control. Score one for the singularity.”

Ajay Agrawal, University of Toronto professor

Ajay Agrawal, who is also a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto, said we have not reached the singularity.

“AI systems are extraordinarily powerful prediction machines, but they do not want anything,” Agrawal told Business Insider. “People have goals; neural networks do not.”

AI can appear purposeful because people set objectives for it to optimize against, he said, but that purpose “originates with us.”

He added it was more accurate to view AI as “remarkably powerful tools serving human goals” than autonomous entities with goals of their own — even as the risk of “catastrophic failure due to increasingly powerful zombie algorithms” grows.