(NewsUSA) - As artificial intelligence technology grows stronger, what we known about the complexity of the human brain provides perspective to its development, according to experts at experts at the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a nonprofit and nonpartisan initiative with a goal of making recommendations to strengthen America's long-term competitiveness in AI.

 “Like the journey of understanding our minds, it is essential to the human experience to step back and imagine how a more powerful form of artificial intelligence (AI) will arrive in leaps, including the next 12-18 months,” said Ylli Bajraktari, CEO of the Special Competitive Studies Project, in a recent blog post.

He identified three megatrends that could contribute to artificial general intelligence (AGI) in the future.

Better generative AI. Large generative AI models such as GPT-4 continue to scale up their performance and become bigger, faster, and stronger. The upward vector will increase until it reaches a plateau, and many experts predict that the LLM (learned language model) may plateau at some useful cost point and continue to serve as the user interface (UI) between people and AI systems-of-systems because LLMs “speak our language.” 

Combined AI Activity. New approaches to specific AI functions will allow AI to perform more human-like tasks by combining functions as well as improving in scale. A combination of today’s AI with capabilities such as better reasoning, planning, creativity, memory, and sensing, as well as the ability to orchestrate the inputs from over 700 specialized GPT models, would yield something much more general.

This megatrend has economic consequences, as it opens a dynamic space in which small and medium-sized companies can flourish. Some of the key advancements in the global AI community include the ability to fuse data from different sources (multimodality), chain of thought reasoning, and planning/scaffolding/framing, which allow AI to progress towards human-like strategizing and problem-solving.

Transformation of technology. The arrival of AGI also will occur by transforming the fundamental technologies upon which AI depends, such as computing, data, microelectronics, networks, and energy. Quantum computing will likely serve as a source for modeling the real world. Ongoing improvements in microelectronics will continue to support human-like memory capabilities in AI, and advanced networks will allow AI systems to react and make decisions almost instantly, like a self-driving car avoiding an accident before you even see the danger.

Although it is likely that these three megatrends will develop, interact, intertwine and combine to create the fourth way to AGI, questions remain about how the megatrends will combine, when it will happen, who will do it, and which drivers will matter most. “Getting positioned and organized for the arrival of this general-purpose technology is a defining challenge of our era,” according to the experts at SCSP.

Visit scsp.ai to learn more.