- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said AGI will be reached in five years during the 2023 NYT DealBook Summit.
- Huang defined AGI as tech that exhibits basic intelligence "fairly competitive" to a normal human.
- Still, he admitted that AI technology is not quite there yet despite its rapid progress.
Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia — one of the companies that is fueling the AI revolution — predicts that we may be able to see artificial general intelligence, or AGI, within the next five years.
During the 2023 New York Times DealBook Summit, the outlet's Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Huang if he expected to see AGI in the next 10 years.
"By depending on how you define it, I think the answer is yes," Huang replied.
At the summit, Huang defined AGI as a piece of software or a computer that can complete tests which reflect basic intelligence that's "fairly competitive" to that of a normal human.
"I would say that within the next five years, you're gonna see, obviously, AIs that can achieve those tests," Huang said.
While the CEO didn't specify what exactly he thinks AGI would look like, Ross Sorkin asked if AGI would refer to AI that can design the chips Nvidia is currently making, to which Huang agreed.
"Will you need to have the same staff that designs them?" Sorkin asked as a follow-up, referring to the development of Nvidia's chips.
"In fact, none of our chips are possible today without AI," Huang said.
He specified that the H-100 chips he said Nvidia is shipping today were designed with help from a number of AIs.
"Software can't be written without AI, chips can't be designed without AI, nothing's possible," he concluded on the point of AI's potential.
Even though Huang said that AI is developing faster than he expected, he said the technology hasn't showed signs it can exhibit or surpass complex human intelligence just yet.
"There's no question that the rate of progress is high," he said. "But there's a whole bunch of things that we can't do yet."
"This multi-step reasoning that humans are very good at, AI can't do," he said.
The CEO's thoughts on AGI come as some business leaders sound the alarm about what they personally consider to be AGI.
Ilya Sutskever, cofounder of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said that AI in its most advanced form will create new problems such as a surge in fake news and cyberattacks, automated AI weapons, and even "infinitely stable dictatorships."
Ian Hogarth, who has invested in more than 50 AI companies, said that a future "God-like AI" would lead to the "obsolescence or destruction of the human race" if the rapid development of the technology isn't regulated.
Huang isn't the only tech leader who believes that AGI will be achieved in the near future.
In February, ex-Meta executive John Carmack said that AGI will be achieved by the 2030s and be worth trillions of dollars.
A few months later, Demis Hassabis, CEO and cofounder of DeepMind, Google's AI division, predicted that AI that is as powerful as the human brain would arrive within the next few years.
Nvidia didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.