An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: Human-level artificial intelligence is close to finally being achieved, according to a lead researcher at Google’s DeepMind AI division. Dr Nando de Freitas said “the game is over” in the decades-long quest to realize artificial general intelligence (AGI) after DeepMind unveiled an AI system capable of completing a wide range of complex tasks, from stacking blocks to writing poetry. Described as a “generalist agent,” DeepMind’s new Gato AI needs to just be scaled up in order to create an AI capable of rivaling human intelligence, Dr de Freitas said.

Responding to an opinion piece written in The Next Web that claimed “humans will never achieve AGI,” DeepMind’s research director wrote that it was his opinion that such an outcome is an inevitability. “It’s all about scale now! The Game is Over!” he wrote on Twitter. “It’s all about making these models bigger, safer, compute efficient, faster at sampling, smarter memory, more modalities, innovative data, on/offline… Solving these challenges is what will deliver AGI.”

When asked by machine learning researcher Alex Dimikas how far he believed the Gato AI was from passing a real Turing test — a measure of computer intelligence that requires a human to be unable to distinguish a machine from another human — Dr de Freitas replied: “Far still.” […] Fielding further questions from AI researchers on Twitter, Dr de Freitas said “safety is of paramount importance” when developing AGI. “It’s probably the biggest challenge we face,” he wrote. “Everyone should be thinking about it. Lack of enough diversity also worries me a lot.” DeepMind describes Gato in a blog post: “The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens.

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Source: Slashdot – DeepMind Unveils ‘Gato’ AI Capable of Completing a Wide Range of Complex Tasks