There are areas where machine cognition still lags far behind that of humans. The ability of AI systems to plan is currently “at the level of a child,” Bengio says, although he notes that frontier models are making rapid strides in this area. Having been mostly trained on text and images, their spatial reasoning abilities are also poor, he says.
A big question in AI research today is how much further models can be pushed in the direction of human or superhuman intelligence. While companies have made tremendous advances by throwing enormous amounts of computational power at their models, it is not clear that ever more powerful computers will result in ever smarter machines. At a certain point, something else might be needed.
Mitchell notes that while babies learn by interacting with the world around them, AI systems are trained passively by being fed huge amounts of information. This may help explain why chatbots are prone to lying: Lacking real-world feedback, they often struggle to discern if information is true or false.
Bengio says that rather than crossing some threshold into a world of sentient machines, as we see in science fiction movies, machine intelligence will continue to develop unevenly.
“We should not be thinking about, Have we passed the threshold of AGI?” Bengio says. (AGI, or artificial general intelligence, often refers to machines with human-like intelligence.) “Because of the jaggedness of how intelligence is evolving in AI, there might never be such a moment.”