Artificial intelligence could reach singularity within 7 years, researchers say
(ORDO NEWS) — After attempting to quantify the progress of AI development, the researchers concluded that artificial intelligence (AI) will reach the singularity within seven years.
Translation company Translated explained that its experts first began testing machine translation technology in 2011.
The team settled on a metric to measure AI progress, which they called Time to Edit (TTE). Simply put, this is the time it takes for a human translator to edit a translation created by another person or AI.
Over the years, the TTE for AI-translated texts has declined fairly consistently, allowing Translated to predict the date the AI will reach the singularity when time is equivalent to human translators.
“When plotted graphically, the TTE data shows a remarkably linear trend,” the team wrote on their website.
“If this trend in TTE continues to decline at the same rate as it has since 2014, TTE is predicted to drop to one second over the next few years, approaching the point where MT [machine translation] will provide what can be called “perfect translation”.
The research team is looking at other metrics that AI is improving on, such as linguistic errors per 1,000 translated words.
Currently, industrial AI makes about 50 errors per 1,000 translated words, and the team expects this to improve at about the same rate as TTE.
The team of researchers believe that the ability to translate (a difficult task for a machine) is a good indication of when the technology will reach a singularity with humans.
“Many AI researchers believe that solving the problem of language translation is the closest thing to creating artificial general intelligence (AGI),” the team writes.
“This is because natural language is by far the most difficult problem we face in AI.
It requires an accurate simulation of reality to work, more so than any other narrow AI.”
The term “singularity” used by the team appears to mean “on par with humans” and may indicate AGI rather than the traditional meaning – a point where technological growth is out of our control and irreversible.
One popular version of the Singularity is the “intelligence explosion”, where AI is able to improve more and more with each generational cycle, far surpassing human intelligence.
However, tasks such as translation as human beings will be a milestone in the development of AI.
It can be used as part of a test for AGI, although it is important to remember that language ability does not make a machine conscious, and language models are, in fact, extremely good predictive texts, not intelligence that makes sense.
However, tracking the progress of AI is still very interesting, and will become more important as we get closer to this theoretical point of singularity.
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.
