A.G.I. meets the brain: testing the range of artificial general intelligence. From the article:

…[Sam] Altman has remade OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, into a for-profit company so it could more aggressively pursue financing. Now he has landed a marquee investor [Microsoft] to help it chase an outrageously lofty goal.

He and his team of researchers hope to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.

A.G.I. still has a whiff of science fiction. But in their agreement, Microsoft and OpenAI discuss the possibility with the same matter-of-fact language they might apply to any other technology they hope to build, whether it’s a cloud-computing service or a new kind of robotic arm.

“My goal in running OpenAI is to successfully create broadly beneficial A.G.I.,” Mr. Altman said in a recent interview. “And this partnership is the most important milestone so far on that path.”…

In a joint phone interview with Mr. Altman, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, later compared A.G.I. to his company’s efforts to build a quantum computer, a machine that would be exponentially faster than today’s machines. “Whether it’s our pursuit of quantum computing or it’s a pursuit of A.G.I., I think you need these high-ambition North Stars,” he said….

OpenAI mastered Dota 2 thanks to a mathematical technique called reinforcement learning, which allows machines to learn tasks by extreme trial and error. By playing the game over and over again, automated pieces of software, called agents, learned which strategies are successful.

The agents learned those skills over the course of several months, racking up more than 45,000 years of game play. That required enormous amounts of raw computing power. OpenAI spent millions of dollars renting access to tens of thousands of computer chips inside cloud computing services run by companies like Google and Amazon.

Eventually, Mr. Altman and his colleagues believe, they can build A.G.I. in a similar way. If they can gather enough data to describe everything humans deal with on a daily basis — and if they have enough computing power to analyze all that data — they believe they can rebuild human intelligence….

The question is how seriously we should take the idea of artificial general intelligence. Like others in the tech industry, Mr. Altman often talks as if its future is inevitable.

“I think that A.G.I. will be the most important technological development in human history,” he said during the interview with Mr. Nadella. Mr. Altman alluded to concerns from people like Mr. Musk that A.G.I. could spin outside our control. “Figuring out a way to do that is going to be one of the most important societal challenges we face.”

For other posts on Sam Altman, see here. For other posts on Microsoft, see here.