Are we on the cusp of AGI, as Musk suggests? There's reason for doubt
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. If Elon Musk is to be believed, as per his post on X, we are "on the event horizon of the singularity". The event horizon is a boundary that marks the outer edge of black holes, the point from which nothing can escape – not even light.
AI singularity refers to when artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human intelligence, leading to rapid, unpredictable technological growth – it's known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Hence, Musk is suggesting that the world is on the cusp of AGI. His post comes when big tech companies including OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Deepseek, and Musk's own xAI are bending backwards to promote their reasoning models, which are also known as chain-of-thought ones.
As opposed to chain-of-thought models, which show intermediate reasoning steps, improving transparency and accuracy in complex tasks, non-chain-of-thought models are common in simple AI tasks like image recognition or basic chatbot replies. As an example, xAI launched the new Grok 3 model on 18 February, which is said to have 10x more compute than the previous generation model and will compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT 4-o and Google's Gemini 2 Pro. These 'reasoning' models differ from 'pre-trained' ones as they are meant to mimic human-like thinking, implying that they take a bit more time to respond to a query but are also generally more useful for answering complex questions.
“We at xAI believe (a) pre-trained model is not enough. That's not enough to build the best AI but the best AI needs to think like a human...," the xAI team said during the launch. Those bullish on AI and generative AI (GenAI) continue to list multiple reasons to try and convince us that the tech will help society
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