Have the developments in AI predicted by experts 10 years ago been achieved today?
As we are still several days away from the end of 2024, numerous new year predictions have already been made, eagerly waiting for reality to echo them. This is the “traditional practice” that media, institutions, and industry leaders eagerly engage in at the end of the year. What’s unique this year is that many of these predictions are focused on AI.
Recently, Open AI CEO Sam Altman announced that by 2025, AI will be as intelligent as humans, or even more so. Just a year ago, he believed that milestone would be reached by 2030.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang believes this could happen within the next five years, while Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicts it will be within the next two years.
The AI community’s predictions for the realization of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) are sourced from X and posted on Reddit on November 19th, 2024.
Where will AI go next?
The answers to this question vary among experts and institutions. When it comes to specific trends in AI development across different fields, here’s how industry leaders have been predicting them in recent years:
Looking back at predictions made 10 years ago, it’s unclear whether humans were too optimistic or too pessimistic.
With so many predictions made, it’s still unknown which ones will come true. “AI is developing so rapidly that if you want to know what the future will be like in 10 years, the best way might be to look back at what it was like 10 years ago,” said Geoffrey Hinton, a Turing Award and Nobel Prize winner.
In 2014, the Pew Research Center surveyed over 1,000 experts on their predictions for AI and robotics by 2025, as well as their views on how it would affect employment. It’s unclear if these predictions have come true 10 years later.
Looking back to the present, people are still eager to make predictions about AI. On prediction websites like Manifold and Metaculus, 709 predictors have a 50% chance of OpenAI announcing GPT-5 in February 2025; 52 predictors believe there’s a 60% chance the new US president (Trump) will sign an executive order specifically targeting AI within the first 100 days of their term by May 2025; and by July 2026, there’s a 50% chance open-source AI will win an international math Olympiad gold medal.
Someone has compiled this timeline of AI predictions and shared it on the US online community Reddit. One highly upvoted comment said: “In 2035, sentient AI will discover this timeline and post it on Reddit, laughing at how all our predictions were wrong.”
So, where do you stand on AI in the next year?
References:
1. APPSO – “AI Godfather” predicts the future: Humans are experiencing a greater intellectual liberation than the Industrial Revolution | with interview transcript, [URL provided in Chinese] https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/RvHqVxCHrnayWNogkup1-A
2. CITIC Bookstore – Eight global AI experts predict the next 20 years in one article, [URL provided in Chinese] https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/aujjsGz-MdXsRnF0EiK21g
3. 36氪 – Red Pine Capital’s three major AI expectations for 2025: The tower is about to be built and five giants are vying for dominance, [URL provided in Chinese] https://36kr.com/p/3083950305278344
