11 Frontiers of AI: Open questions and global trends
This chapter covers
- Artificial general intelligence
- Examining debates on AI consciousness and sentience
- Assessing the environmental footprint of LLMs
- Surveying the LLM open source community
- Exploring the global investment in AI today
In 2022, a group of researchers published a survey that found artificial general intelligence (AGI) had about a 50% chance of emerging before 2060 [1]. Some imagined systems surpassing human reasoning; others warned of existential risk. Around the same time, Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed that Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), one of the company’s large language models, was sentient. His assertion sparked a public debate that stretched from technical forums to late-night talk shows: could a machine be conscious, or was this simply anthropomorphism?
These moments show how speculation about AI’s future often runs up against uncertainty about what today’s systems actually are. Alongside utopian and dystopian visions of AGI and consciousness, the field is also grappling with concrete challenges, including measuring the enormous energy demands of large-scale models, navigating the rise of open source LLM communities, and responding to the surge of global investment in AI infrastructure.