Google chief scientist Jeff Dean says that there are certain things in AI he always avoids talking about as, 'lots of people have very different ...'

There is one conversation related to AI that Google's Chief Scientist

Jeff Dean

says he always tries to avoid. In a recent interview, Google's Jeff Dean, shared his reason for avoiding a popular topic in the AI community:

Artificial General Intelligence

, or AGI.Speaking on "The Moonshot Podcast," Dean explained that the term AGI is problematic because it has too many different definitions. He noted that the perceived difficulty of achieving AGI can vary wildly depending on who you ask, sometimes by a factor of a trillion.Dean offered his perspective on the current state of AI. He believes that today's AI models are likely already better than the average person at a wide range of non-physical tasks. While these models can struggle and are not yet at the level of human experts, they are still "pretty reasonable at most things," he said. This, he suggested, is a far cry from the more extreme definition of AGI as a system that can outperform human experts at every single task.When asked about the timeline for AI to make breakthroughs faster than humans, Dean said we are likely already close to that point in some areas. He believes that automated search and computation will accelerate progress in science and engineering, helping advance human capabilities over the coming decades. "There will be a lot of domains where automated search and computation actually can accelerate progress — scientific progress, engineering progress," he said. "All these things I think are going to be important for advancing what we as people can do over the next five, 10, 15, 20 years," he said.

Google's Jeff Dean on definition of AGI

The debate around AGI is a major one in the field of AI. While many define AGI as a form of AI with human-like intelligence and learning abilities, others see it as the point where autonomous computer systems can outperform humans at most valuable work. The predictions for when AGI might be achieved also vary significantly, with some experts predicting it will happen in the next few years, while others believe it could be decades away.