How AI Superintelligence Could Change Your Business—and Everyone Else’s

This might be the dramatic understatement of the day, but AI really is everywhere now. ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and many other artificially intelligent systems are so sophisticated that people are using them to help at work, in education, and in many other arenas of modern life. Gen-Z, weary of dating apps, is even using AI to help navigate the tricky business of seeking romance in the 2020s. Today, thanks in part to Mark Zuckerberg’s company Meta, a new and even more exciting AI term is in the headlines: superintelligence. Meta recently invested $14 billion in startup Scale AI to effectively poach its CEO and cofounder Alexandr Wang. Wang will now lead a new superintelligence unit at Meta, with numerous other high-flying AI experts that Meta’s also poached from rival companies. Serious money is at play, with some new Meta hires reportedly winning seven figure salaries. But if AI refers to your garden-variety “artificial intelligence,” then what exactly is this new, exciting, expensive-sounding superintelligence thing? Isn’t the supposed next generation of AI supposed to be “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI? And, more importantly, why is Meta working on this tech so furiously, and what impact will it have on you and your company? Let’s dig in, starting with the basics and moving on to superintelligence. What is AI? Essentially, artificial intelligence is an umbrella term that covers lots of different digital inventions that are designed to simulate certain human cognitive skills. Many current leading-edge AI systems are generative in some way, meaning they take data in, then process your query by relying on a vast training database of information, then generate an output. For example, Chatbots like ChatGPT can take data that you give them and process it in a number of ways, perhaps summarizing a body of complex text, or generating an analysis of a set of financial numbers. And Apple’s new Image Playground app takes photos you give it, waits for your text-based instructions on what to do, and creates an AI-generated replica in cartoonish, emoji-like style that some users may prefer to share online. Technology experts at IBM explain it in a more scientific way, noting AI is “technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision making, creativity and autonomy.” And while it seems like AI just burst onto the scene with Chat-GPT, it’s worth pointing out that AI in different forms has existed for decades. For example, in 1997 an IBM computer beat Gary Kasparov at chess. That form of AI is very different from the generative form that’s the rage right now, but it was still AI. Today’s generative AI tools are powerful. They’re useful for streamlining boring office tasks for your staff, giving advice to entrepreneurs on how to run a business, and other great workplace tricks. But they remain fallible, not quite reaching human levels of intelligence, and are typically quite specialized in terms of their output and abilities. The next step: Artificial General Intelligence The next level of AI tech is the one you may be familiar with from countless TV shows and movies. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is an evolution of today’s technology, and it’s been the holy grail of AI researchers for a long time. You can think of AGI as a human-like digital system that can do millions of the same type of tasks that the human brain can. Google explains it more technically: AGI “aims to mimic the cognitive abilities of the human brain,” it says. Furthermore, what will set AGI apart from today’s simpler AI systems is an ability to generalize, or “transfer knowledge and skills learned in one domain to another, enabling it to adapt to new and unseen situations effectively.” AGI will have “a vast repository of knowledge about the world, including facts, relationships, and social norms, allowing it to reason and make decisions based on this common understanding.” Today’s AI hawks like Elon Musk and OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman are known for their efforts to evolve their current AI systems into next-gen AGI systems. This requires spending billions upon billions of dollars to amass complex, super-powerful processing chips. Musk predicted, back in 2023, that an AGI might be created in “five or six years.” If these innovators do create an AGI, it will likely have dramatic, transformative impacts on society, since it will be capable of doing pretty much any intellectual job a human can. If it helps, you can think of tomorrow’s AGI as being like the digital brain that powers the smart, highly capable humanoid robots that science fiction legends like Isaac Asimov have been writing about for decades: machines that can learn to do far more than one simple repetitive task. Given how useful today’s generative AI can be for businesses, putting a future AGI to work in your company could be a transformational experience. Particularly if it’s embodied in a humanoid android that can take on physical workplace tasks either too dangerous or too boring for human workers. Going beyond, to superintelligence Superintelligence is an evolution of AGI, where, as Elon Musk explained, the AI system is “smarter than any human, at anything.” As of today, superintelligence remains a purely theoretical notion, but the very idea has worried AI critics. If today’s AI systems are already threatening some worker’s jobs, and tomorrow’s AGI could be capable of replacing any human at any job, what impact will superintelligence have? Stephen Hawking, computer scientist Stuart Russell, and physicists Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek, wrote an editorial about superintelligence back in 2014, looking at the state-of-the art AI of the time, and noting that “looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved.” They also warned that these super-smart systems “could repeatedly improve their design even further” all by themselves, triggering catastrophic problems. “One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand,” the scientists explained, adding “whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.” This sounds worrying, and you may think Meta’s big push into developing superintelligence might seem dangerous. It could also appear very premature. After all, no one has developed a next-gen AGI system yet. But Meta’s leaders are clearly working on a long-term game plan—this is the “control” that Hawking and colleagues mentioned. Meta is no doubt dreaming about the trillions of dollars a next-generation superintelligent system could generate for its inventors, perhaps by selling its problem-solving services to human users, or any one of a billion other ways superintelligent AI could create income—some of which only a superintelligent AI could dream up. But if Meta succeeds, and its experts can in time fashion a machine that may even be smarter than they are, what will happen? And what would be the use of such a system for you or your business? The truth is, nobody knows. And it may not even be possible. Zuckerberg has some ideas, though. In a memo to Meta staff about his new superintelligence push, he said: “I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity, and I am fully committed to doing what it takes for Meta to lead the way.” BY KIT EATON @KITEATON