.Google's DeepMind division has been showing off its clever AI tricks for years, making headlines in 2016 when one of its machines beat a world champion in the strategy game Go, which was supposed to be impossible.
So, when one of DeepMind's bigwigs makes a bold claim about the future of AI, it's worth paying attention, especially if you're a startup entrepreneur. AI might be after your job.
Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and now boss of Inflection AI -- a tiny, California-based machine intelligence firm -- said this could happen in a few years.
Suleyman said he reckons AI tech will soon be able to develop a company, run it, and sell products. This imaginary AI entrepreneur will surely do this by 2030. He's certain that these AI skills will be "widely available" for "meagre" prices, maybe even as open-source systems, meaning some bits of these super smart AIs would be free.
We'll have to wait and see whether an AI entrepreneur could beat a human at the startup game, but Suleyman says an AI could do the job is amazing. It's also dodgy and probably full of legal problems.
For example, there's the sticky issue of whether an AI can own or patent anything. A recent ruling in the UK says that an AI can’t be a patent holder.
To show how much of this is just guesswork, Suleyman's thoughts about AI entrepreneurs came from an answer to whether AIs can pass the famous Turing test. This is sometimes seen as a gold standard for AI: If a real artificial general intelligence (AGI) can trick a human into thinking it is also a human.
Slyly, Suleyman turned the question around and said the traditional Turing test wasn't good enough. Instead, he said a better test would be to see if an AGI could do complex tasks like being an entrepreneur.
No matter how theoretical Suleyman's thinking is, it will worry critics who fear the harmful potential of AI, and it may bother some in the venture capital world, too. How would one invest in a startup with a founder that's just a bunch of silicon chips? Even Suleyman said this kind of innovation would cause a substantial economic shake-up.
