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John Hennessy, a Silicon Valley pioneer and former Stanford president, says AI progress is “stunning.”
ChatGPT and other AI systems are propelling us faster toward the long-term technology dream of artificial general intelligence and the radical transformation called the “singularity,” Silicon Valley chip luminary and former Stanford University professor John Hennessybelieves.
“The AI revolution is upon us. It’s stunning,” Hennessy said Monday at the TechSurge conference. “It’s awakened in everybody a sense that maybe the singularity, … this turning point where computers really are more capable than humans, is closer than we thought.”
Hennessy won computing’s highest prize, the Turing Award, with colleague Dave Patterson for developing the computing architecture that made energy-efficient smartphone chips possible and that now is the foundation for virtually all major processors. He’s also chairman of Google parent company Alphabet.
AI is indeed transforming computing, relying on neural network processing methods inspired by the human brain to tackle new problems in spotting patterns and more recently to generate new text and imagery. AI spread across the computing industry for years, making speech recognition mainstream and letting us unlock our phones with our faces. But AI expectations surged with 2022’s debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can answer a huge range of questions, offer advice, pass medical exams, hold conversations and write programs and poetry.
“Some of us thought that point at which we’d have artificial general intelligence was 40 or 50 years away. I think everybody’s horizon has moved in by probably 10 or 20 years,” Hennessy said at the Celesta Capital-organized conference held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “These models keep getting bigger, and every time we make a jump up in the size of the model, we seem to be able to do new tasks. We don’t know where that’s going to plateau yet.”