从通用人工智能到超级人工智能

摘要

过去十年，构建人类水平的通用人工智能已从遥不可及的猜测转变为许多大型AI组织未来十年的具体目标。实现这一目标将对人类社会产生深远而广泛的影响，这为未来十年提出了诸多复杂问题。本报告探讨了在后AGI世界中，AI如何沿着机器智能连续谱继续演进。这一连续谱的终结点——通用AI——在理论上已有深刻理解，这为本报告的核心内容提供了形式化基础：从人类水平AGI向通用超级智能的过渡。直观上，ASI可理解为比大型人类组织更智能、认知能力更强的系统。在界定ASI特征后，报告讨论了从AGI到ASI的四种潜在路径：规模化AGI、AI范式转换、递归改进，以及大规模多智能体集群涌现出的ASI。随后报告探讨了这些路径中可能存在的摩擦与瓶颈。判断这些摩擦的影响可忽略还是重大，会引发一系列具体的研究开放问题。由于预测ASI进展存在巨大不确定性，不能排除未来几年AI发展持续加速的可能性。这意味着将人类水平AGI引入社会所引发的单一变革性飞跃图景可能并不准确。更为贴切的展望或许是：由AI驱动的科学和技术领域多项突破引发的系列性社会变革。为应对这一前景，需开展具有全球规模和利益的跨学科大规模努力。

English

Over the last decade, building human-level artificial general intelligence has moved from far-fetched speculation to being a concrete next-decade target for many of the largest AI organisations. Achieving this goal would have profound and far-reaching impacts on human society, which raises many complex questions for the decade ahead. This report investigates how AI itself might continue to develop in a post-AGI world along the continuum of machine intelligence. The endpoint of this continuum, Universal AI, is theoretically well understood, which provides some formal grounding for the main focus of this report: the transition from human-level AGI to artificial general superintelligence, which, intuitively, can be understood as a system that is more intelligent and cognitively capable than large organisations of humans. After characterizing ASI, the report discusses four potential pathways from AGI to ASI: scaling AGI, AI paradigm shifts, recursive improvement, and ASI emerging from large-scale multi-agent collectives. The report then discusses possible frictions and bottlenecks along these pathways. Determining whether the impact of these frictions will be negligible or substantial raises a number of concrete open research questions. Due to large uncertainties for predicting ASI progress, it cannot be ruled out that AI progress might continue to accelerate over the next years. This could imply that the image of a single transformative step change, caused by the introduction of human-level AGI into our society, could be inaccurate. More apt might be the prospect of a series of transformative societal changes caused by AI-enabled progress and breakthroughs across many areas of science and technology. Preparing for this prospect requires a massively interdisciplinary endeavour of global scope and interest.