Mukesh Bansal on why AGI is the ultimate goal for AI investments
Tech companies are pouring billions into AI research. The goal, according to Bansal, is artificial general intelligence.
While artificial intelligence and machine learning as concepts have been around for decades, they have made an impact in the real world in the past ten years or so. Take, for example, companies like Netflix that use ML to personalise user experience via content recommendation.
Today, the excitement around AI is not just about making software more efficient but about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), where software can potentially think like a human. With companies pouring billions into AI research, the goal is to eventually reach some level of AGI.
“AGI is the true promise,” serial entrepreneur and Founder and CEO of enterprise AI startup Nurix AI, Mukesh Bansal, said at the 16th edition of TechSparks.
“If you take AGI as a possibility out of the picture, then all this investment stops making sense. All the Big Tech companies are preparing for that moment,” Bansal said. He was speaking during a fireside chat with Shradha Sharma, Founder & CEO, YourStory & The Bharat Project, on AI and deep tech R&D, science and innovation.
When AGI will be a reality remains anyone’s guess. “It may happen in two years from now, or five years from now, or even 10 years from now. But the hope here is that some aspects of AI will start doing what humans have been doing,” he said.
On the current hype around efficient AI models, Bansal said that software engineering is already good at exploiting efficiency.
“If you look at the transformer architects, it is not deterministic. All other engineering is very deterministic. You feed the same inputs, it provides the same output. AI doesn’t work like that. At the fundamental level, the architecture is probabilistic,” Bansal said. “Like all of us, if we were to repeat this conversation, it would not look like our previous conversation. Something new will come out. We have no idea. In many ways the large language models are very much like that."
Bansal, who has founded companies such as fashion ecommerce platform Myntra and fitness startup Cult.Fit, is now building Nurix AI, which develops AI agents and assistants to help enterprises automate workflows, improve customer services, and increase efficiency for sales and support teams.
