Professor: Only a matter of time before AGI becomes reality

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) will likely become a reality in the coming years, said the Chinese research team behind MOSS, China's first publicly unveiled ChatGPT-like model.

Named after the intelligent quantum computer that controls the space station in the blockbuster Chinese sci-fi film The Wandering Earth II, MOSS is a conversational large-scale language model developed by a research team from Fudan University.

Since it was made available for public testing on Feb 20, the ChatGPT-like chatbot has become one of the hottest topics on various Chinese social media platforms. MOSS will be made open source by the end of March.

While it is still undergoing intensive internal testing and optimization, expectations for the chatbot's capabilities are high, with many wondering if MOSS can one day perform the same tasks the AGI featured in the movie did.

"I'm very optimistic that it will be able to," said Qiu Xipeng, a professor from Fudan's School of Computer Science and the leader of the research team behind MOSS.

"MOSS is at the forefront of the most cutting-edge exploration in the field of natural language processing and even in the field of artificial general intelligence. We look forward to using MOSS as a pedestal that leads to artificial general intelligence, which will become a reality in maybe five to 10 years. By that time, we will accept artificial general intelligence as we accept search engines now."

AGI, also known as strong AI or deep AI, refers to machine intelligence that can solve problems as well as a human.

Qiu and his team of eight Fudan students set out to develop MOSS at the end of last year. Although the scale of MOSS is smaller than that of ChatGPT, the Chinese chatbot has a decent logical ability, said the team.

Sun Tianxiang, a doctoral student from the School of Computer Science and a key member of the research team, remembered that there was one exciting moment from the development of MOSS on Jan 19. He said that he had posed a question in Chinese but MOSS answered in English. This was an exciting development as MOSS's Chinese corpus at that moment accounted for less than 0.1 percent of all training data, Sun explained.

"That was amazing because we had not even taught it machine translation," said Qiu, before pointing out that he was so excited by the development that he even lost sleep that night.

"MOSS right now is like a smart kid," he added. "Even though it is not good at writing poems, solving problems or doing specific things, it has the potential of becoming an AGI framework."

The fact that MOSS is smaller in scale compared with ChatGPT has allowed the public to develop various application scenarios, said the research team. Once made open source as promised by the research team, MOSS can be deployed by small and medium-sized enterprises to develop various vertical products, such as smart customer service, smart home and AI lawyers, Qiu said.