Is System Design The Missing Piece for AGI?: System-level Design Considerations for Next Generation AI

Today’s AI solutions face a trifecta of challenges: The Great AGI Leap, The Energy Wall and The Alignment Problem. Recent AI solutions have been quite energy inefficient. They consume unprecedented amounts of energy during training and unsustainable peak power during run-time. Making things worse, the amount of compute used for training doubles every 3.5 months. Current approach to AI lacks system design; even though system-level characteristics play a critical role in the human brain; from the way it processes information to how it makes decisions. For the AGI Leap, the required integration and balanced operation of multiple functional subsystems is impossible to achieve without system-design. Lastly, for the alignment problem, AI lacks the capacity to employ multiple subsystems (such as System 1 and 2, model-free and model-based learning) in a balanced way for moral decisioning. In this talk, we investigate the importance of system design for next generation AI solutions and argue that system-design is the missing piece without which the three grand challenges may never be solved.