Businesses across the globe are in a panic now, realizing that AI will change the world. But big tech leaders are overstating their progress toward “super intelligence.” That’s according to Usama Fayyad, Yahoo’s first-ever chief data officer who is now senior vice provost for AI and data strategy, as well as senior advisor to the President of Northeastern University.

Fayyad spoke at a recent event at Northeastern’s Roux Institute, which focused on the digital future. Following are some of the main points from his discussion:

• He described the four stages of AI this decade: 2023 was Fascination (amusement and curiosity). 2024 was Denial (irrelevant and trendy). 2025 was Delusion (using ChatGPT equals AI proficiency and understanding). 2026 is Panic (AI is real and we are behind).
• The nature of jobs and information leverage will fundamentally change with the growing use of AI systems.
• On narrow, well-defined tasks, machine performance already exceeds human performance by far.
• The declarations of tech companies advancing from the current state of AI to Artificial General Intelligence, however, are way overblown, he said. (AGI is “super intelligence,” which surpasses the cognitive level of the brightest human beings).
• AI does not yet “analyze” or “understand” data. “We are still far from addressing the foundational problems of replicating human intelligence,” Fayyad noted. “Reasoning, planning, understanding, generalizing and translating learnings across problem-solving domains remain as difficult as they were decades ago.”
• When a chatbot says it is “thinking,” that means that it is reconstructing information that is already in its system to answer a question or perform a task.

Regarding data centers, China is advanced when it comes to designing centers that may include smaller buildings that have a lower need for power and water. Tech companies in China have also experimented with underwater options. Big Tech Midwest will provide more coverage about this in the future.