Skip to main content

AI expert says that Russia is on the verge of a ‘major breakthrough’ in artificial intelligence

At an artificial intelligence conference in New York City last week, Professor Alexi Samsonovich from the Moscow-based National Research Nuclear University (MEPhl) Cybernetics Department told Sputnik News, “We are on the verge of a major breakthrough” in AI.

In the past six months, we’ve seen AI master the board game Go, write a short film script, and infiltrate Snapchat filters. Each of these achievements is impressive in its own right. Together, they show just how quickly AI is advancing. But what was this breakthrough Samsonovich hinted at in NYC? Digital Trends reached out to him to find out.

Recommended Videos

In the last half-century, since the notion of AI was officially coined, the term has created some buzz but has not fulfilled the hype, according to Samsonovich. “A major breakthrough was expected to happen from year to year, but it did not,” he told Digital Trends. “As a result, the idea was discredited. There are reasons to think that now we are really close to the breakthrough, as never before. And as an indirect evidence, the last few years showed rapid exponential progress in AI research, in terms of the number of publications as well as the money invested by governments and companies.”

With this increased interest and investment comes significant progress, including an advance that Samsonovich thinks will allow machines to feel. “Primarily this entails demonstrating that a machine [is] capable of feeling human emotions and exhibiting human-level socially emotional intelligence in a variety of settings,” he said.

Samsonovich is quick to insist that this doesn’t necessarily involve consciousness. In fact, he thinks consciousness is impossible to ever validate in another subject other than oneself, and thus it’s too vague to be a reliable marker.

“What I am talking about here is limited to behavior, internal organization of the system and its internal dynamics, like neurophysiology or running software,” he said. “Today we can build a machine that behaves as if it had human-like feelings. When you will see this kind of behavior exhibited consistently over time in many circumstances and without occasional ‘presence breaks’ … you will believe that this entity is alive and is in a social contact with you, and you will interact with it accordingly.”

These emotionally intelligent machines are emerging right now and will be a reality within the next few years, according to Samsonovich, who presented his idea for a kind of Turing test for emotional intelligence at the conference last week. Over the next 18 months, Samsonovich and his team hope to develop Virtual Actor, an AI capable of creating goals, making plans, and building social relationships with people.

But before that happens, we’ll need to change the way we — as humans — think.

“Today’s obstacles are mainly limited to psychological barriers,” he said. “We already have the necessary hardware and most of the necessary theoretical foundations. Still, people tend to think within the limits of popular paradigms, or not to think at all — just do what everybody else does or says.

“People also hesitate to take risks,” Samsonovich continued. “Given that nearly all research in AI today is motivated financially, it is hard for most of us to take seriously an idea of a bold commitment leading outside of the road, based on a long-term expectation. Fortunately, now we do not need to wait for too long.”

Dyllan Furness
Former Contributor
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
Clinical test says AI can offer therapy as good as a certified expert
Interacting with Therabot AI App.

AI is being heavily pushed into the field of research and medical science. From drug discovery to diagnosing diseases, the results have been fairly encouraging. But when it comes to tasks where behavioral science and nuances come into the picture, things go haywire. It seems an expert-tuned approach is the best way forward.
Dartmouth College experts recently conducted the first clinical trial of an AI chatbot designed specifically for providing mental health assistance. Called Therabot, the AI assistant was tested in the form of an app among participants diagnosed with serious mental health problems across the United States.
“The improvements in symptoms we observed were comparable to what is reported for traditional outpatient therapy, suggesting this AI-assisted approach may offer clinically meaningful benefits,” notes Nicholas Jacobson, associate professor of biomedical data science and psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine.

A massive progress

Read more
This AI app boosts my productivity in a way that Apple Intelligence can’t
A microphone in front of a MacBook on a desk.

Apple Intelligence offers a bunch of interesting features, but if you’ve tried most of them for more than a few minutes, you realise they’re not quite up to scratch compared to the best artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

Image Playground is fine, for instance, but not particularly useful. Writing Tools work well enough but aren’t as ground-breaking as Apple might make out. And the less that’s said about Siri, the better.

Read more
Google is giving free access to two of Gemini’s best AI features
Gemini Advanced on the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold.

Google’s Gemini AI has steadily made its way to the best of its software suite, from native Android integrations to interoperability with Workspace apps such as Gmail and Docs. However, some of the most advanced Gemini features have remained locked behind a subscription paywall.
That changes today. Google has announced that Gemini Deep Research will now be available for all users to try, alongside the ability to create custom Gem bots. You no longer need a Gemini Advanced (or Google One AI Premium) subscription to use the aforementioned tools.

The best of Gemini as an AI agent
Deep Research is an agentic tool that takes over the task of web research, saving users the hassle of visiting one web page after another, looking for relevant information. With Deep Research, you can simply put a natural language query as input, and also specify the source, if needed.

Read more