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Artificial intelligence is already superior to humans in many tasks, according to the “godparents” of the revolutionary technology, fuelling an industry debate as to how quickly tech giants will create “superintelligence”.

Nvidia chief Jensen Huang, Meta AI chief Yann LeCun, as well as top computer scientists Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li and Bill Dally were announced as among the winners of this year’s Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering this week.

Speaking together at the FT’s Future of AI summit in London to accept their award on Wednesday, the illustrious group suggested that machines already have “equivalent intelligence” to humans in some domains.

“For the first time, AI is intelligence that augments people, it addresses labour, it does work,” said Huang.

“We have enough general intelligence to translate the technology into an enormous amount of society-useful applications in the coming years; we are doing it today,” he added.

Reaching “artificial general intelligence” — where systems reach levels of capability similar to those of humans — has become one of the most pressing questions in the booming AI sector.

OpenAI and Anthropic have attracted billions from investors in their quest to build the technology, while the US and China are racing to reach the goal first.

The recent rise in valuations of both public and private AI companies is partly predicated on the belief that they are on the verge of creating world-changing technology.

AGI was also mentioned 53 per cent more times in companies’ earnings calls in the first quarter of 2025 than in the same period in the previous year, as businesses prepare for its potential impact.

The most bullish researchers and investors estimate AGI will be achieved within two years, while others suggest the milestone is decades away.

But the leading experts who laid the foundation for modern AI research argue that AGI will not be a single moment. “It is not going to be an event because the capabilities are going to expand progressively in various domains,” said Meta’s LeCun.

“We are already there . . . and it doesn’t matter because at this point it’s a bit of an academic question,” Huang said, adding that the technology will continue to be applied.

However, they had diverging views on whether AI systems will surpass humans in all domains.

“Parts of machines will supersede human intelligence . . . Part of it is already here. How many of us can already recognise 22,000 objects in the world . . . how many humans can translate 100 languages?” said Fei Fei Li, founder of World Labs, a start-up that is creating “spatial intelligence” in AI by developing humanlike processing of visual data.

“Machine-based intelligence will do a lot of powerful things, but there is a profound place for human intelligence to always be critical in our human society,” Li said.

Geoffrey Hinton, who won the Nobel Prize for physics last year alongside American researcher John Hopfield for their work on machine learning, said: “How long before if you have a debate with a machine, it will always win? I think that is definitely coming within 20 years.”

“I do not see any reason why, at some point, we wouldn’t be able to build machines that can do pretty much everything we can do,” said Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian academic who also won the Turing Award for achievements in AI. “Of course, for now . . . it’s lacking, but there’s no conceptual reason you couldn’t.”

But Bengio warned against making current decisions based on the technology’s future development. “You should be really agnostic and not make big claims because there’s a lot of possible futures now,” he added.