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Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

No one is claiming that alphaGo is close to AGI. At least not anyone that understands the methods it uses. What alphaGo is, is an example of AI progress. There has been a rapid increase in progress in the field of AI. We are still a ways away from AGI, but it's now in sight. Just outside the edge of our vision. Almost surely within our lifetime, at this rate.

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There has been a lot of progress in AI research, and AlphaGo does represent some of that. But AlphaGo is not any kind of progress from the AI before it towards AGI. It's progress, but progress mostly perpendicular to the goal of "true" or "general" intelligence. It's similar to the same kind of AI that was built for chess, just for a much more difficult problem in that same class of problems. No problems useful to general intelligence were solved in making AlphaGo, just harder problems in the field of special intelligence. It's still a tremendous accomplishment, just not one that puts AGI happening within any of our lifetimes.

> We are still a ways away from AGI, but it's now in sight.

These people in 1956 also thought that AGI was in sight:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Conferences

Not most of them, and not with any certainty. The Dartmouth conference was just the very first investigation into whether it was even possible and what it would take. Of course they didn't know when AGI would be developed. The computers they had access to were smaller than my calculator!

Now we have massive computers and 60 years of progress. And lots of real world successes of AI technology. Surely we are in a much better position to predict than people of 60 years ago!

> Not most of them, and not with any certainty.

This probably holds true also today.

> but it's now in sight. Just outside the edge of our vision.

Well if it's outside the edge of our vision, it is out of sight.

It's progress, very neat progress, but it's not even progress in the sense that there are new kind of problems being solved. AI for Go and similar games has existed for a zillion times, but, given the huge space of the game of Go, it had never been that good at playing it as to beat a human.

Not to diminish that this isn't an achievement, but let's put it into context. To talk about being closer to AGI, a different kind of progress would need to be shown: AI solving different -new- kinds of problems.

"AI solving different -new- kinds of problems."

Which of course, it does. Do you honestly believe Go and other games are the only AI problems where progress is being made?

ok, but we were talking about alphaGo here, and what does it represent as an example of progress in AI.

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