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Comment by econ101isSexist | Hacker News Reader

Dude, this system has better conversation skills than me. I mean literally. Well, I'am autistic + esl (+ kinda too why). But still it's kinda incredible that a system is actually better.

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Yes, that first restaurant reservation would have taken me several times as long to complete.

"The funny thing about AI is that it’s a moving target. In the seventies, someone might ask “what are the goals of AI?” And you might say, “Oh, we want a computer who can beat a chess master, or who can understand actual language speech, or who can search a whole database very quickly.” We do all that now, like face recognition. All these things that we thought were AI, we can do them. But once you do them, you don’t think of them as AI. It has this connotation of some mysterious magical component to it, but when you actually solve one of these problems, you don’t solve it using magic, you solve it using clever mathematics. It’s no longer magical. It becomes science, and then you don’t think of it as AI anymore. It’s amazing how you can speak into your phone and ask for the nearest Thai restaurant, and it will find it. This would have been called AI, but we don’t think about it like that anymore. So I think, almost by definition, we will never have AI because we’ll never achieve the goals of AI or cease to be caught up with it."

Who in the 70's thought AI would be defined by being good at chess? I mean it can just about brute force the game; how is that intelligent?

The Turing test is way older and seems to have been the standard measure since it's inception.

First of all you can't brute force the chess. Algorithms that beat high level chess players are non-trivial, even with todays computers. In fact top engines today all use carefully designed heuristics hand-crafted by experts -- this notion that Big Blue, Deep fritz, etc were dumb "brute force search engines" is a misleading tale.

Second, in the 70s there was no computer power even for quite clever algorithms (that probably didn't exist yet) to beat top chess players. Chess was seen as a grand goal requiring utmost intelligence -- while it is obvious in hindsight, at the time the intuition was probably that extremely "intelligent" humans were required to play chess, and in fact the best chess players were among the most "intelligent" persons -- it was a clear exclusively intellectual task that few people were competent at. So many believed that chess would be one of the greatest challenges to AI (the clarity of the rules added convenience of research and implementation). Things like walking didn't seem intellectually demanding, so the common sense was that it is probably "easy". In fact today we know that navigating a bipedal robot in a simple environment through visual recognition is vastly more difficult computationally than playing chess well, it is only easier for us because we have highly specialized circuitry in our brain hat is well matched to those tasks. Our brain wetware is not very well matched to playing chess.

Also chatbots have been doing pretty well on Turing's original definition of a Turing test, ever since about 10 years ago. But now it is being argued that Turing didn't really see the "loopholes" they believe the bots are exploiting, and are coming up with more strict requirements for a Turing test.

That's totally in line with Tao's argument that every time we approach a major AI goal, suddenly it is not AI anymore, because there's nothing magical about it, just boring old technology. And human brains are magical, right?

Until every obscure niche capability of humans has been dominated in every possible way by AIs many won't want to concede that it really is AI. And even when it does become better than us in every possible way, I suspect a few will still find arbitrary reasons why it really isn't AI/AGI, e.g. because it is not organic, because the computer lacks a body, because it lacks a "soul", etc.

You might be right about chess, but I can't understand how you think chat bots are "doing pretty well". I've never seen a conversation with one that held up to even the most tolerant hand-holding for more than a few sentences.

I mean they're doing pretty well by Turing's original definition. I agree chatbots using traditional techniques (not sure about newer LSTM chatbots) are not too impressive, just illustrating that we've had to adjust the definition. That's by definition moving the target.

In fact I'm quite sure Turing would be quite impressed by good recent chatbots.

Try this one: https://www.pandorabots.com/mitsuku/

From the point of view of the 1940s, this would seem really close to a veritable "Thinking machine"! Although I'm sure he'd recognize a few things are still missing to fully replicating human behavior (or going beyond).

"who can understand actual language speech" - "we do that now" We have mood classification, but understanding? [citation-needed]

By understanding he means translating speech to text, I guess. We have speech-to-text systems that are better than the median human in the native language now. Quite amazing, given how central auditory language processing is in our cognition. And most people don't think it's "AI" (and certainly not anywhere near AGI). That's a good example of how AI is a moving target IMO.

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