After several decades and a much-hyped last few years we have fake cleverness - impressively so in both cases - but nothing more.
Why should I care if my fridge is fake clever or real clever?
For your fridge that's an annoyance, but when used for more serious applications the ramifications can be large. Example: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithm... – there's much more where that came from.
ML works by taking a huge amount of data and finding patterns and is pretty much incapable of judging individual cases. We have ugly words for humans who judge people based on generalisations instead of judging the individual...
Computers and algorithms are devoid of empathy and humanity, I am extremely apprehensive in using them to make any sort of judgement call, especially if the calculation is inscrutable. Humans may not be perfect, but at least they're ... human.
ML is an interesting tool which can be used for many things, but right now it's also being misapplied for many things. I think a lot of opposition comes from that, rather than your fridge or whatnot.
I mean, really? In the most pessimistic evaluation of ML research, we still know which techniques and paradigms won't work for AGI. That's not zero progress. Nobody is expecting this to happen overnight.
No evidence - as always. No progress.
Of course, if you - or anybody else - can show evidence of a genuine advance towards AGI, rather than breathless hype and vague assertions based on the impressive but irrelevant narrow-domain "AI" expertise of Alpha-x and the like, I (and many others) would love to read it.
We've been waiting since at least Alan Turing.
Perhaps we do, but if we don't, then the continued lack of progress is in fact evidence of our ineptitude and inefficiency in the face of an embarrassment of riches in terms of tools and power.
It's kind of like a having a searchlight that is more and more powerful and still not being able to find the object in the darkness we are looking for because we have given it to a blind man.
Plenty of practitioners ready to impress us with buzzwords, empty assurances and paper after paper on the brilliance of obscure statistical formulae and their money pit implementation in server farms.
But all this power and cliquey self congratulation is just noise drowning out a very embarrassing truth:
We don't have any new ideas.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/03/better-babblers.html
A scarily large amount of human speech is essentially word prediction, especially in cases where someone wants to seem impressive without having actually done the work. We're all familiar with the problem of people "bullshitting" about technical topics, especially in the business realm where there are lots of people with no technical background who want to learn and have authoritative opinions on technology, like in this article. The GPT models are quite capable of producing this kind of "sounds legit" speech. And if that isn't a form of intelligence, then what is?
Tic Tac Toe, Chess, Image Classifying, Translation, Go, Sentence Construction, etc.; We are creating phenomenally impressive calculating worm-equivalents, but nothing human-level, or even remotely so.
It's pretty fascinating that nobody (AFAIK) really predicted that, except perhaps Isaac Asimov. Sci-fi normally presents AI as either superintelligent or non-existent (just basic voice commands). I don't think I've seen one which presents it as an AI ecology of idiocracy.
The GPT models are essentially massive databases along with the use of probability models for how words are connected. Do you think that means intelligence? Can it generate new knowledge of things outside its database? Can it generate novel theories for things outside its understanding?
The GPT models often generate streams of text which can found word for word in its database, i.e. it's not really generating anything new as just mimicking. When a parrot repeats a human, it doesn't understand what the words mean, it's just making sounds.