There are lots of ML algorithms that definitely work but none of involve claims of intelligence. So it's not just "exploratory AI" that you're talking about. It's "any AI", anything claiming to be "artificially intelligent" and fully replace a human in a key decision making position (but not "any ML" since ML encompasses much more boring stuff).
I try to be an optimist, mostly because of how many counterexamples you see from history. Didn't some newspaper claim that human flight "may be invented in the next several thousand years" shortly before Kitty Hawk?
But for some reason, rich people keep coming to me with what they're trying to do. My advice is the same: you're going to lose your money unless you bet on proven techniques that exist today.
Take AI dungeon as the prime example. That is what I would call a grade-A idea. It was incredibly obvious that it would become a company (now Latitude) and that it would be successful, if someone was willing to put in the effort to make it so (which Nick Walton did). Once AI dungeon worked, and it had a "minimum viable working thing," the rest was a matter of execution.
But a lot of the ideas seem to fall into the category of... Well, for example, someone came to me saying they wanted to build a "virtual universe, filled with virtual people that you can talk to."
It sounds lovely on paper. But what are you selling, really? There has to be some specific value proposition. So strike one is that it's an unproven market. You yourself want a virtual universe. But is that virtual universe going to lead to something that will solve a lot of people's problems? And we haven't even begun to discuss how you're going to get there. What do you mean exactly by "virtual person"?
It's easy to pick on some of the outliers. But unfortunately, the problem runs much deeper. There are people who genuinely believe that AGI is within reach within our lifetimes, or perhaps within one generation. But whenever I try to corner them into giving specific details on how precisely to get there, the handwaving begins.
This is now a complete tangent, but, I found myself excited and enthusiastic to pursue AGI after a long conversation with a certain someone. They had "fresh eyes" -- a new way of viewing the situation, unlike anything that people were currently trying.
Unfortunately, after throwing myself into that mindset for several weeks, I had no choice but to conclude that their chance was closer to zero than 1%. And I was really trying hard to find that 1%, with all my mental effort (such as it is).
So what choice do we have but to let people pursue impossible dreams, and return to the work that we feel we can make an impact on? Live and let live. And of course, there's the likely outcome: our predictions will be incorrect, and we'll be talking with AGI in a virtual universe sooner than we think. But I wouldn't fall in love with their dream.
(I also think you were unfairly jumped on, and that you had a fine point, for what it's worth. Thanks for the prompt.)
Self-driving is absolutely the key problem, I'd say. I sympathize with you optimism. I'm optimistic about what "computers can do" but I'm pessimistic about DNNs + standard control becoming able to navigate the human-machine border.
Basically, I think a lot of problem are "AGI-complete", especially problem around human-computer interaction, more problems than people like to admit. And Remember, for things just in the NP-complete class, an "average" problem can be easy, it's the few examples that prove troublesome. It seems to me that AGI-complete problems are similar (and yes, I realize the term is a neolism, defined by only extension etc but I'd still say it's valid).
I also think you were unfairly jumped on, and that you had a fine point, for what it's worth. Thanks for the prompt.
Theoretically having lots of "karma" should make me not care about it. Theoretically...
Having recently become a parent, I have a newfound appreciation for how complex spatial navigation tasks are. Children learn to recognize faces and objects within the first 6 weeks to 4 months of their lives. They learn to navigate environments over the next 1-5 years language is fully understood for non-gibberish use cases over the next 5-20 years. It's not a fair comparison, but it provides for roughly the only yard stick we know of.
Not to further rain on the parade (without good reason) but I should mention...
"Recently we’ve learned that the server costs incurred for both the Griffin and Dragon models are higher than our total revenue. Nobody has ever deployed AI models this powerful before, and it requires extremely expensive hardware. If we don’t make changes to cover the costs of that hardware soon, AI Dungeon will not be financially viable."