The rate of progress is AI technologies seems absolutely incredible to me. Sure, there is tons of hype and noise to weed through. And much of the technology and research hasn’t yet found commercial applications. But the progress in recent decades is objectively incredible.
We are reaching a point where all games are basically falling to AI. Go, no-limit hold ‘em (poker), StarCraft, Dota, and so on.
In other domains, we have GPT-3 and AlphaFold. And I’m sure there are many developments I’m not aware of.
From what I can tell, GPT-3 is mainly significant for challenging that notion that increased scale can’t be the primary factor in a significant AI developments. The jury is still out, but my understanding is that it demonstrated that modest tweaks to existing algorithms with a massive increase in model size can result large performance improvements. GPT-3 had quite limited “memory”, which is one of the reasons it struggled with coherency. How would a model 10x - 100x larger than GPT-3 with a significantly enhanced memory perform? What if it was trained to predict the next frame in video in addition to the next sequence of text blobs?
No one knows how close we are. It will likely happen quickly without many people knowing it is coming soon. It will seem “impossible” to most even as the last few pieces are falling in place. Major technological paradigm shifts usually happen unexpectedly, as history shows us.
I’m rambling a bit (If I had more time / skill I would have written a shorter comment ;). Suffice to say I’m surprised by the number of confident proclamations against AGI. Our brains are amazing. But they aren’t magic.