Hacker News Reader

Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

The AI technology today has practical value for some use cases but it's basically just clever parlor tricks. There has been near zero discernable progress toward artificial general intelligence. We don't yet have a computer that can learn and make optimal resource usage decisions in an open world environment as well as a mouse. In most respects we're not even at the insect level yet.

View on HN

You're making the point that the linked article is trying to argue against.

How good is this model at fighting other insects?

> The AI technology today has practical value for some use cases but it's basically just clever parlor tricks.

Come on, you could have said the same thing about excel 30 years ago.

Yes Excel has more features today. So what? We're still not making any measurable progress towards true AGI. We don't even know what the development path or ultimate goal looks like except for some vague hand waving about passing the Turing Test.

I work for a company that provides "ai" services in a "boring" domain. The Time saved and accuracy (for a legally audited result) we provide is quantifiable, and when I saw the numbers I was surprised. So while a lot of the "AI" hype is stupid marketing bs, some of us are actually doing real stuff, it's not just parlor tricks. You might also be surprised in how many domains a small improvement has huge yield in terms of raw money and/or quality of life improvements.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com