But you acknowledge that things slowed down as we moved into more complex domains? Then you agree with my comment, the person I responded to said that things didn't slow down as we moved towards more complex domains, but there is no way you can say they haven't. AlphaStar and AlphaGo quickly competed and could beat top humans, the domains they worked with after that went way slower and still can't compete with top humans.
> Each level of capability you described was science fiction stuff before they were achieved. They’re not in any way horizontal achievements.
The second statement doesn't follow from the first, moving horizontally by applying the same things to a new domain can still unlock massive capabilities that we didn't have before.
A self driving car 20 years ago could be in a drag race and do 100mph.
Now self driving goes most everywhere, but at the posted speed limit.
And DeepMind did go off and tackle increasingly complex areas in other fields.
Not sure how anyone can argue AI slowed down. Maybe advancements in one particular game slowed down, but was that because they hit a wall? or because they shifted company resources after a game demo.
I'm not sure how you are measuring time, do you think that because AlphaStar was a few years ago, that means AI advancement slowed down? Because there wasn't another breakthrough in AlphaStar? Because they didn't keep going and fully build out every race and unit?
Do you think DeepMind has been throwing resources at Star Craft and just hitting a brick wall?
It was a proof of concept, they beat some humans, and moved on to other things like Protein Folding. Was the Protein Folding not impressive enough to think AI was still advancing?
AI is continuing to advance, because for each iteration it is tackling bigger, more complex, problems.
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The time between each breakthrough does seem to be a down line, less time between each plateau.
Chess : Board with a lot of possible moves, but 'manageable', the AI could just calculate every move.
GO: More possible moves than atoms in the universe or something. So the AI had to use some form of 'intuition', it could no longer brute force calculate every move. (it was only few months after AlphaGO won that they turned the same engine on Chess and it 'learned' from scratch to be a Master in only a few hours.)
SC2: There are no 'moves' it is all real time movement, and most important, there as imperfect information. The AI had to scout and keep track of un-known positions, to remember and anticipate.
Dota: Honestly, I'm not sure what the big breakthrough is for Dota. But quibbling over how many 'hero's the AI had access to seems pedantic. Wasn't this years ago. This isn't a knock on AI, the Dota work was years ago. We're arguing about an AI that is 3+ years old now. I really don't think that you can say AI research slowed because a company stopped throwing money at a game demo.
Protein Folding: Hey, lets stop just focusing on games and do something to help the world.
Poker: Wasn't Poker also conquered in this time frame, in last 2 years? Showing ability to bluff?
3D Virtual Environment: Was in discussion in another thread where everyone's main argument was AI isn't 'embodied' in the 'world', doesn't 'live' in the 'world'. And boom, same day, another breakthrough covering that. Giving machine what we would call 'vision', to understand objects in the world.
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Now slap this into a robot, give it a gun, and tell it the world is a 3d game.
LOL.
"We haven't had a miracle in the last 6 months, oh no, AI advancement is slowing down."
Machine learning has been a thing almost since discrete electrical circuits have existed, just wildly impractical to make generalizable versions of until recently