It shouldn’t be this hyped up but the first ai boom was because a computer could learn ‘something’ without explicit programming. It was too primitive and computers were not powerful enough; the scientists (like Minsky) were too optimistic about the growth of computer power as well. The 80s revival with knowledge systems wasn’t actually ever feasible as AGI; everyone I spoke to then in the field (I started uni begin of the end 80s AI winter) had been saying for many years it was a dead end.

So I feel outside the overhyping (some hype is warranted but this much?) could be less, this is different; it’s not a promise, I am chatting to my computer on my lap as if it was my human assistant; it gives me answers faster and usually better than most humans would. That’s simply not the same as we had in the previous instances. Knowledge systems did this too, but were encyclopedia’s; they couldn’t come up with stuff that wasn’t explicitly put in and categorized. You often controlled them by answering a tree structure of multiple choice screens (there are some nice episodes on the Computer Cronicles about this on Archive.org). Now you can have this knowledge base in your (vector) db, ask open questions in any language about it; it will answer human-like, lies/bluff and all.