For people working in the field, deep learning has already proven itself to be self-funding. It’s the main source of Google’s profits. It’s TikTok’s algorithm. Et cetera.
And AGI is science fiction with no credible plan of how to get there. If you can even get everyone to agree on the same definition.
An AI winter is something that can be measured and is factual eg. the lacklustre spending on AI products and the dry up in VC funding.
Amazon was a company that was around and survived the dot com bomb (founded in 1994, roughly around the time of the beginning of the bubble) [though its stock took about 7 years to recover]
Facebook was post dot com bomb. (founded 2004)
The fact that VCs aren’t throwing millions of dollars after every CS undergrad who figured out how to make an API call to OpenAI means they are wising up. The main question is why it took this long.
I mean... you can't really have a (strict) plan for how to build something that nobody knows how to build (yet). But that doesn't necessarily mean it's "science fiction". There are credible reasons[1] to believe that AGI will happen - eventually. To me, the biggest question is around timeline, not "will it happen or not". Now granted, that allows for anything from "tomorrow" up to "the heat death of the universe" so you can accuse me of the dodging the issue if you'd like. But I'd bet money on it happening closer to "tomorrow" than "the heat death of the universe".
[1]: among others - the progress on AI that's already been made. And while we may not have AGI, it's hard to deny that we have AI that's a far sight better than what we had in 1956. The other is that, unless you believe in magic, the human brain is an existence proof that human level AGI is achievable on a deterministic machine that operates according to the physical laws of the universe. It would seem to follow then that it should be possible (albeit perhaps very difficult) to achieve that same level of intelligence on some other deterministic machine. And note that even if "Penrose is right" about the brain relying on quantum mechanical phenomenon, there's no particular reason to think that those can't also be mirrored on a human created machine.
I would say that the material from Chapter 4 of Engineering General Intelligence - Volume 1[1] by Ben Goertzel reflects a pretty spirited and useful attempt to capture the important details, at least vis-a-vis the discussion at hand.
Excerpt:
Many attempts to characterize general intelligence have been made; Legg and Hutter [LH07a] review over 70! Our preferred abstract characterization of intelligence is: the capability of a system to choose actions maximizing its goal-achievement, based on its perceptions and memories, and making reasonably efficient use of its computational resources [Goe10b]. A general intelligence is then understood as one that can do this for a variety of complex goals in a variety of complex environments. However, apart from positing definitions, it is difficult to say anything nontrivial about general intelligence in general. Marcus Hutter [Hut05a] has demonstrated, using a characterization of general intelligence similar to the one above, that a very simple algorithm called AIXI can demonstrate arbitrarily high levels of general intelligence, if given sufficiently immense computational resources. This is interesting because it shows that (if we assume the universe can effectively be modeled as a computational system) general intelligence is basically a problem of computational efficiency. The particular structures and dynamics that characterize real-world general intelligences like humans arise because of the need to achieve reasonable levels of intelligence using modest space and time resources.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-General-Intelligence-Part...
You could say that faster than light travel, curing every disease, etc are all possible because progress has been made.
Yes. To paraphrase something I read once (I think it was from Eric Drexler):
Any technology that isn't physically impossible, will be realized one day. The question is always "when" not "if".
Now of course one might counter that there isn't much value in that knowledge when you can't say anything meaningful about that eventual time-frame. But I personally think it's worth considering that binary distinction between "absolutely will not happen, ever, period" and "will almost certainly happen eventually."
> You could say that faster than light travel,
I generally agree with your overall sentiment, but I might quibble on this specific example a bit. Yes, we've "made progress" at traveling faster and faster, but I would argue that that doesn't count as "progress" towards FTL travel, because we have a specific, generally accepted, theoretical reason why FTL travel is actually physically impossible. Of course some hypothetical new finding could overturn Einstein's work, but that seems unlikely. In this context, I'd treat FTL as "impossible" and something like AGI as "will happen, we just don't know when."