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Comment by putaside | Hacker News Reader

I think this is an unfair assessment. The industry talks of AI, not AGI. It's not Microsoft's fault that the public thinks of Terminator robots when hearing "AI", nor that science-fiction stories have been written a 100 years ago.

The general public does not set budgets for AI research.

AI research benefits from faster processors, more memory and more advanced algorithms. Only philosophers (the domain of AGI is philosophy, not so much engineering or maths) are uncomfortable with those details.

Please refer to AGI, if you are talking of the hypothetical strong AI. The current textbook definition is alright.

(And yeah, the hype around AI is palpable and annoying. That's why many researchers called their work "cognitive science", "machine learning", "optimization", "logic" or "applied maths" and avoided "AI". Because else, they'd have to argue semantics, or defend why they haven't build an artificial God yet...)

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>It's not Microsoft's fault that the public thinks of Terminator robots when hearing "AI"

Large corporation definitely could do better when it comes to explaining the limits of their AI/ML technologies and putting those technologies in perspective (especially historic perspective). Scaling down on hyperbole, buzzwords and personification would help as well.

Why is a glorified calculator considered "AI"?

Why shouldn't it be? You don't even need the glorification. A normal calculator is performing what most people would consider to be a difficult cognitive task, and doing so at a superhuman level.

AI is not some magical ineffable thing that will someday appear out of nowhere. It's the name we give to the gradual progression of our efforts to build machines to perform cognitive tasks. Someone from the pre-computer age would have had no problem recognizing even the ENIAC as intelligent, in a limited sense; it could solve problems that were previously too hard even for the smartest human mathematicians. As someone who actually does AI research on a daily basis, I have no problem with granting intelligence to even very basic chatbots. That goes hand in hand with recognizing that there are many kinds and levels of intelligence, and plenty of opportunity to build smarter and more flexible systems.

You are saying that amebas* are intelligent.

* Viruses would probably be a more apt analogy.

I don't think that follows from what I wrote, though it's certainly a defensible position.

How is anything remotely related to AI a "glorified calculator"?

Pedantically yes, you are taking inputs into a black box and recieving output.

This level of reductionist thinking actually hampers progress in AI, because you're stuck on Chinese room. I mean seriously, they already had this discussion like 20 years ago "fam".

The progress we've made in AI can be summed up by a very nice analogy I recently about Deep Mind beating the Go world champion: "We need to make transistors* and we just discovered fire."

Yeah, you are right. It's some progress.

* For the record, we don't even know if it even possible to make transistors in this hypothetical universe of AI.

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