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Comment by bondarchuk | Hacker News Reader

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bondarchuk·

So why did he start to develop it in the 1970s?

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Why did he start a research direction that 50 years later "might turn out" to not be a good idea?

That's a relatively silly question, don't you think?

No it's a completely serious question. The goal has always been to replicate human/biological thinking processes in software, and now that this has been more or less achieved he's suddenly not happy about it. There's been plenty of opportunity to actually think about "what if all of this actually works" but they chose not to.

For one thing, we haven't remotely achieved that. GenAI is a statistical model, it cannot think or reason. So one reason he might lament the status quo is because it has people thinking we have achieved AI when we haven't. But also, it wasn't apparent until recently that even if the tech did work as promised, it will be an awful thing because humans will use it to bad ends. I don't think it's particularly blame-worthy that he didn't foresee that 50 years ago.

I don't think we need to have the "can AI really think* debate for the millionth time, anyhow it's safe to say that we have progressed towards the goal far enough that Hinton thinks it's a problem.

>So one reason he might lament the status quo is because it has people thinking we have achieved AI when we haven't.

I don't think the article allows us to infer this at all.

>But also, it wasn't apparent until recently that even if the tech did work as promised, it will be an awful thing because humans will use it to bad ends. I don't think it's particularly blame-worthy that he didn't foresee that 50 years ago.

No, really, that would be extremely naive, we can expect better from scientists.

Sounds like sour grapes. He worked on it for a long time but he doesn't own a trillion dollar company. Missed the boat?

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