alt Hacker NewsMy interpretation is that before the transformer, most everything under the domain of 'AI' was either an academic curiosity or only applicable in very narrow fields. GPT-3 was when the 'magic' that people had always dreamed of with AI began to emerge, and it's only really this year that we are starting to be seriously confronted with the possibility of a general intelligence emerging from LLMs (albeit, not quite the same thing as 'true' AI which would necessarily be more of a biological exercise).
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This sounds right to me as well but the point of this thread here is about how amazed one should be that this page was written in 2016. I'd say moderately, because maybe you woke up to AI being a thing this year or the last few, but the ideas obviously go back far and in surprisingly prescient ways. But this is not something unique to these AI labs. Obviously most laypeople will see the press releases and the media announcements as the big milestones and flagposts, but the academic research was inseparable from it. The AI labs obviously took on PhDs who trained in academia and had deep roots from those ideas. The story that some genius Sama invented this back when nobody thought about AI is the same exaggeration as Bill Gates inventing personal computing in his garage out of nowhere.
GPT-3 is only applicable in a narrow field too, but that field is "speaking English" which activates the Eliza effect.
>not quite the same thing as 'true' AI
I've really started changing my mind on this. "There is no AI, only I" is the position that I've really come to adopt.
Part of it is from Michael Levin's quote "Humans only can really see intelligence at human scales an immediately discount anything that doesn't exactly match their experience". The other part is most peoples immediate assumption that for something to be intelligent it has to be alive. Lastly is there may be platonic intelligence, that some kinds of intelligence may arise from the very structure of our universe when accessed.
We have really entered an age where thinking that human intelligence = intelligence is an anti-pattern that tells you less about the world and blinds you to what is actually occurring.
Biological intelligence, human intelligence, electronic intelligence, algorithmic intelligence are all subsets of intelligence set theory and even where humans like to call themselves a general intelligence it's distinctly likely that we're less generalized than we expect.