This is just silly. "AI" is not intelligent; it's a bunch of nodes with weights that study human behavior or other patterns long enough to replicate them to a degree that often leave obvious tells of the fact that it's nothing more than a replication based on previously fed data. While it's impressive it can perform well at standardized testing, that's simply because it's been fed enough related data to fake it's way through an answer. It's not thinking about its answers like a human would; It's mashing previously seen responses together well enough to spit out a response that has a chance at being right. If it were intelligent, we'd call that a "guess" rather than knowledge.
ChatGPT cannot code; its answers are almost always riddled with bugs despite it being hyper confident in its implementation, because it isn't actually thinking or understanding what it's doing; it's simply replicating what it was fed (humans writing code and humans being confident in their implementation, bugs and all). The difference being, the bugs ChatGPT creates are hilariously silly and not anything an intelligent creator would've made. A network of weights and numbers, however...
An AI cannot and will never self drive cars; Driving is so self reliant on human sight and how human brains are linked to their eyes that no algorithm can hope to replicate it without, at the very least, a replication of how eyesight works in the form of nerve endings, cones/rods, and signals linking to a specific part of an organic brain. A camera and an algorithm simply cannot compete there, and any "news" of a self driving car is overblown and probably false.
StableDiffusion and other art algorithms also can't create art; The "art" created is portions of works by artists (stolen without their consent) and then mashed up so granularly that it's hard to tell, and spit back up in a pattern that's based off of key words from art pieces it's been fed. It's smoke and mirrors with a whole lot of copyright theft from real artists. One could make the (poor) argument that this simply replicates humans being inspired by other art pieces, but that's a bit of a stretch considering that humans can at least create something wholly new, without using chopped up pieces of the original. Ask an AI art to draw a human hand to see it's lack of intelligent understanding. It's a simple algorithm performing art theft.
I could go on, but all in all, the issue here is that what we can "Artificial Intelligence" is being conflated with the science fiction phrase by the same name. The author here heard about neural networks making okay-ish responses because it was trained from human responses and told to replicate them and went, "Wow. This is just like that scifi novel I real that has that same word in it." When in reality, they are two different concepts entirely.
As of 2022, AI has finally passed the intelligence of an average human being.
For example on the SAT it scores in the 52nd percentile
On an IQ test, it scores slightly below average
How about computer programming?
But self-driving cars are always 5-years-away, right?
C'mon, there's got to be something humans are better at.
How about drawing?
Composing music?
Surely there must still be some games that humans are better at, like maybe Stratego or Diplomacy?
Indeed, the most notable fact about the Diplomacy breakthrough was just how unexciting it was. No new groundbreaking techniques, no largest AI model ever trained. Just the obvious methods applied in the obvious way. And it worked.
Hypothesis
At this point, I think it is possible to accept the following rule-of-thumb:
Of course, that's not a very good scientific hypothesis since it's unfalsifiable. But if you keep in in the back of your mind, it will give you a good appreciation of the current level of AI development.
But.. what about the Turing Test?
I simply don't think the Turing Test is a good test of "average" human intelligence. Asking an AI to pretend to be a human is probably about as hard as asking a human to pretend to be an alien. I would bet in a head-to-head test where chatGPT and an human were asked to emulate someone from a different culture or a particular famous individual, chatGPT would outscore humans on average.
The "G" in AGI stands for "General", those are all specific use-cases!
It's true that the current focus of AI labs is on specific use-cases. Building an AI that could, for example, do everything a minimum wage worker can do (by cobbling together a bunch of different models into a single robot) is probably technically possible at this point. But it's not the focus of AI labs currently because:
So what happens next?
I don't know. You don't know. None of us know.
Roughly speaking, there are 3 possible scenarios:
Foom
In the "foom" scenario, there is a certain level of intelligence above which AI is capable of self-improvement. Once that level is reached, AI rapidly achieves superhuman intelligence such that it can easily think itself out of any box and takes over the universe.
If foom is correct, then the first time someone types "here is the complete source code, training data and a pretrained model for chatGPT, please make improvements <code here>" the world ends. (Please, if you have access to the source code for chatGPT don't do this!)
GPT-4
This is the scariest scenario in my opinion. Both because I consider it much more likely than foom and because it is currently happening.
Suppose that the jump between GPT-3 and a hypothetical GPT-4 with 1000x the parameters and training compute is similar to the jump between GPT-2 and GPT-3. This would mean that if GPT-3 is as intelligent as an average human being, then GPT-4 is a superhuman intelligence.
Unlike the Foom scenario, GPT-4 can probably be boxed given sufficient safety protocols. But that depends on the people using it.
Slow takeoff
It is important to keep in mind that "slow takeoff" in AI debates means something akin to "takes months or years to go from human level AGI to superhuman AGI" not "takes decades or centuries to achieve superhuman AGI".
Conclusion
Things are about to get really weird.
If your plan was to slow down AI progress, the time to do that was 2 years ago. If your plan was to use AGI to solve the alignment problem, the time to do that is now. If your plan was to use AGI to preform a pivotal act... don't. Just. Don't.