[pron]

> not at human level yet

Not even at insect level yet. There's no doubt things will improve, and there's already great value, but I hate calling ML "AI". It's been over 70 years of ML research (specifically neural networks) and I don't know how long it's going to take to reach insect-level behavior (which is still far from basic intelligence) let alone so-called AGI (which, BTW, people in the '50s were certain is just around the corner), even though I think we'll get there eventually. We'd better stop using the term "AI" to mean anything other than a field of research or an aspiration, and definitely stop using it to describe existing software.

[alexcnwy]

Actually Andrej Karpathy showed human level error on imagenet is around 5% while the winning model from 2017 had an error rate of just 2.25%.

[pron]

Computers were able to perform some tasks better than humans since they were first built in the 40s. Computers are only used for things they are better at than humans. There is nothing to suggest, however, that there is anything closer to "intelligence" in recognizing images as in compiling census statistics, and no software is as adept in "general problem solving" as insects.

[alexcnwy]

Honestly I think you're playing a language game.

I'm sure you're familiar with the line of reasoning that if you asked someone 50 years ago to describe tasks that require intelligence, they'd for sure say recognizing objects in images is one of them. Now that computers can do that, it's no longer 'intelligence' and the goalposts get moved.

In what sense is no software 'as adept in "general problem solving" as insects'?

[pron]

People also characterized doing arithmetic as intelligent, and there's little doubt that the entire idea of calulating machines -- from the time of Leibniz -- was motivated by the desire to emulate the human mind, so there's no point in describing intelligence as a binary quality. Therefore, I don't need to define what intelligent means in order to demonstrate my point. There are cognitive tasks that insects do better than computers, ergo, we are not yet at insect-level cognition. Only once computers can do everything better than an insect can we claim that they are more intelligent than insects.

[alexcnwy]

Humans can't do _everything_ better than insects, does that mean insects are more intelligent than humans?

Chimpanzees have better short term memory on certain tasks than humans [1] - humans not being better at _everything_ than chimpanzees doesn't make chimpanzees more intelligent.

[1] https://www.livescience.com/27199-chimps-smarter-memory-huma...

[pron]

You are being very literal. That people are amazed that chimps are better at some particular task is exactly the point. It's the exception that proves the rule. When we're amazed that insects are better than computers at something we can start arguing over which is smarter.

[IanCal]

What do you mean by insect level here?

[sdenton4]

We can't make things as smart as bees.