[ArtWomb]

Good discussion! I'll just respond here, but plenty of though-provoking points all around ;)

I think what I was looking at was the result that has been often observed, that progress in AI research roughly tracks with hardware developments. Looking at AlphaGo to AlphaZero to MuZero. Training time for self-play increases. But parallelism in the tensor units of the hardware is an order of magnitude faster. It's great for problem domains like autonomous vehicles, contactless payments in retail stores and fraud detection in the data center. But what about generalizability? What about the black box communicating how it has learned? Will it be suitable for next-gen applications like robots designed to assist humans in space expansion?

I attended an event in NYC around the creative use of AI by a new breed of emerging artists like Mario Kliegmann from Germany. ArtBreeder can train a GAN on a single input sample and generate paintings in the style of Fragonard or Picasso or Rothko. And someone made a remark along the lines of: "if this had existed in the 1960s, we wouldn't have need Warhol to invent Pop Art!". But in reality, Andy Warhol experimented with a wide variety of media and techniques. From film to "oxidation art". And it struck me that was the truly creative part of the process. One that arises from a place other than rational optimization on a single task or even multiple known tasks.