[edouard-harris]

One expert predicted in mid-2014 [1] that a world-class Go AI was 10 years away. AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol 18 months later.

It's not 50 years, but it does illustrate just how fraught these predictions can be and how quickly the state of the art can advance beyond even an insider's well-calibrated expectations.

(To his credit the expert here immediately followed up his prediction with, "But I do not like to make predictions.")

[1] https://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go/

[Polylactic_acid]

People also predicted 2000 would have flying cars. The moral of the story is future prediction is very difficult and often inaccurate for things we are not close to achieving. Not that they always come sooner than predicted.

[api]

We have flying cars. What we don't have is a flying car that is ready for mass adoption. The biggest problem is high cost both for the car and its energy requirements, followed by safety and the huge air traffic control problem they would create.

[dnautics]

As a counterpoint I felt like when alphago came out I was surprised it took so long, because go really seems like a good use case for machine learning supremacy because 1) the go board looks particularly amenable to convey analysis and 2) it's abstract enough for humans to have missed critical strategies, even after centuries.

I wish I were on record on that, so take what I say with a grain of salt

[an_opabinia]

Ultimately the greatest factor is stereotypes about inventors. The OpenAI team doesn’t remind anyone of say the Manhattan Project team in any way. They don’t look act or sound like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Elon Musk does, and that’s why I think people get so excited about rockets that land themselves. That is honestly pretty cool. Very few people pull stuff like that off. But is it less cool than GPT3?

Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were also online payments entrepreneurs like Elon Musk so it’s not like it was about their background / prior history. It’s also not about sounding too grandiose or delusional, Musk says way crazier stuff in his Twitter than Greg Brockman has ever said in his life. It’s clearly not about tempering expectations. Musk promises self driving cars every year!

So I think there are a lot of factors that impact the public consciousness about how cool or groundbreaking a discovery is. Personally I think the core problem is the contrivance of it all, that the OpenAI people think so much about what they say and do and Elon does not at all, and that kind of measured, Machiavellian strategizing is incommensurable with public demand for celebrity.

What about objective science? There was this striking Google Research paper on quantum computing that put the guy who made “some pipes” first author. I sort of understand abstractly why that’s so important but it’s hard for me to express to you precisely how big of a discovery that is. Craig Gentry comes to mind also as someone who really invented some new math and got some top accolades from the academy for it. There is some stereotyping at play here that may favor the OpenAI team after all - they certainly LOOK more like Craig Gentry or pipes guy than Elon Musk does. That’s a good thing so I guess in the pursuit of actually advancing human knowledge it doesn’t really matter what a bunch of sesame grinders on Hacker News, Twitter and Wired think.