[rbanffy]

My guess is as good as any other layperson's, but I don't see much work being done for it, and no real good definition of what it is so we could plan how to create it.

OTOH, we see specialized intelligences do all soft of superhuman feats, all the time, and more impressive abilities join these all the time. These, however, are not human-like intelligences. They aren't even bee-like. They are so alien we don't see "general intelligence" in them.

So, my guess is that we'll have some extremely complex and capable systems that are extremely alien in nature well before we can have a conversation with a human-like intelligent system. They'll be useful and treated like oracles - we won't be able to understand their reasoning, but they'll be right most of the time.

It is, however, a matter of time and desire. There is nothing inherently magical in our mammalian brains and our organic bodies that can't be simulated by a sufficiently capable machine and technology for that will, eventually, become possible, then available, then practical, and then ubiquitous.

[scubakid]

To me, the term "alien" connotes a level of capability much more interesting than what I've actually seen from most modern systems. But point taken.

And I'd like to believe that you're right about it only being a matter of time and desire, but I do also worry about the possibility that we're actually on a different kind of exponential curve and will instead reach a point where we see diminishing returns.

[rbanffy]

I have no doubts there will be diminishing returns at some point, specially with narrow AIs, where increases in complexity and cost of training models will not be able to improve on what’s already good enough.

AI is a tool like many others, useful for some things and not for others.