Considering the computational resources available at the time, he was not that wrong. Research into artificial neuronal networks has always been held back by available computational power.
Agreed, but as a professor I believe one needs to be looking in the future. It was not that far out, but yeah it was an AI winter. We were stuck until 2012 basically. That's a long time.
I'm a professor in an AI field, and I can tell you that neither myself nor the colleagues I regularly have scientific discussions with could imagine ten years ago that something like ChatGPT would be possible in 2022. I suppose there might be a minority who called it, but recent advances in deep learning absolutely whooshed past the predictions of the overwhelming majority of people in the field.
Ah yes, that's what I was trying to say. I was the worst sceptic of AI; I never did anything with AI with it after getting my masters. I just went for money, programming and managing programming.
For me [1] this is the most mindboggling thing I have seen in my life and I don't think people realise what it means. And yes, it wooshed passed anything I thought possible in my lifetime. I hate that it's 'not be evil', 'anti thought crime' etc but it is really incredible what it does.