[gcanyon]

"strong AI is not within sight"

What is in sight is AI that can (sometimes) fool us into thinking it is "strong". And whether it is or not becomes a point for philosophers to debate.

We're heading toward a situation captured fairly well in "The Good Place" -- is Janet actually alive? Is killing her wrong? She would tell you no, as long as you're not approaching the button that actually reboots her :-)

[naasking]

> What is in sight is AI that can (sometimes) fool us into thinking it is "strong".

Or maybe you've fooled yourself into thinking that "strong AI"/general intelligence is actually not just a bunch of tricks that mash together into a smorgasbord that usually works quite well. That includes human intelligence.

[gcanyon]

I have definitely not fooled myself into thinking that "strong AI" is not a bunch of tricks that mash together into a smorgasbord. That's exactly what I think :-)

Including human intelligence, as you say. I'm reasonably convinced that "intelligence" is an emergent higher-order abstraction that arises from deterministic processes, at the cellular, or digital, level.

I would, however, make a distinction between resilient and brittle intelligence. ChatGPT, for example, seems very human-like for some percentage of responses, but when it goes off the rails, it goes completely wrong. Humans can sometimes be like that, but (I don't think) to the same degree, and certainly they are often capable of a softer landing when they get into unfamiliar territory.

[psychphysic]

What it's unequivocally done is shown us that while we thought bigger models would lead to incremental improvements we have had a giant leap with this X10 bigger model.

I.e. were not good at predicting how far away stronger AI is. Even if we can comment on strong/weak AI.