[whimsicalism]

> Basically my rant is that current progress was made over a long time and people just didn't really realize how far they have come until they opened it up to the public.

As someone in the field, I largely agree with this take but we're still talking about progress over the course of 5 years or so.

Also, fine-tuning/RLHF considerably advanced the usability of the models by the lay public and hasn't been around for that long.

[jmerz]

It's crazy how fast humans normalize and adapt. Five years ago this stuff was science fiction, now we're arguing about how it's wrong sometimes.

We just kind of walked straight past the Turing test and nobody cares.

[atleta]

I had a teacher at the university a very long time ago (well before even advanced AI computer vision was a thing, around the time DeepBlue beat Kasparov) and when he talked about AI and the future he warned us to take note that as long as machines cannot do something, we keep saying that you need to be intelligent to do it and as long as machines can do it we say that no intelligence is needed (because machines can do it). And as a result we may never admit that AI is actually intelligent or at least not until it's much better than us.

On a side note, I think the idea behind the first part of the phenomenon, i.e. that we think you need intelligence (and probably general intelligence) to do most things that machines cannot is that that is the way we do it. So until we could build machines that could calculate (say multiply and divide) we though you needed actual intelligence because we didn't know any other way and that is how we did it. (I remember that calculating and calculators were an actual example in that lesson.) Same thing for chess. And yes, we were right to say that you don't need general intelligence for neither chess nor calculating because we could come up with relatively simple algorithms.

But people a few years ago started to say this about go. And I do remember that after DeepBlue beating Kasparov everybody was like "yeah, but you need intelligence for go because that's a game with vastly more possible moves". And in a sense this is what we saw, because AlphaGo was indeed a kidn of AI, but still people started saying that you don't need intelligence to win go - as long as you are a machine.

Now people started to make up shit about how GPT is just generating text and that's not intelligent (some people, obviously ignorant laypeople, even say that it's just copy pasting text together and other nonsense). Despite that the freaking thing passes high level exams aimed at people. (Of course, you can say that it's still not a sign of intelligence, because the exams do not measure that, we know people are more or less intelligent, the exam measures knowledge, but the amazing thing here is not the knowledge part but being able to answer the questions aimed at people.)