Google researchers deal a major blow to the theory AI is about to outsmart humans

[BootinUp]

"When presented with tasks or functions which are out-of-domain of their pre-training data, we demonstrate various failure modes of transformers and degradation of their generalization for even simple extrapolation tasks," authors Steve Yadlowsky, Lyric Doshi, and Nilesh Tripuraneni wrote.

What transformers are good at is performing tasks that relate to the data they've been trained on, according to the paper. They're not so good at dealing with tasks that go even remotely beyond that.

That's a bit of a problem for those hoping to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), a term techies use to describe hypothetical AI that can do anything humans do. As it stands, AI is pretty good at specific tasks but less great at transferring skills across domains like humans do.

It means "we shouldn't get too crazy about imminent AGI at this point," Pedro Domingos, professor emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, told Insider.

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-researchers-have-turned-agi-race-upside-down-with-paper-2023-11

[patphil]

1. The concept is still in it's infancy.

Another decade perhaps; certainly less than 2 decades.

[BootinUp]

2. You might want to review the history of AI. But one thing we know for sure

is the hype will continue.

[Lithos]

3. If you look at the history

The term AI was invented to get more money to study machine learning.

[BootinUp]

4. My point in sharing the article is in the headline and the article

further that A.G.I. the stated goal of the hypers at microsoft, OPENAI and the rest, is therefore bullshit, and they are no where near to achieving it as I have suggested here in my many posts on the subject.