…Today I want to talk about predictions of when we reach a more general version of artificial intelligence, similar to a human brain, and ask what we’ve learned.  There have been a few approaches to this over the years.  One that I was a big fan of was this 2015 WaitButWhy piece on the AI revolution.  The argument in this piece is that AI progress is doubling and we are expecting a linear trend, but that doubling will explode the AI capabilities of machines sooner than we thought.  I admit that I was a big fan of this argument, but it increasingly looks incorrect.  While it is possible that this is true, and that we are still just in the early stages of the trend, it increasingly looks like the marginal gains from existing approaches to AI are decling and won’t get us to general AI.

The other big prediction about when we get there is Ray Kurzweil’s extrapolation of computing power, noting that next year, in 2023, the amount of compute you can buy for $1000 will surpass the compute available in the human brain, bringing us close go general AI.  Of course, that only works if the key to AI is raw compute power.  It increasingly looks like that may be wrong. Read More