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Majority of AI Researchers Say Tech Industry Is Pouring Billions Into a Dead End (futurism.com)

submitted 2 days ago by cm0002 to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 2 days ago (11 children)

The actual survey result:

Asked whether "scaling up" current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), or a general purpose AI that matches or surpasses human cognition, an overwhelming 76 percent of respondents said it was "unlikely" or "very unlikely" to succeed.

So they're not saying the entire industry is a dead end, or even that the newest phase is. They're just saying they don't think this current technology will make AGI when scaled. I think most people agree, including the investors pouring billions into this. They arent betting this will turn to agi, they're betting that they have some application for the current ai. Are some of those applications dead ends, most definitely, are some of them revolutionary, maybe

Thus would be like asking a researcher in the 90s that if they scaled up the bandwidth and computing power of the average internet user would we see a vastly connected media sharing network, they'd probably say no. It took more than a decade of software, cultural and societal development to discover the applications for the internet.

[–] stormeuh 14 points 2 days ago (4 children)

I agree that it's editorialized compared to the very neutral way the survey puts it. That said, I think you also have to take into account how AI has been marketed by the industry.

They have been claiming AGI is right around the corner pretty much since chatGPT first came to market. It's often implied (e.g. you'll be able to replace workers with this) or they are more vague on timeline (e.g. OpenAI saying they believe their research will eventually lead to AGI).

With that context I think it's fair to editorialize to this being a dead-end, because even with billions of dollars being poured into this, they won't be able to deliver AGI on the timeline they are promising.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago

There are plenty of back-office ticket-processing jobs that can, and have been, replaced by current-gen AI.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

AI isn't going to figure out what a customer wants when the customer doesn't know what they want.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Part of it is we keep realizing AGI is a lot more broader and more complex than we think

[–] jj4211 2 points 2 days ago

Yeah, it does some tricks, some of them even useful, but the investment is not for the demonstrated capability or realistic extrapolation of that, it is for the sort of product like OpenAI is promising equivalent to a full time research assistant for 20k a month. Which is way more expensive than an actual research assistant, but that's not stopping them from making the pitch.

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