The New Illusionists

Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of artificial intelligence research company DeepMind, has left Google to join venture capital firm Greylock Partners. In a recent interview he made the statement: “We now have AI systems that can generate new text, conversational sentences and whole paragraphs, which is approaching human-level performance.” Human-level performance at what? It is time for clarity about the difference between comprehending language and creating the illusion of comprehension.

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Algorithm Generated Text: Magical Thinking & Mediocrity

Today even statistical programs as humble as a regression analysis in an Excel spreadsheet are being called Machine Learning and by association AI. At the other end of the spectrum, we have the colossus known as GTP-3, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, from the OpenAI group. It is the third generation so-called “language model” based on the “Transformer” algorithm developed by Google.

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Stop Calling Everything AI!

I read an article last week that claimed that a linear regression in an Excel spreadsheet was actually Machine Leaning and by extension Artificial Intelligence. What next? When I was a child, we had mechanical adding machines that could certainly do arithmetic better than I could. AI too?

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The Third Singularity

Are Super Artificial Intelligences going to make humanity obsolete?
If you’re not worried about this maybe you should be since some of the leading technical minds of our time are clearly very concerned.

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What is Artificial Intelligence?

Over the past 40 years, Artificial Intelligence has become a “bucket term” for all kinds of techniques that don’t actually do anything that most people would recognize as intelligence but which they still call “AI” because that is what they were aspiring to create.

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What ever happened to A.I.?

We’ve expected talking robots, intelligent cars and smart houses by now but all we got is a “speech interpretation and recognition interface (Siri).”

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