Debunking the Hype
The first major wave of AI was based on the premise that knowledge could be “represented” as a set of rules that computers could process with logic. If you could add enough rules, you could eventually produce common sense knowledge of the world and general intelligence. It was on the right track; the goal of AI is to achieve knowledge in machines. In its day it generated great excitement and funding. But knowledge was never achieved.
The current great hope, the second wave, is Connectionist AI or Data Science, particularly Machine Leaning (ML). Never has the excitement, expectation, and funding been greater and never has the hype, confusion, and even genuine dishonesty surrounding AI been higher.
The problem is that the hype and turbulence of this second wave are
obscuring something new and amazing – a Third Wave of AI is already here.
Cerebras Systems said today that the company has achieved the computational equivalent of the human brain, or the equivalent of 100 trillion synapses.
“It may be that today’s largest neural networks are slightly conscious.” OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever AI Hype-o-Meter There are so many things wrong about this statement I hardly know where to begin. What does “slightly conscious” mean anyway? Is that the...
“We now have AI systems that can generate new text, conversational sentences and whole paragraphs, which is approaching human-level performance.” Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of artificial intelligence research company DeepMind AI Hype-o-Meter Human level performance at what? People don’t generate...
