OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap has said that ChatGPT will be ‘Laugably Bad’ in 12 months time, highlighting the speed at which the technology is progressing. He made this comment at the 27th annual Milken Institute Global Conference.
However I can’t help but think that if LLMs are the focus of this ‘progress’, we are unlikely to get closer to real ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in any meaningful way in relation to what we have now.
It feels to me that LLMs are really not the path forward to create AI. Finding words that are close together in a large enough data set and regurtitating in a given context just seems such a fake intelligence. There is really nothing here that points to an intelligence that we normally associate with living things.
However it should also be noted that this is good enough for a lot of tasks. Generalizing across a large enough data set has its uses. The trick is finding the right scenario.
Also it has people hyped (or worried) for progress. Change is a good think in most situations as it drives adaptation and growth. Overall it is likely to be a net positive for humanity.