While futurists and fundraisers used to make bullish predictions about artificial general intelligence, they’ve become quieter lately. Peter Thiel — the tech billionaire and rumored vampire — says Silicon Valley big brains have lost enthusiasm for AGI. “Elon’s not talking about it anymore and Larry [Page] is off to Fiji and doesn’t seem to be working on it quite as hard,” Thiel said at a recent event. Thiel described Musk as “a weathervane for the zeitgeist,” who’s stopped talking about AGI because interest has declined. Scientists are also increasingly skeptical. A recent study paper posited that AGI is “in principle impossible,” while other researchers have mocked the term’s proponents. “I have yet to come across work on AGI that I can take seriously,” tweeted Abeba Birhane, a cognitive scientist based at University College Dublin.
— Abeba Birhane (@Abebab) November 14, 2021 The path towards AGI increasingly appears — at best — a long one. Imbuing machines with human-like intelligence remains immensely challenging. As Melanie Mitchell, a computer science professor at Portland State University noted in a preprint paper published last year on arXiv: Critics fear that another AI winter is coming. Hyping AGI helped spurred enormous investment in artificial intelligence, but overconfident predictions could be detrimental to progress in the field — if the real-world advances prove disappointing.
