#AI#GenerativeAI#LLMs#Chatbots#Hype: "...[T]he AI hype of the last year has also opened up demand for a rival perspective: a feeling that tech might be a bit disappointing. In other words, not optimism or pessimism, but scepticism. If we judge AI just by our own experiences, the future is not a done deal.
Perhaps the noisiest AI questioner is Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist who co-founded an AI start-up and sold it to Uber in 2016. Altman once tweeted, “Give me the confidence of a mediocre deep-learning skeptic”; Marcus assumed it was a reference to him. He prefers the term “realist”.
He is not a doomster who believes AI will go rogue and turn us all into paper clips. He wants AI to succeed and believes it will. But, in its current form, he argues, it’s hitting walls.
Today’s large language models (LLMs) have learnt to recognise patterns but don’t understand the underlying concepts. They will therefore always produce silly errors, says Marcus. The idea that tech companies will produce artificial general intelligence by 2030 is “laughable”.
Generative AI is sucking up cash, electricity, water, copyrighted data. It is not sustainable. A whole new approach may be needed. Ed Zitron, a former games journalist who is now both a tech publicist and a tech critic based in Nevada, puts it more starkly: “We may be at peak AI.”" https://www.ft.com/content/648228e7-11eb-4e1a-b0d5-e65a638e6135
