AI’s bark is worse than its bite.
As fearmongering over artificial intelligence’s capabilities reaches a high pitch, experts claim that the so-called advanced technology isn’t nearly as smart as your dog.
Woof!
At Wednesday’s VivaTech conference, Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, revealed that, currently, generative AI is “still very limited.”
“Those systems are still very limited. They don’t have any understanding of the underlying reality of the real world, because they are purely trained on text, massive amounts of text,” LeCun said, per CNBC.
By contrast, much of what humans learn “has nothing to do with language,” and, at this point in technological advancement, “that part of the human experience is not captured by AI.”
In other words, robots — while they can excel on medical and business exams — are unable to learn basic chores such as unloading a dishwasher.
“What it tells you [is] we are missing something really big … To reach not just human-level intelligence, but even dog intelligence,” LeCun said.
In fact, experts have “no idea how to reproduce this capacity with machines today.”
“Until we can do this, we are not going to have human-level intelligence, we are not going to have dog-level or cat-level [intelligence],” LeCun added.
But his remarks contrast those of Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, who said AI could achieve “human-level cognitive abilities” within the next decade.
Hassabis’ announcement came mere days after Geoffrey Hinton, known as the Godfather of AI, quit his job at Google to voice his concerns and regrets about the technology’s development, while people across most workforces fear for their jobs and others worry over safety.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” the 75-year-old previously said.
He’s not the only one — Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has been vocal about the potential threats AI poses.
ChatGPT, an intelligent chatbot software created by OpenAI, has been utilized for cheating by students and dubbed the “atom bomb” by business mogul Warren Buffett.
But as users tinker with the smart bot, they’re realizing it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
While fun to toy with as a pastime, ChatGPT could not produce quality work, according to showrunners for the hit Netflix franchise “Black Mirror.”
Charlie Brooker, the series’ creator, said the chatbot wrote a “s-–t” script for the tantalizing drama.
“Because all it’s done is look up all the synopses of ‘Black Mirror’ episodes, and sort of mush them together,” Brooker said this month. “Then if you dig a bit more deeply, you go, ‘Oh, there’s not actually any real original thought here.’”