this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Artificial Intelligence never meant AGI. AI was simply the attempt to build software that can solve problems that computers traditionally can't do, but humans can. That includes stuff like chess, image recognition, language, etc. Exactly the kind of things AI has been getting really good at over the last decade.
AGI on the other side is an autonomous AI system that can solve all the problems a human can solve, not just some. That's frankly quite a bit more of a blurry concept, since what human can do is largely just an artifact of evolution and our environment, and also quite different between humans. AGI is not some magical point that has any significance in the underlying science and it's unlikely we ever land on exactly that point, as capabilities are just so different between AI and humans and often far superior once we figured out the basics (e.g. StableDiffusion can paint images 1000x faster than a human, ChatGPT has more knowledge than any human ever had).
Also AGI still doesn't contain sentience, since that's not really needed to replace a human.
The "real AI" is in the underlying algorithms, e.g. backpropagation. Those are the foundation of modern AI systems and those algorithms are what allows you to find pattern in the data. And they are the reason why the field is making seemingly such rapid progress, we can throw data at them and get good results. Our actual understanding why that all works is still somewhat limited, since those algorithms are what extracts the pattern from the data, not us.
ChatGPT on the other side is just an application build with those algorithms and a lot of data. It's interesting because we can play with it today, but AI models get thrown away and new ones get trained from scratch all the time.