It is not suffering from hype. There is too little hype. People are vastly underestimating what is about to happen.

See my comments here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13079598

under our recent article " Artificial Intelligence Generates Christmas Song".

Basically, if there is no pixie dust that makes humans intelligent, and instead it is a matter of the architecture of the brain and the first few years of supervised sensory input, then neural net breakthroughs (which use a similar architecture/topology) have the potential at any moment in time to break through and match general human intelligence.

What I mean is that if someone sent back source code from 80 years from now, but we had to run it on a bunch of Amazon / Google servers in a server farm, we're pretty much guaranteed to have enough computing power to do so!

(This is a combination of the number of neurons, their number of connections, and their very slow speed.)

We have the hardware.

Now: we do not actually have the source code from 80 years from now that we can go ahead and run on those machines.

So, we're at like heavier-than-air travel right before the Wright Brothers flew at Kittie Hawk. Except we have like jet engines already -- just no way to design them into something that flies.

I think that AI is vastly underrated and I watch with incredible interest every single breakthrough.

For the second category above, ML built into products or engineering solutions, Alphago surprised me, because Go had an intractibly large possibility space, it's not in any sense subject to brute-forcing or exhaustive search.

Dragon's Natural dictation surprised me in that using its model its able to get basically perfect dictation. I've never worked as a transcriptionist, but a small search reveals it has basically annihilated the industry of medical transcription.

These are not the big, general breakthrough.

But the big, general breakthrough is right there, somewhere. The results researchers are coming up with are astounding, and they're doing it in many cases with neural nets, quite similar to the wiring of the human mind.

The hype is faaaaaaaaaaaaaaar less than warranted for the stage that we're at. At any moment someone can put together something that achieves higher-level intelligence and can be set loose upon the world corpus of culture.

True, there are no clear indications that this is about to happen (For example: people do not extract innate language algorithms from the human genome which encodes them), so we are not exactly taking many steps that we could be trying to. As far as I know we're not even genetically engineering people to see what different parts of DNA do -- which is obviously a very, very good thing, and who would allow anyone to bear to term a child made as an experiment to see what DNA does.

But despite not going from a human starting point, the results that we are achieving in many cases match and surpass human ability - while we do know that in many cases some of their architecture is similar. I feel quite strongly that we have more than enough hardware for general intelligence - and I see advances every day that could end up going past the ppint of no return on it.

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EDIT: got a downvote, but I would prefer a discussion if you think I'm wrong.