People overestimate what's possible short-term and under-estimate what's possible long term. Current AI models have three main limitations: - rapid skill acqu

People overestimate what's possible short-term and under-estimate what's possible long term. Current AI models have three main limitations: - rapid skill acquisition. Example: someone invents a new programming language. Something like Elm or Rust. Humans can start using it right after reading a "quick start" page and few tutorials from the authors of the new language. How much training data will GPT-style models need to start using that language? A lot, like output of hundreds or thousands of people. This needs to go down by a factor of 10x to 100x to match humans. - agency, or taking actions guided towards a goal. Example: Can you ask GPT-like model to book a flight ticket for you? Help it help you learning Photoshop? New IDE? Test your latest app or indie game and find bugs? No. The ability of current models is still not good enough to be useful to an average person with regard to interacting with outside world. - acting in the physical world. Example: An average human can learn to drive enough to pass a driving test in the order of 100 hours during a driving course. How far away are we from a system that can control humanoid-style robot to learn to drive in the order of 100h? Currently, we can't do it with billions of dollars with specially designed hardware. Using humanoid robot to control a car is not even useful as a benchmark for the state of the art machine learning systems. IMO the currently existing systems like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion are worth all put together in the range of $10B to $100B in the next 3-5 years. Future systems that will address all 3 limitations mentioned above may be literally the whole reachable universe changing if we decide to build self-replicating space probes (Von Neumann probes). We know that there are physical systems that are not very intelligent but capable of exponential growth like viruses or bacteria (humans too). The main limitation of biological systems is their adaptability, especially to lack of water. If robots can build other robots avoiding bottlenecks of human intellectual and manual labor then the robots are limited only by resources and energy available. We have plenty of both on Earth and Solar system is full of it. Also, I'm just talking about human-like abilities. All of that is possible without involving concepts like superintelligence. Bacteria are not very smart, but they can multiply exponentially. The spread of possibilities is enormous. All of that hinges on your timelines on the 3 above mentioned limitations. It's like predicting when atomic bomb will be possible. It may not happen for decades, or there may be right this very moment someone with an idea that will make it all possible.