The progress of AI hasn’t only caught most people by surprise, but it’s also caught academicians and AI researchers by surprise.
Max Tegmark, who is a professor at MIT, has said that even his colleagues had been completely wrong about their predictions around the progress of AI. Tegmark is a physicist, cosmologist, and machine learning researcher, and is known for his pioneering work on ideas on the nature of reality and artificial intelligence. He says that the scientific community, even a few years ago, had no idea how quickly AI was going to develop.
“I remember very vividly, like 6-7 years ago, most of my colleagues here at MIT and most of my AI colleagues in general pretty convinced that we were decades away from passing the Turing test, decades away from building machines that could master language and knowledge at the human level. And they were all wrong,” Tegmark said on the Curt Jaimungal podcast.
“They were way too pessimistic. Because (these things) have already happened, right? You can quibble about whether (passing the Turing Test) happened with GPT-4 or when it was exactly, but it’s pretty clear it’s in the past now. If people could be so wrong about that, maybe they were wrong about more. And sure enough, since then AI has gone from being kind of high school level, college level, being PhD level, to professor level, to even far beyond that in many areas. In just four short years, prediction after prediction has been crushed, where things have happened faster,” he added.
“I think we have gone from the overhyped regime to the under hyped regime. And, and this is the reason why so many people now are talking about it will reach broadly human level in two to five years, depending on which tech CEO you talk to or which professor you talk to. But it’s very hard now for me to find anyone serious who thinks we’re a hundred years away from it,” he added.
Humanity has indeed blazed past the Turing Test, once thought to be one of the hardest problems in computer science, which required creating a artificial system which could pass off as a human in a conversation. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that historians of the future will be unable to agree when exactly the Turing Test was passed, which indicates that AI progressed so quickly over the last few years that it was impossible to even tell when exactly this milestone was passed. There were also other predictions that have proven been too pessimistic — even in 2021, less than 10 percent of experts believed that an AI would win a gold medal at the International Mathematics Olympiad by 2025, and both Google and OpenAI have already achieved the feat. And if AI can keep progressing at this pace, there’s no telling where it might be a few years.