AI can’t teach AI new tricks
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Artificial intelligence is our economy’s next productivity power pack. It better be—OpenAI just raised $6.6 billion, the largest venture-capital funding of all time, at a $157 billion valuation.
Oh, and the company will lose $5 billion this year and is projecting $44 billion in losses through 2029. We are bombarded with breathless press releases. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts that “powerful AI" will surpass human intelligence in many areas by 2026.
OpenAI claims its latest models are “designed to spend more time thinking before they respond. They can reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems." Thinking? Reasoning? Will AI become humanlike? Conscious? Not so fast. Large language models are impressive, but they are still statistical models mimicking human thinking.
You can’t just throw cheaper chips at the problem and expect growth. More than Moore’s Law (chips doubling in density every 18 months) is in play. I hate to be the one to throw it, but here’s some cold water on the AI hype cycle: Moravec’s paradox: Babies are smarter than AI.
In 1988 robotics researcher Hans Moravec noted that “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility." Most innate skills are built into our DNA, and many of them are unconscious. Mr. Moravec went on: “Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it." DNA is the carrier of life’s success signals.
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