Jeffrey Hinton
Don’t bet against human invention.
Most, if not virtually all people still have little grasp on how much change generative artificial intelligence will bring. Yesterday, the Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Jeffrey Hinton. Just three years ago, he was seen as wildly optimistic in predictions that artificial general intelligence could happen in 20 years, now that looks like it will be much sooner.
In 2023, fellow godfather of AI Yoshua Bengio spoke to Congress and warned:
“Previously thought to be decades or even centuries away, we now believe it could be within a few years or decades … The shorter timeframe, say five years, is really worrisome because we will need more time to effectively mitigate the potentially significant threats to democracy, national security, and our collective future.”
He’s now warning that robotics could be “figured out” within five years.
The history of AI is replete with examples where experts predicted long timelines for achieving significant milestones, only to be overtaken by incredible advancements. All that was achieved at OpenAI was done by a handful of people and now virtually-unlimited money and talent is being thrown at it.
Here is what the New York Times wrote today in 1903 in response to a failed flying experiment by Samuel Langley two days prior:
[It] might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years… No doubt the problem has attractions for those it interests, but to the ordinary man it would seem as if effort might be employed more profitably.
On that same day, Orville Wright wrote in his diary, “We started assembly today”. The first flight happened 69 days later.
But that wasn’t the end of aviation. After the Wright brothers proved the concept, investment in aviation soared; the first aerial bombing took pace just three years later, the first commercial flights from London to Paris took just 11 years and humanity was in space in less than 60 years.
The lesson, I believe, is that once science fiction becomes reality, the advancement and refinement of the technology takes place far faster than
h/t @JonErlichman