Actually Useful AI

Some interesting quotes:

Computers were very rigid and I grew up with a certain feeling about what computers can or cannot do. And I thought that artificial intelligence, when I heard about it, was a very fascinating goal, which is to make rigid systems act fluid. But to me, that was a very long, remote goal. It seemed infinitely far away. It felt as if artificial intelligence was the art of trying to make very rigid systems behave as if they were fluid. And I felt that would take enormous amounts of time. I felt it would be hundreds of years before anything even remotely like a human mind would be asymptotically approaching the level of the human mind, but from beneath.

But one thing that has completely surprised me is that these LLMs and other systems like them are all feed-forward. It's like the firing of the neurons is going only in one direction. And I would never have thought that deep thinking could come out of a network that only goes in one direction, out of firing neurons in only one direction. And that doesn't make sense to me, but that just shows that I'm naive.

It also makes me feel that maybe the human mind is not so mysterious and complex and impenetrably complex as I imagined it was when I was writing Gödel, Escher, Bach and writing I Am a Strange Loop. I felt at those times, quite a number of years ago, that as I say, we were very far away from reaching anything computational that could possibly rival us. It was getting more fluid, but I didn't think it was going to happen, you know, within a very short time.