Sabine Hossenfelder On AI
Sabine Hossenfelder is a German ex-physicist who several years ago got frustrated with the academic environment, dropped out, and became a full-time YouTube commentator on general science issues. Her commentary on AI is provocative, but I'm not sure if it's entirely well-informed, and it has the problem of trying to talk about an abstraction as if it's something concrete, in other words, hypostatization. (This was my hobby horse when I taught freeshman comp half a cenrury ago.) At 1:13, she says, The future is not everyone gets a genius assistant. The future is your genius assistant is currently unavailable, because billionaires are using it to optimize tax avoidance. The artificially intelligent systems we currently have are just about to become useful in some domains like coding and text-based tasks. They're still far away from humanlike general intelligence, but we'll get there. . . . Large language models have serious shortcomings. Most importantly, ...