Top researcher blasts 'nonsense' of superhuman AI

SACLAY: Efforts to build artificial intelligence (AI) that could solve all the world's problems at a stroke are "nonsense", leading researcher Michael Jordan told scientists in Paris ahead of next week's global AI summit.

Jordan, a computer science professor at the Univiersity of California, Berkeley, was taking aim at claims from industry figures like OpenAI chief Sam Altman or Anthropic's Dario Amodei that so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) is only years away.

AGI is the hoped-for holy grail of AI research that would surpass humans in all fields.

"This super AGI thing that can answer any question, it knows everything... this is nonsense," machine learning and statistics expert Jordan said at an AI conference at France's prestigious Polytechnique engineering school.

He criticised the fact that companies are spending "billions and trillions" to achieve what he said was for now an illusory goal.

Today's AI models can "predict really, really well" thanks to their access to vast quantities of human-generated data, including from the internet, Jordan said.

But AI "can't know everything, because what's in my mind right now is the context of what I'm going to do next today. You cannot know that," he added.

"And if it doesn't know that, it can't give me good advice."

Large language models (LLMs) that power AI chatbots like ChatGPT are like "a lot of little experts" able to respond to highly specific questions but are "not intelligent entities".

Jordan characterised today's developments in AI as "a new engineering field emerging, like civil engineering" but working with "human decisions and data and flows on networks".

That makes it suited to solving specific complex problems like improving transportation or healthcare, he suggested.

"This whole development of this wonderful engineering field is really being held back by this whole AI aspiration, building a super robot that takes over and helps you for all your tasks at home and all these other things," Jordan said.

"I don't think there's ever been an era in human history where a new field of technology has arisen where there was so much hype and hysteria," he added.

Debate over whether or not AGI is realistic -- and if so, a threat to humanity if its creators lose control -- is one of the major controversies among scientists and developers in the field.



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