Terence Tao on AI's "Artificial General Cleverness" vs. True Intelligence
By
gmays
All dough, no crust. Filling but forgettable.
Summary
Terence Tao discusses the limitations of current AI tools in achieving genuine artificial general intelligence, but highlights the emergence of 'artificial general cleverness' - the ability to solve broad classes of complex problems through stochastic or brute-force methods. He distinguishes between intelligence and cleverness, noting that while AI tools can generate useful outputs through clever approaches, they lack true intelligence. Tao suggests viewing current AI as stochastic generators of sometimes clever thoughts, which can be valuable when combined with verification procedures.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledI doubt that anything resembling genuine 'artificial general intelligence' is within reach of current AI tools.
By 'general cleverness', I mean the ability to solve broad classes of complex problems via somewhat ad hoc means.
This results in the somewhat unintuitive combination of a technology that can be very useful and impressive, while simultaneously being fundamentally unsatisfying and disappointing.
Viewing the current generation of such tools primarily as a stochastic generator of sometimes clever - and often useful - thoughts and outputs may be a more productive perspective when trying to use them to solve difficult problems.
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