Current AI large language models a ‘dead end’ for human-level intelligence, scientists agree
Current approaches to artificial intelligence (AI) are unlikely to create models that can match human intelligence, according to a recent survey of industry experts.
Out of the 475 AI researchers queried for the survey, 76% said the scaling up of large language models (LLMs) was “unlikely” or “very unlikely” to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), the hypothetical milestone where machine learning systems can learn as effectively, or better, than humans.
This is a noteworthy dismissal of tech industry predictions that, since the generative AI boom of 2022, has maintained that the current state-of-the-art AI models only need more data, hardware, energy and money to eclipse human intelligence.
Now, as recent model releases appear to stagnate, most of the researchers polled by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence believe tech companies have arrived at a dead end — and money won’t get them out of it.
“I think it’s been apparent since soon after the release of GPT-4, the gains from scaling have been incremental and expensive,” Stuart Russell, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who helped organize the report, told Live Science. “[AI companies] have invested too much already and cannot afford to admit they made a mistake [and] be out of the market for several years when they have to repay the investors who have put in hundreds of billions of dollars. So all they can do is double down.” [Continue reading…]