Comment by deepsquirrelnet

I think you hit on some good points. It seems like in common language, AI has taken the meaning “general purpose”, rather than satisfying some criterion of the futurist definition.

Personally, I care very little about whether the machine is intelligent or not. If it actually happens in my lifetime, I believe it will be unmistakable.

I am interested in how people solve problems. If you built and trained a model that solves a challenging task, THAT is something I find noteworthy and what I want to read about.

Apparently utility is boring, and “just ML” now. There’s tons of academic papers I see fly under the radar probably because they solve specific problems that the average person doesn’t know exists. Much of ML doesn’t foray into “popular science” enough to hold general public interest.