Comment by imiric

> Like I said, what exactly would you be expecting to see with the capabilities that exist today ?

And like I said, "signs and hints" of superhuman intelligence. I don't know what that looks like since I'm merely human, but I sure know that I haven't seen it yet.

> There's nothing to buy or not buy. They simply aren't. They are unable to do a lot of the things these people do.

This claim is directly opposed to claims by Sam Altman and his cohort, which I'll repeat:

> we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways, and are able to significantly amplify the output of people using them.

So which is it? If they're "smarter than people in many ways", where is the product of that superhuman intelligence? If they're able to "significantly amplify the output of people using them", then all of humanity should be empowered to produce incredible results that were previously only achievable by a limited number of people. In hands of the best and brightest humans, it should empower them to produce results previously unreachable by humanity.

Yet all positive applications of this technology show that it excels at finding and producing data patterns, and nothing more than that. Those experience reports by Terence Tao are prime examples of this. The system was fed a lot of contextual information, and after being coaxed by highly intelligent humans, was able to find and produce patterns that were difficult to see by humans. This is hardly a showcase of intelligence that you and others think it is. Including those highly intelligent humans, some of whom have a lot to gain from pushing this narrative.

We have seen similar reports by programmers as well[1]. Yet I'm continually amazed that these highly intelligent people are surprised that a pattern finding and producing system was able to successfully find and produce useful patterns, and then interpret that as a showcase of intelligence. So much so that I start to feel suspicious about the intentions and biases of those people.

To be clear: I'm not saying that these systems can't be very useful in the right hands, and potentially revolutionize many industries. Ultimately many real-world problems can be modeled as statistical problems where a pattern recognition system can excel. What I am saying is that there's a very large gap from the utility of such tools, and the extraordinary claims that they have intelligence, let alone superhuman and general intelligence. So far I have seen no evidence of the latter, despite of the overwhelming marketing euphoria we're going through.

> Well it's a good thing that's not true then

In the world outside of the "AI" tech bubble, that is very much the reality.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45784179