Comment by gaigalas

This comparison is very typical. I've seen a lot of people trying to correlate performance in chess with performance in other tasks.

Chess is a closed, small system. Full of possibilities, sure, but still very small compared to the wide range of human abilities. The same applies to Go, StarCraft or any other system. Those were chosen as AI playgrounds specifically because they're very small, limited scenarios.

People are too caught up trying to predict the future. And there are several competing visions, each one absolutely sure they nailed it. To me, that's a sign of uncertainty in the technology. If it was that decided (like smartphones became from 2007->2010), we would have coalesced into a single vision by now.

Essentially, we're witnessing an ongoing unwillingly quagmarization of AI tech. At each bold prediction that fails, it looks worse.

That could easily be solved by taking the tech realistically (we know it's useful, just not a demigod), but people (especially AI companies) don't do that. That smells like fear.

It's an exoskeleton. A bicycle for the mind. "People spirits". A copilot. A trusted companion. A very smart PhD that fails sometimes, etc. We don't need any of those predictions of "what it is", they are only detrimental. It sounds like people cargo culting Steve Jobs (and perhaps it is exactly that).