AI Is Remarkably Clever And Shockingly Stupid

AI is a Goliath

AI is an undeniably powerful tool, beating the world-class Go champions, passing college admission test and even passing the bar exam. The notion that AI can eventually surpass human intelligence is a compelling one. But there’s something that the human brain has which beats AI hands down every time, and that’s common sense. AI may have the key to unlock enormous amounts of information, more than the human brain could ever hold, but it does not have intelligence, wisdom, common sense. The human instinct to “know” when something is wrong, or makes no sense.

Today, AI is like a Goliath. It is literally very, very large. The latest large language models are trained on tens of thousands of computer chips processing trillions of words. Such extreme scale AI models appears to demonstrate sparks of artificial general intelligence, the goal of producing an AI capable of “acting” like a human, except when it makes small silly mistakes, as I’m about to show you.

Many believe that whatever mistakes AI makes today can be easily fixed with the brute force of bigger scale and more resources. However, the issue is that these extreme scale AI models are very expensive to train, and only few tech companies can afford to do so. When it comes to AI safety, this concentration of power puts as at the mercy of…