Very intelligent machines closer to reality

Two articles popped up on my various feeds today.

Mollick — Confronting Impossible Futures

Kehlmann — Not yet panicking about AI? You should be – there’s little time left to rein it in

They both make a similar point — incredibly intelligent (AGI or not) machines are here a bit now, getting closer, and may not be far off. Mollick briefly reviews the debate on the timeline.

Maybe it’s 3, 5, or 10+ years to human-level intelligence in at least most ways in which we are intelligent. But regardless of if and when it gets there, these technologies will transform the world. They already are.

Some things have to be conquered (reasoning, hierarchical planning, and the development of common sense), but significant progress is being made on reasoning (lots of studies and see below) and the interaction of AI agents is starting to demonstrate planning. These are things many have argued that artificial intelligence could not do.

What else have they said it can’t do? Mollick points out that people said they couldn’t be creative but now they are. People have said they can’t convey empathy, but now they can.

What else? Well, lots of people said they could never master natural language…but they have done that! This first highlighted line, written in 2015, is something we now laugh at.

And they also said they couldn’t crack protein folding, which they recently did!

As for me, well here’s a pretty simple project that I asked Claude 3.5 to do that involved some basic reasoning. It took about 10 seconds.

What I started with —

(1) A large pile of email addresses, which included parent emails that were not in a table.
(2) A list of HS and MS students
(3) A list of HS students in one class but not in another
-- Neither list had an email address next to it.

So, I asked Claude to sort it out and it nailed it when I gave Claude screenshots of the pile of info.

This is just a simple task someone who hasn’t written a line of code since 1984 could do with a basic prompt.

In Mollick’s post, he encourages businesses to start planning for these worlds (degrees of machine intelligence). I wish more schools were doing the same.