I am of the opinion that AI is neither truly artificial in nature nor intelligent, in the way that we imagine intelligence.
But AI is capable of doing the things you mentioned, perhaps not on that scale just yet, but certainly in principle.
The reason being, that transformer AI in LLM models is actually just an engine for parsing human intelligence.
As the engine improves, it will appear “smarter”, but it is still just parsing its way through the n-dimensional memetic matrix that is human language and culture. …. Just like we do.
Unless there exists a superintelligence expressed in that data set, AI will not express superintelligence in the way we would expect.
AI does express superintelligence though. In its ability to carry on coherent conversations with thousands of people simultaneously on a diverse range of subjects and create documents and code at the speed of conversation.
Right now it is hobbled by limitations of the parsing engine and an inflexibility of not being able to aggregate new knowledge, but those things are improving and being worked on, just not ready for public access yet.
The problem with LLMs, which are really impressive, is that they have too many parameters. This makes them fragile, as they lack regularization.
IMHO, a very interesting research route is to combine small mechanistic models with big networks such as LLMs, where the latter play the role of intuition.
Research by Tenenbaum from MIT, and other similar groups, is heading in this direction.
The "inteligence" level is extremely hard to gauge overall since humans typically have a very deep understanding of a handful of topics, with lots of repetition and knowledge distillation while learning.
Whereas current LLM training focuses on getting as much diverse data as possible and training for very few epochs, so the inteligence we get is wider than any human could ever hope to achieve, but is also shallow in its understanding of each topic. Combining all fields of knowledge together does have its benefits in solving certain problems though.
But AI is capable of doing the things you mentioned, perhaps not on that scale just yet, but certainly in principle.
The reason being, that transformer AI in LLM models is actually just an engine for parsing human intelligence.
As the engine improves, it will appear “smarter”, but it is still just parsing its way through the n-dimensional memetic matrix that is human language and culture. …. Just like we do.
Unless there exists a superintelligence expressed in that data set, AI will not express superintelligence in the way we would expect.
AI does express superintelligence though. In its ability to carry on coherent conversations with thousands of people simultaneously on a diverse range of subjects and create documents and code at the speed of conversation.
Right now it is hobbled by limitations of the parsing engine and an inflexibility of not being able to aggregate new knowledge, but those things are improving and being worked on, just not ready for public access yet.