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Nature is trying to tell us something here, which is this doesnt really work, but the field is so believing its own press clippings that it just cant see that, he adds.

Even de Freitass DeepMind colleagues Jackie Kay and Scott Reed, who worked with him on Gato, were more circumspect when I asked them directly about his claims. When asked whether Gato was heading toward AGI, they wouldnt be drawn. I dont actually think its really feasible to make predictions with these kinds of things. I try to avoid that. Its like predicting the stock market, said Kay.

Reed said the question was a difficult one: I think most machine-learning people will studiously avoid answering. Very hard to predict, but, you know, hopefully we get there someday.

In a way, the fact that DeepMind called Gato a generalist might have made it a victim of the AI sectors excessive hype around AGI. The AI systems of today are called narrow, meaning they can only do a specific, restricted set of tasks such as generate text.

Some technologists, including some at DeepMind, think that one day humans will develop broader AI systems that will be able to function as well as or even better than humans. Though some call this artificial general intelligence, others say it is like "belief in magic. Many top researchers, such as Metas chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, question whether it is even possible at all.

Gato is a generalist in the sense that it can do many different things at the same time. But that is a world apart from a general AI that can meaningfully adapt to new tasks that are different from what the model was trained on, says MITs Andreas: Were still quite far from being able to do that.

Making models bigger will also not address the issue that models dont have lifelong learning, which would mean that if taught something once, they would understand all the implications and use it to inform all the other decisions they make, he says.

The hype around tools like Gato is harmful for the general development of AI, argues Emmanuel Kahembwe, an AI and robotics researcher and part of the Black in AI organization cofounded by Timnit Gebru. There are many interesting topics that are left to the side, that are underfunded, that deserve more attention, but thats not what the big tech companies and the bulk of researchers in such tech companies are interested in, he says.

Tech companies ought to take a step back and take stock of why they are building what they are building, says Vilas Dhar, president of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, a charity that funds AI projects for good.

AGI speaks to something deeply humanthe idea that we can become more than we are, by building tools that propel us to greatness, he says. And thats really nice, except it also is a way to distract us from the fact that we have real problems that face us today that we should be trying to address using AI.

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The hype around DeepMinds new AI model misses whats actually cool about it - MIT Technology Review