Is research on LLM AI slowing down?

John McCarthy

It looks like the fate of the field of computer technology, wrongly called artificial intelligence, is to alternate between excessive optimism and unbridled pessimism. Here is a sketch of the history of this technology:

1. At the Dartmouth College summer school in 1956, the name artificial intelligence was proposed for computer programs that could perform tasks that had traditionally been considered exclusively human, such as playing chess and translating from one human language to another. The attendees, led by John McCarthy, predicted that within ten years these two problems would be solved. They hoped that by 1966 there would be programs capable of beating the world chess champion, and others that could translate perfectly between any two human languages. When these objectives were not achieved so early, research into artificial intelligence stopped. At universities, research topics in this field were frowned upon, because they were thought to have no future.

Some problems in Automatic Natural Language Generation

Alan Turing

ChatGPT and similar tools have more than met the Turing test, for they are capable of fooling many human beings (I don’t know how many, but certainly more than 30%) into believing that there is a mind behind such simple algorithms. But, quoting Evan Ackerman (Senior Editor of IEEE Spectrum):

The problem with the Turing Test is that it’s not really a test of whether an artificial intelligence program is capable of thinking: it’s a test of whether an AI program can fool a human. And humans are really, really dumb.