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.

Computer programs and intelligence games

In 1956, John McCarthy and colleagues, in a seminar that took place at Dartmouth College in Hanover (USA), defined the term Artificial Intelligence, so abused now. On the same year, Arthur Samuel, working at IBM, built the first computer program capable of playing checkers. This program kept information about the games it had played and used it to modify its future plays. In other words, it “learned.” After a certain number of games, the program was able to defeat its creator and play reasonably well in official championships.

At first sight, this seemed to go in the good direction. The creators of the term Artificial Intelligence had predicted that ten years later (that is, around 1966) we would have programs capable of performing perfect translations between any two human languages and playing chess better than the world champion. And this would only be the beginning. We would soon be able to build machines capable of behaving with equal or more intelligence than man. The old dream of building artificial men would have come true.

Science and hate for religion: a personal anecdote

John McCarthy

Since 1995, Internet has become an almost indispensable tool for many people. Our society is increasingly dependent on the global data network, which means that we are increasingly vulnerable. A solar flare, a large meteorite, an overload of energy networks, a major war, can endanger our social structure, making it impossible to use Internet.

In the late 1980s, Internet was just a fledgling network linking together private companies, whatever their hardware and software. In fact, it was one among many networks competing for the new ecological-social niche. One of the most important of these networks was BITNET, which linked all the universities in North America using IBM computers. Later, a parallel network was created in Europe, called EARN, which was soon connected to BITNET.

Fred Saberhagen versus the Turing Test

Alan Turing

In 1950, the English mathematician and chemist Alan Turing tried to define the conditions so that it would be possible to affirm that a machine is capable of thinking like us. For Turing, this will be achieved when the machine is capable of deceiving human beings, making them think that it is one of them. This test is called the imitation game. I have talked about this in a previous post in this blog.

In 1956, Arthur Samuel of IBM built a program to play the game called draughts or checkers. The program kept information about the moves in the games it had played, which was used to modify its future moves (in other words, it learned). In a few years, after playing many games, the program was able to defeat its creator and played reasonably well in official championships.

That same year, during a summer course held in Dartmouth College, John McCarthy and other computer pioneers coined the term artificial intelligence. Getting their hopes too high, they predicted spectacular advances for the next ten years, which did not take place in the time envisaged, but much later. I have also written about this in another post.

In 1963, science fiction writer Fred Saberhagen published the first story of his famous series about the berserkers, autonomous and intelligent space fortresses created by an ancient extraterrestrial civilization to exterminate intelligent life wherever it appears in the galaxy. This story, titled Without a thought, is an answer to the Turing Test and a brake to the unbridled hopes of the inventors of the term artificial intelligence. This is the plot of the story:

What is artificial intelligence

Hal 9000, from the film 2001 a Space Odyssey

Terms such as smart and artificial intelligence are being abused lately. Let’s look at some recent news that have appeared in various media:

• Smart benches with solar energy free mobile charge, and access to Wi-Fi. These public street benches, installed in London by Ford, incorporate a Wi-Fi repeater and a solar plate that gives them power to charge a mobile phone battery. Where is the intelligence in the bench? Nowhere. The intelligence belongs to the human being who invented these devices. In a similar case, we would be saying that our houses are smart because they have electricity and an Internet connection.
• China implements smart trash cans. In this case the waste bin also incorporates a solar panel connected to a mobile phone charger. In the future they will also have a Wi-Fi repeater and a device to disinfect the garbage with ultraviolet rays. As in the previous case, the mere presence of an electrical or electronic device is confused with intelligence.
• Goodyear tests a tire that predicts when it must be changed. The tire has a built-in wireless sensor that detects when it needs to be replaced and issues the corresponding warning. Although this case is somewhat more complex than the previous two, something is again called smart when it isn’t. To implement this, you just need a sensor and a simple electronic device, more or less equivalent to those radio devices that since decades have been incorporated to wild animals, to follow their displacements and watch their activities.

As you can see, what is now called smart is just what was formerly called automatic. But of course, the word smart is more appealing, that’s why it’s being abused. In the same way, there is a tendency to call artificial intelligence what formerly was called computer science.

Automatic translation

John McCarthy

In a famous summer course that took place at Dartmouth College in 1956, the term artificial intelligence was applied for the first time to all those computer programs that perform tasks traditionally considered exclusively human, such as playing chess and translating from one human language to another. Those attending the course, led by John McCarthy, felt optimistic enough to predict that in ten years those two problems would have been completely solved. Thus, they hoped that by 1966 there would be programs capable of defeating the world chess champion, and others that would translate perfectly between any two human languages.

In March 1961, my uncle, Felipe F. Moreno, then chief of Spanish translators at the headquarters of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, wrote in the ITU magazine an article on machine translation and how it could affect human translators, which proves that the question was hot. Shortly afterwards, when the deadline announced by the artificial intelligence forerunners had been reached, with both problems far from being solved, it was obvious that they had been overly optimistic.

We know that the goal of writing a program that would defeat the world chess champion was met in 1997, when Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the champion in that year. The other problem, machine translation, was even more difficult. At the end of the sixties the following anecdote was well-known in the computer-programming world: