“AI” may be too broad of a category, though. As an analogy, consider that there is currently a huge demand for programmers who do all kind of website development, but as far as I know, this hasn’t translated into an increased number of academics studying—say—models of computation, even though both arguably fall under “computer science”.
Similarly, the current wave of AI may get us a lot of people into doing deep learning and building machine learning models for specific customer applications, without increasing the number of people working on AGI much.
It’s true that there is now more excitement for AI, including more excitement for AGI. On the other hand, more excitement followed by disillusionment has previously led to AI winters.
“AI” may be too broad of a category, though. As an analogy, consider that there is currently a huge demand for programmers who do all kind of website development, but as far as I know, this hasn’t translated into an increased number of academics studying—say—models of computation, even though both arguably fall under “computer science”.
Similarly, the current wave of AI may get us a lot of people into doing deep learning and building machine learning models for specific customer applications, without increasing the number of people working on AGI much.
It’s true that there is now more excitement for AI, including more excitement for AGI. On the other hand, more excitement followed by disillusionment has previously led to AI winters.