I think the “secret sauce of intelligence” view is looking worse and worse, as is the “village idiot to Einstein is no gap at all view.”
Is it looking worse and worse? We’ve seen repeatedly, with chess, Go, Atari games, and now Diplomacy, AIs going from subhuman, to human, to superhuman levels in relatively short periods of time. Years, in most cases. Months in some.
The “village idiot to Einstein” argument is about the relative length of the “subhuman—village idiot” and “village idiot—Einstein” transitions. It predicts that the latter should be vastly shorter than the former. Instead we usually see computers progressing fairly smoothly through the range of human abilities. The fact that the overall transition “subhuman—superhuman” sometimes doesn’t take very long is not directly relevant here.
From your link:
Is it looking worse and worse? We’ve seen repeatedly, with chess, Go, Atari games, and now Diplomacy, AIs going from subhuman, to human, to superhuman levels in relatively short periods of time. Years, in most cases. Months in some.
The “village idiot to Einstein” argument is about the relative length of the “subhuman—village idiot” and “village idiot—Einstein” transitions. It predicts that the latter should be vastly shorter than the former. Instead we usually see computers progressing fairly smoothly through the range of human abilities. The fact that the overall transition “subhuman—superhuman” sometimes doesn’t take very long is not directly relevant here.