My big bet on the future of AI: Verbal parity
&quot;&quot;&quot;
Summary:<p>While everyone is focused on the question of when will general artificial intelligence come to be, there’s another milestone that will probably come earlier- verbal parity.<p>By verbal parity I mean roughly the ability of a computer, given a string of text, to respond with another string of text as well as a typical human could (weak parity) or to respond as well as a human from the relevant profession could (strong parity). This comes without a presumption that the computer can do things normally attributed to general AI- perception, motor coordination, playing even a simple real-time computer game, etc.<p>Although in some respects verbal parity can be seen as an extension of the Turing test, thinking of it too much through that framework might be a trap.<p>There are reasons to think that verbal parity could come well before we currently expect AGI to come. If the current rate of advance is sustained, we can even imagine it happening in a very brief time (5-15 years). The implications of verbal parity would be enormous. These include the automation of a vast swathe of jobs, and, just possibly, a singularity.<p>If verbal parity comes before general artificial intelligence, that changes the strategic landscape around the control problem, although how it changes it is difficult to say.<p>Verbal parity might be nearer than general artificial intelligence, and that likely makes the control problem worse because it gives us less time to solve it.<p>Currently, missing components of verbal parity from the best models include a capacity for ongoing learning without finetuning and a larger window size.<p>Predictions are included at the end, even though, in general, I hate making predictions I’m making them here is a kind of publicity effort.
&quot;&quot;&quot;