Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
The distance between &quot;sort of works&quot; and &quot;works&quot; for AI is considerable. Not infinite.<p>Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM&#x27;s Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had off-road driving on empty roads working. Then there were a few experimental self-driving cars that sort of worked on general roads. Many startups, most went bust.<p>Today you can take a driverless cab in San Francisco. 64 years since GM&#x27;s Firebird III.
(Which still exists, in driveable condition, in GM&#x27;s in-house collection.)<p>It may take a while to get from GPT-3 to Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0. But the path is clear now.