There’s a popular mistake these days of assuming that LLMs are the entirety of AI, rather than a subfield of AI.
If you make this mistake, then you can go from there to either of two faulty conclusions:
(Faulty inference 1) Transformative AI will happen sooner or later [true IMO] THEREFORE LLMs will scale to TAI [false IMO]
(Faulty inference 2) LLMs will never scale to TAI [true IMO] THEREFORE TAI will never happen [false IMO]
I have seen an awful lot of both (1) and (2), including by e.g. CS professors who really ought to know better (example), and I try to call out both of them when I see them.
You yourself seem mildly guilty of something-like-(2), in this very post. Otherwise you would be asking questions like “how quickly can AI paradigms go FROM obscure and unimpressive arxiv papers that nobody has heard of, TO a highly-developed technique subject to untold billions of dollars and millions of person-hours of investment?”, and you’d notice that an answer like “5 years” is not out of the question. (See second half of this comment.)
There’s a popular mistake these days of assuming that LLMs are the entirety of AI, rather than a subfield of AI.
If you make this mistake, then you can go from there to either of two faulty conclusions:
(Faulty inference 1) Transformative AI will happen sooner or later [true IMO] THEREFORE LLMs will scale to TAI [false IMO]
(Faulty inference 2) LLMs will never scale to TAI [true IMO] THEREFORE TAI will never happen [false IMO]
I have seen an awful lot of both (1) and (2), including by e.g. CS professors who really ought to know better (example), and I try to call out both of them when I see them.
You yourself seem mildly guilty of something-like-(2), in this very post. Otherwise you would be asking questions like “how quickly can AI paradigms go FROM obscure and unimpressive arxiv papers that nobody has heard of, TO a highly-developed technique subject to untold billions of dollars and millions of person-hours of investment?”, and you’d notice that an answer like “5 years” is not out of the question. (See second half of this comment.)
I’m not sure how you define “imminent” in the OP title, but FWIW, LLM skeptic Yann LeCun says human-level AI “will take several years if not a decade…[but with] a long tail”, and LLM skeptic Francois Chollet says 2038-2048.