This take is widely prevalent in every single ChatGPT discussion.
I'll quote myself for discussion for a previous article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34746348
> I've find two groups of people on this subject, first one has taken a graduate level stat course and/or ML course, and may have work experience in machine learning/data science. The latter camp is more numerous and did not do those things.
> The latter group are far more hyped about ChatGPT et al, despite explanation by the first group.
> Don't get me wrong, ChatGPT is very exciting, just not in the way it is frequently portrait to be, in particular, development on this model will not lead to General Intelligence, which is not a data training/stat problem altogether. With how the ML field is shaping up to be today, it doesn't even look to be a Machine Learning problem.
And let me just add a ridiculous comparison, since you are assuming that it is a path towards AGI:
> iPhone 4 isn't fusion energy. It's incredibly useful and a tectonic shift in the cellphone industry, but it's not producing energy. The analogy might sound completely insane, but that's how different machine learning of today and general intelligence is.
While AI of today feels like a blackbox, at every stage of its training we know to a degree what it is doing, and once trained, it is as deterministic as a few billion interconnected if else connected to a random seed generator. It could do a lot of things, acquiring a mind of its own isn't one of it.
I wouldn't be worried just yet, because AGI is something that research have barely had an idea on how it's going to look outside of our brain, or even inside. I'm not saying that it will never come, just that I highly doubt it will be invented in my lifetime. In the meanwhile, I have something that all of bots today won't have, initiative.