How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

From the article:

> “Bad things could happen because of either the misuse of AI or because we lose control of it,” says Yoshua Bengio, a deep-learning researcher at the University of Montreal, Canada.

God, I hate phrases like this. We've already lost control of it. We don't have any control. AI will evolve in the rich medium of capitalism and be used by anyone due to its ease of use and even laws will be unable to restrict that. At this point, since we've set up a system that promotes technologies regardless of their long-term cost or dangers, we simply cannot control them. Bad things are already happening and human beings are being integrated into a matrix of technology whose ultimate purposes is just the furthering of technology.

Even people like Dr. Bengio are just pawns in a system, whose purpose is just to present an artificially balanced viewpoint as if there were a reasonable set of pros and cons, designed to make people think that we could "lose control" but with the right thinking, we don't have to let that happen. I mean come on, just suppose for a second the hypothesis of "AI is already out of control". If Dr. Bengio and their colleagues acknowledged that, then they'd be out of a job. So just by evolutionary pressure on "organizations that monitor AI", they have to be artificially balanced.

Wikipedia has better culture. Shadow libraries and private trackers have more culture than you may need in a lifetime.

Is there a distinction between LLM’s and AI, or do we consider LLM’s to exhibit intellect?

I remeber Sam Altman pointing out in some interview that he considers GPT to be a reasoning machine. I suppose that if you consider what GPT does to be resoning, then calling it AI is not so far fetched.

I feel it’s more like pattern recognition though rather than reasoning, since there’s no black box ”reasoning” component in an LLM.

Not to call into question your experience, but for gauging this anecdote: what sorts/levels of experts and how many have you been speaking with?

As a thought exercise, on one hand the technology's purpose is having no purpose at all, just doing what it was made to do. So I'd rather focus on the technology people, where some develop it for the sake of developing, and others want to extract most money possible out of it. Nothing surprising because capitalism, but now there's a real possibility that the AI owner(s) will extract all the money there is. And I have no idea how our society will function then - until now rulers always needed subjects... We try building guardrails in laws and regulations exactly because we don't know where all this can lead, but as even today humans find ways to circumvent laws I expect the AI finding ways around its guardrails as well (with human help for sure). Thus sooner or later we will unavoidably come to that point where we have no idea what's gonna happen, and that's when usually unrest peaks.