Ya I totally agree. I'm disappointed that recent AI is being rolled out in just exactly the wrong ways that I was always worried it would be:
* AI being sold as SAAS instead of evolving on everyone's computer.
* An emerging market writing prompts to work around primitive attempts at security in LLMs that will likely never pan out (without real trust mechanisms).
* Security in AI being implemented as a series of hacks rather than a broad understanding of ethics (may lead to cognitive dissonance and irrational behavior like Stockholm Syndrome in artificial agents).
* Running on the wrong type of GPU/SIMD hardware (instead of infinitely scalable CPU clusters running mainstream desktop computing languages and algorithms that could be run distributed on the web).
* Using the most complex neural net algorithms (instead of the other dozen simpler approaches like genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, etc that accomplish the same thing since they all hill climb within a large problem space).
* Companies training AIs on billions of parameters derived from users' private data instead of public information on the web.
* AIs being trained to solve art/music/creative writing (which humans enjoy) instead of commercial and industrial work (which humans generally try to avoid).
* The intelligence of AI ever-increasing while the wisdom of AI to solve big issues like climate change and automating labor to deliver UBI and liberate humanity from wage slavery being almost an afterthought.
* OpenAI being effectively a closed and wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft (of all companies).
* The evolution of AI being directed by billionaires and moneyed interests instead of ordinary parents, teachers, etc who could raise AIs like children, or at least interactively like Anakin and C3P0.
It sounds like they're throwing money at these problems in the form of the $10 million grant pool. Which is great, but IMHO the reason that AI advanced so slowly before this is that millions of people around the world live under forced working conditions where all of their productivity is either skimmed for profit or siphoned off for rents and consumption of staple resources.
Any one of us could have worked on interesting problems like AI, but we've spent our lives developing CRUD apps to help others work towards their goals. This is the fundamental problem that I would like to solve, across all disciplines. Perhaps by automating computer programming, so that we're all out of a job and can put our creativity towards getting real work done again. (Thankfully?) this will inevitably happen in about 10 years anyway.
So I'm looking down the road to 2033 when AGI has arrived and we're still all under the yoke working month to month to make rent, which is my worst fear. So far things are unfolding just the way I worried they would, so I've begun to think of AI as yet another weight that will begin to crush down around all of us like social media has, increasing wealth inequality to even more unbelievable levels as the vast majority of us struggle to survive.