The hype around DeepMind’s new AI model misses what’s actually cool about it

Nature is trying to tell us something, but the field is so sure of itself that it cannot see that.

When I asked de Freitas' DeepMind colleagues about his claims, they were more circumspect. They wouldn't be drawn on whether Gato was heading towards AGI. I try not to. It's like predicting the stock market.

Reed said the question was hard to answer. It's hard to predict, but hopefully we get there someday.

The fact that DeepMind called Gato a generalist might have made it a victim of the hype around AGI. The artificial intelligence systems of today can only do a limited set of tasks, such as generating text.

Some technologists, including at Deepmind, think that one day humans will be able to function as well or even better than artificial intelligence. Some people call this intelligence. Many top researchers, such as Meta's chief artificial intelligence scientist, question whether it is possible at all.

Gato is a generalist because it can do many different things at the same time. That is a world apart from the general Artificial Intelligence that can adapt to new tasks that are different from what the model was trained on.

Making models bigger won't address the issue that models don't have lifelong learning because they don't have it.

The hype around tools like Gato is harmful for the general development of artificial intelligence, argues a researcher who is part of the Black in AI organization.

The president of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation says that tech companies need to take a closer look at why they are building.

“AGI speaks to something deeply human—the idea that we can become more than we are, by building tools that propel us to greatness,” he says. “And that's really nice, except it also is a way to distract us from the fact that we have real problems that face us today that we should be trying to address using AI.”