The metaphors of artificial intelligence.

A few months after ChatGPT was released, the neural network pioneer Terrence Sejnowski wrote about coming to grips with the shock of what large language models (LLMs) could do: "Something is beginning to happen that was not expected even a few years ago. A threshold was reached, as if a space alien suddenly appeared that could communicate with us in an eerily human way.…Some aspects of their behavior appear to be intelligent, but if it's not human intelligence, what is the nature of their intelligence?"

The Turing Test and our shifting conceptions of intelligence.

"Can machines think?" So asked Alan Turing in his 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Turing quickly noted that, given the difficulty of defining , the question is "too meaningless to deserve discussion." As is often done in philosophical debates, he proposed replacing it with a different question.

Debates on the nature of artificial general intelligence.

The term "artificial general intelligence" (AGI) has become ubiquitous in current discourse around AI. OpenAI states that its mission is "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." DeepMind's company vision statement notes that "artificial general intelligence…has the potential to drive one of the greatest transformations in history.

How do we know how smart AI systems are?

In 1967, Marvin Minksy, a founder of the field of artificial intelligence (AI), made a bold prediction: "Within a generation…the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will be substantially solved." Assuming that a generation is about 30 years, Minsky was clearly overoptimistic. But now, nearly two generations later, how close are we to the original goal of human-level (or greater) intelligence in machines?