AI is overhyped, OpenAI knows it, and we can all see it

Extremely smart take by Julia Angwin on the most recent Pivot podcast regarding how generative AI players, like OpenAI, have hyped the market up for a technology that isn’t actually even close to ready (emphases mine):

The [AI] companies… did themselves a disservice by coming out with this technology and saying “it’s so good… the main concern here is that it’s actually going to take over the world and kill humans.” When you start with that level of hype it’s actually really hard to walk back to where it can barely answer a question accurately. I’m sure it seemed like a great marketing strategy at the time because it did make [AI] seem so sexy and dangerous…

I honestly think that OpenAI disbanding their [safety] team is a little bit of an acknowledgement, like “that isn’t actually the issue we’re facing here right now. We are actually facing the fact that it’s kind of unreliable, it’s not consistently accurate, and we have to kind of solve those problems.”

It’s not that “AI” tools are useless. They have some uses, of course.

It’s that Sam Altman and the sycophantic tech press have been hyping this to a degree that no technology could sustain. “Artificial General Intelligence” is nowhere on the horizon today, just as it was 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and 20 years ago.

You can hear Angwin’s comments on the Pivot podcast here: https://overcast.fm/+OwaLbGX-U/48:20