We seek to foster a community centered around the exchange of AI knowledge, with the idea that the creation of AI technologies should be the result of collective input from diverse individuals.
Over the past decade, AI has been receiving an increasing amount of attention, including from businesses and goverment institutions around the world and, most recently, even from Church. As a result, the field of AI has also received a significant amount of funding. Despite the enthusiasm and progress made in narrow domains due to advances in compute, algorithms, and the availability of data, we have yet to develop anything resembling general-purpose intelligence. There are differing forecasts for the timeline of this development, ranging from the next five years to 2050, or more conservatively, within the next 100 years. At the same time, there is a significant amount of uncertainty surrounding all these estimates.
Against this backdrop, there are suggestions that the current approach of scaling neural networks for specialized tasks will not be sufficient to deliver general-purpose machines. The field of AI has been heavily reliant on a single wave of technological advancement, namely, deep learning, which has led to a lot of enthusiasm about this method. While recently the introduction of large language models to the public has opened up many opportunities for businesses and individuals, the technologies that might have a substantial societal impact, such as social robots helping to care for the elderly, are currently largely unavailable.
What is the way forward? What techniques and engineering approaches, as well as conceptual ideas, can bring us closer to developing truly intelligent AI? How can we combine these ideas and engineering approaches in order to maximize our chances of success? And how can we ensure that the development of general-purpose AI systems does not internalize power inequities?
These are crucial questions that need to be addressed as we move forward with the development of AI. By trying to propose answers to these questions, we can better ensure that we are taking an inclusive approach to AI development that benefits the society at large.