If we start going to the exact specifics of what makes them different then yes, there are reasonable grounds for why GPT-3 would be expected to genuinely be more of an advance than SHRDLU was. But at least as described in the post, the heuristic under discussion wasn’t “if we look at the details of GPT-3, we have good reasons to expect it to be a major milestone”; the heuristic was “the audience of a horror movie would start screaming when GPT-3 is introduced”.
If the audience of a 1970s horror movie would have started screaming when SHRDLU was introduced, what we now know about why it was a dead end doesn’t seem to matter, nor does it seem to matter that GPT-3 is different. Especially since why would a horror movie introduce something like that only for it to turn out to be a red herring?
I realize that I may be taking the “horror movie” heuristic too literally but I don’t know how else to interpret it than “evaluate AI timelines based on what would make people watching a horror movie assume that something bad is about to happen”.
If we start going to the exact specifics of what makes them different then yes, there are reasonable grounds for why GPT-3 would be expected to genuinely be more of an advance than SHRDLU was. But at least as described in the post, the heuristic under discussion wasn’t “if we look at the details of GPT-3, we have good reasons to expect it to be a major milestone”; the heuristic was “the audience of a horror movie would start screaming when GPT-3 is introduced”.
If the audience of a 1970s horror movie would have started screaming when SHRDLU was introduced, what we now know about why it was a dead end doesn’t seem to matter, nor does it seem to matter that GPT-3 is different. Especially since why would a horror movie introduce something like that only for it to turn out to be a red herring?
I realize that I may be taking the “horror movie” heuristic too literally but I don’t know how else to interpret it than “evaluate AI timelines based on what would make people watching a horror movie assume that something bad is about to happen”.
Seems like he basically admits the thing was a fraud: