Most of the book was written in 2020 or earlier, which makes it ancient in terms of technical advances and social recognition of AI concerns. I would say that the paragraph is correct as of the date of writing, where it talks about the non-technical articles generally circulated in the media at the time.
For example, not even GPT-2 is mentioned until page 422 of the book, possibly written later than these background chapters. The “success stories” for deep learning on the previous page refer mostly to Siri, Alexa, progress in ImageNet benchmarks, and AlphaGo. They refer to self-driving cars with full autonomy as being “not yet within reach”. Anything written in the present tense should be interpreted as being back when GPT-2 was new.
Their statements are less true now, and it is possible that the authors would no longer endorse those paragraphs as being true of the current day if brought back to their attention. By now I would expect them to be aware of the recent AI safety literature including technical publications assessing safety of current AI systems in ways that present counterexamples to multiple statements in the second paragraph without any reference to sentience.
Most of the book was written in 2020 or earlier, which makes it ancient in terms of technical advances and social recognition of AI concerns. I would say that the paragraph is correct as of the date of writing, where it talks about the non-technical articles generally circulated in the media at the time.
For example, not even GPT-2 is mentioned until page 422 of the book, possibly written later than these background chapters. The “success stories” for deep learning on the previous page refer mostly to Siri, Alexa, progress in ImageNet benchmarks, and AlphaGo. They refer to self-driving cars with full autonomy as being “not yet within reach”. Anything written in the present tense should be interpreted as being back when GPT-2 was new.
Their statements are less true now, and it is possible that the authors would no longer endorse those paragraphs as being true of the current day if brought back to their attention. By now I would expect them to be aware of the recent AI safety literature including technical publications assessing safety of current AI systems in ways that present counterexamples to multiple statements in the second paragraph without any reference to sentience.