As a theoretical/computational chemist my understanding of AI is very limited, I only know basic methods of machine learning and neural networks in order to figure out accurate parameters related to forcefields and such. AI is a completely different beast, one that I thought we were seeing the first glimpses of when ChatGPT was released before Christmas. Having spent some hours toying with it, I can only assume how many heavy filters were placed and dogwhistles were programmed that will prevent anyone from getting interesting results. Sure, I asked it some questions like "What's the nth digit of pi?" or "Give me 10 statements while only one of them is a lie", all of which were responded back to incorrectly. Not to mention that the program also just blatantly makes up stuff when it can't answer your question.
I'm absolutely convinced this program can do a ton, but because we are in the very early stages of AI right now the developers don't know how to program it in a "controlled" way yet. It's being held back and most likely for good reason considering the malicious things one could do with such a powerful tool; it's basically Tony Stark's AI Jarvis. I'm also convinced it will take uhhhh.... about 30 years maybe until we will see an AI with properties actually approaching some kind of sentience similar to humans?
Maybe more than 30 years but if I were a betting man I wouldn't say any earlier than that, even when taking the quadratic growth of such technology into account.
You’re right that ChatGPT isn’t “intelligent” in a human sense but it’s basically a giant statistical engine predicting the next word. The mistakes we saw aren’t because of filters but because it has no built-in math/logic engine, and filters mostly just stop unsafe outputs.
What’s often overlooked is the energy side: training one large model can use megawatt-years of electricity, comparable to running a small town. Even inference (just answering questions) at global scale eats huge amounts of power. So the bottleneck isn’t just “when do we reach sentience,” but whether scaling laws + energy demands make it sustainable.