"Natural Intelligence Winter" is the wrong descriptive term for the advent of a technology that sucks all the oxygen out of the room and diverts natural intelligence away from a technical area that had a "summer". Take, for example, the phrase "neural winter" aka "neural network winter":
The most recent "neural network winter" came about after the "second neural network summer" was terminated by support vector machines sucking all the oxygen out of the room in the 1990s, and was revived only when Moore's Law conspired with first person shooter games to produce matrix multiply hardware in the form of GPUs so that Hinton et al could initiate the "third neural network summer" that "let a thousand flowers bloom" (really, just pick up where NNs were circa 1990, if not repeat the work of the late 1980s as Schmidhuber often rightly points out much to the embarrassment of the field). Minsky and Papert initiated the "first neural network winter" with their addendum in the book "Perceptrons" that initiated a "symbolist summer" until Charles Sinclaire Smith -- who had been struggling to model the macroeconomic dynamics of the energy economy for the DoE as he cofounded its Energy Information Agency -- got his hands on the Systems Development Foundation's endowment and financed the "second neural network summer". The LLMs are just the new Support Vector Machines, sucking all the oxygen out of the room. For a related view on this problem read Sara Hooker's paper: The Hardware Lottery <https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06489> On Sun, Aug 6, 2023 at 10:41 AM <ivan.mo...@gmail.com> wrote: > Considering late AI success, is there a possibility we are entering > natural intelligence winter? > > On a few forums I'm involved with (LTU, aiDreams), researches seem to be > less interested and enthusiastic about their own AI projects. It almost > seems like they gave up all the excitements and thrills of scientific or > hobby research just because of GPT-X and company are shaking the current > webscape. Traffic on those forums significantly decreased lately, and I'm > wondering are we actually entering an NI winter? > *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T469692845b7d2d7e-Md7654b655014266cccd19f26> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T469692845b7d2d7e-Mee011357d8923758ec41e251 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
