A Man Out to Prove How Dumb AI Still Is

Summary

Deep down, Sam Altman and François Chollet share the same dream. They want to build AI models that achieve “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI—matching or exceeding the capabilities of the human mind. The difference between these two men is that Altman has suggested that his company, OpenAI, has practically built the technology already. Chollet, a French computer scientist and one of the industry’s sharpest skeptics, has said that notion is “absolutely clown shoes.”When I spoke with him earlier this year, Chollet told me that AI companies have long been “intellectually lazy” in suggesting that their machines are on the path to a kind of supreme knowledge. At this point, those claims are based largely on the programs’ ability to pass specific tests (such as the LSAT, Advanced Placement Biology, and even an introductory sommelier exam). Chatbots may be impressive. But in Chollet’s reckoning, they’re not genuinely intelligent.Chollet, like Altman and other tech barons, envisions AI models that can solve any problem imaginable: disease, climate change, poverty, interstellar travel. A bot needn’t be remotely “intelligent” to do your job. But for the technology to fulfill even a fraction of the industry’s aspirations—to become a researcher “akin to Einstein,” as Chollet put it to me—AI models must move beyond imitating basic tasks, or even assembling complex research reports, and display some ingenuity.Chollet isn’t just a critic, nor is he an uncompromising one. He has substantial experience with AI development and created a now-prominent test to gauge whether machines can do this type of thinking. For years, he has contributed major research to the field of deep learning, including at Google, where he worked as a software engineer from 2015 until this past November; he wants generative AI to be revolutionary, but worries that the industry has strayed. In 2019, Chollet created the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence, or ARC-AGI—an e...