Comment by EGreg

Next up, claims of ...

  Text generation without human writers
  Image generation without human artists
  Video generation without production crews

The rub is that all the training data has been done by lots and lots of search, human writing, human artists, and human production crews. At every step, they curated the results and generated a beautiful latent space that the model was then trained on.

The impressive part about AlphaZero is that it did the Monte-Carlo Tree Search itself, without being trained on human decision-making.

While this ... well, this is just taking credit for all the search and work that was done by Stockfish, or humans, at a massive scale over centuries and then posted nearly for free online. It's then using all that data and generating similar stuff. Whoop de doo. Oh, and it's even used cheap labor for the last mile, too:

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

It's not the same thing as actual search to, for example, automatically derive scientific laws (e.g. Kepler's laws of motion) from raw data fed to it (e.g. of star movements). AI doing that can actually model the real space, not the latent space. It can go out and learn without humans or stockfish massively bootstrapping its knowledge.

I mean, don't get me wrong ... learning a lot about the latent space is what students strive to do in schools and universities, and the AIs are like a very smart student. In fact, they can be huge polymaths and polyglots and therefore uncover a lot of interesting connections and logical deductions from the latent space. They can do so at a huge scale... and I have often said that swarms of AIs will be unstoppable. So at the end of the day, although this isn't very impressive when it comes to the credit of who did the search and curation, AI is going to be extremely impressive with what it can do with the results on the next N levels.