AI Has Been Surprising for Years

Excerpt:  “What cognitive tasks can humans do that AI systems can’t? For many years—up until roughly a decade ago—it was easy to answer this question. There are basic tasks that most humans can do with very little effort, but that AI systems weren’t able to do comparably well, such as identifying an object from an image, listening to speech and writing down the corresponding text, and resolving basic linguistic ambiguities. But over the last few years, it’s been a very different situation. As discussed below in detail, AI systems now match human performance on long-standing benchmarks for image recognition, speech recognition, and language understanding, and while there are questions about reliability of the benchmarks, none of these three broad capabilities are considered major challenges for AI anymore.” (footnote omitted)