I very much doubt there will be a Hollywood-movie-event when "company X developed true AI" will be in the news. I think it's more likely that more and more algorithmic building blocks as well as computational power gradually become available, and that humanity collectively gets closer to AGI capabilities.
Many of the algorithms that are making headlines theses days are decades old. It seems to me that we just crossed some computational power threshold a couple of years ago that made it possible to produce qualitatively better results with the algorithms that we already knew about. There wasn't any qualitative break-through -- just years and years of small incremental improvements, both on the computer science and hardware fronts -- and there won't be a "monopoly of AI". That is industrial-era thinking. AI is not like railways, light bulbs or power plants.
On the other hand, I am worried that all the hype currently surrounding AI could lead to a second AI winter. The media cycle and investors seems to have terribly low attention spans, and are prone to lose interest as easily as they become hyper-excited.
The AI winter was caused to a large extent by the hardware of the day not being powerful enough to do much that was useful. That seems less likely to be a problem this time around.
From what I've read, the winter was caused by complete lack of direction. No one knew how to even approach the problems. This doesn't seem to have changed at all.
We're getting some practical multi billion dollar products this time like self driving cars. That didn't happen the first time around - you couldn't build that sort of stuff with the 1970s computers.
That is true, but those products have little to do with OP is talking about. Self driving cars are using nothing more than a calcullator. A very sophisticated one, for sure, but it a calculator nonetheless. It is dubbed "AI" because it sounds sexier.
Yeah but the AI winter was mostly a period of low funding for AI due to disappointment at the research in the 70s and 80 not producing useful products. No one then was expecting human level intelligence but they were hoping to get some return on investment.
Many of the algorithms that are making headlines theses days are decades old. It seems to me that we just crossed some computational power threshold a couple of years ago that made it possible to produce qualitatively better results with the algorithms that we already knew about. There wasn't any qualitative break-through -- just years and years of small incremental improvements, both on the computer science and hardware fronts -- and there won't be a "monopoly of AI". That is industrial-era thinking. AI is not like railways, light bulbs or power plants.
On the other hand, I am worried that all the hype currently surrounding AI could lead to a second AI winter. The media cycle and investors seems to have terribly low attention spans, and are prone to lose interest as easily as they become hyper-excited.