With all due respect, I think your perspective is both limited and narrow minded. Games are how we as humans develop in adolescence. They are incredibly powerful tools in helping us through the process of learning how to learn.
All the model architectures and machine learning techniques that have been developed through the playing of these games, exponentially increasing in difficulty from Go to Starcraft, can be directly applied to real life tasks.
What is life anyways if not just a superset of sets of games to be played? Optimizing the output of a protein structure designed for chemical catalysts, teaching a car how to get from point A to point B while navigating a rule based obstacle emplaced environment, etc, etc. All merely simple games, and yet filled with pretty much infinite possibility.
Underestimate the power and potential of machines learning to play at your own folly.
That entire reply is a great example of "vague connections to AGI".
I hope this AI hype cycle ends soon and funding gets diverted from tech to actual science in the medical field. But I guess that's unlikely. I see no obvious evidence for AI/ML etc to be less of a speculation hype than the already deflating self-driving car hype.
I don't doubt that ML will have its practical application given the amount of effort that is currently put in to it, but I do think it is wildly inflated. Not to mention that the spectrum of what kinds of software that counts as AI seem to get wider for every week.
That the AI hype is more or less entirely confined within an already hyped tech industry doesn't seem to me like a coincidence. An AI revolution hellbent on figuring out how intelligence works would surely include other fields than just tech?
All the model architectures and machine learning techniques that have been developed through the playing of these games, exponentially increasing in difficulty from Go to Starcraft, can be directly applied to real life tasks.
What is life anyways if not just a superset of sets of games to be played? Optimizing the output of a protein structure designed for chemical catalysts, teaching a car how to get from point A to point B while navigating a rule based obstacle emplaced environment, etc, etc. All merely simple games, and yet filled with pretty much infinite possibility.
Underestimate the power and potential of machines learning to play at your own folly.