When you're on that curve, it's indistinguishable until you hit the plateau. We're in an era where AI is continuing to improve and has already surpassed a level that many people doubted was achievable. Nobody knows when that progress will plateau. It's entirely possible that we plateau _after_ surpassing human-level intelligence.
If you have actual data you can take the derivative of the curve and see you're on the S curve with a lot of confidence by the time you hit the middle and long before the plateau: https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*6A3A_rt4YmumHusvTvVTxw.png
Exactly correct. We really don't know if the progress is exponential or like a Sigmoid squashing function. You just changed my opinion, a bit, on this.
The AI technology today has practical value for some use cases but it's basically just clever parlor tricks. There has been near zero discernable progress toward artificial general intelligence. We don't yet have a computer that can learn and make optimal resource usage decisions in an open world environment as well as a mouse. In most respects we're not even at the insect level yet.
Yes Excel has more features today. So what? We're still not making any measurable progress towards true AGI. We don't even know what the development path or ultimate goal looks like except for some vague hand waving about passing the Turing Test.
I work for a company that provides "ai" services in a "boring" domain. The Time saved and accuracy (for a legally audited result) we provide is quantifiable, and when I saw the numbers I was surprised. So while a lot of the "AI" hype is stupid marketing bs, some of us are actually doing real stuff, it's not just parlor tricks. You might also be surprised in how many domains a small improvement has huge yield in terms of raw money and/or quality of life improvements.
