Why general artificial intelligence is a myth?

Welcome back to the podcast! Today we are diving into a thought-provoking new paper titled 'AI Must Embrace Specialization via Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence' by researchers including Judah Goldfeder and Yann LeCun.If you follow the tech world, you hear the term AGI—Artificial General Intelligence—thrown around constantly by executives, doomsayers, and politicians. But this paper argues that our entire obsession with AGI is fundamentally flawed because it relies on the illusion that human intelligence is 'general'. The authors argue that humans aren't actually general intelligence engines at all; we are highly specialized creatures who were honed by evolution to master a very narrow set of skills required for survival.Instead of chasing the myth of AGI, the authors propose a new North Star for the field: Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence, or SAI. Rather than trying to build a single, monolithic AI that can do literally everything, SAI focuses on adaptability—specifically, the speed at which an AI can learn and master new, important tasks. As the authors brilliantly put it: 'The AI that folds our proteins should not be the AI that folds our laundry!'.This paper makes a compelling case that to push the boundaries of technology, we need to abandon our human-centric biases and lean into specialized models powered by self-supervised learning and world models. Let's get into it!"