In Deepak Pathak’s telling, nobody is building human-level artificial intelligence with language alone. You could train a large language model on billions of descriptions of gravity, but it would never conceptualize it, since it has never experienced the real world. Train it with every physics textbook on earth, and it still can’t visualize what happens when you drop a ball from your hand. With this natural limitation, it hallucinates.
Pathak, a Carnegie Mellon professor and former Meta AI researcher, suggests that today’s leading AI research labs are perhaps too focused on building artificial general intelligence — AI with human-level thought and dexterity — via raw data and compute.