But how long did it take Nature to get from a mammal with mouse-level intelligence to a human-level brain. I think 200-ish million years [0].
You might be right that a mouse is a good indicator of high-level intelligence and that you don't need human-level intelligence to make a good AI, but there might still be some considerable way to go until we have an AI that can significantly outperform us.
[Edit - I agree that natural selection wasn't aiming or directed, and thus wasn't forced to be as fast as we could be. But a human's higher brain functions might not be simple incremental improvements over a mouse's, and there could still be a long way to go]
How long did it take nature to go from T-Rex to chickens?
There’s no reason to believe human level intelligence to be an inevitable result of evolution. It just happend.
Not that I agree with the sentiment in the GP, but it took a relatively short time from the first development of multicellular life until nervous systems developed and an even shorter amount of time to go from small mammal intelligence to human intelligence. However, evolution isn't about "progress" as we understand it. The most we can say with regards to intelligence and evolution is that human intelligence satisfied a niche that existed at a certain place and time.
So I think the estimate of 3-5 years might be realistic, but the artificial mouse is a long way away, IMO.
I'm not sure creating an intelligence that even supercedes our own will lead to anything good. If anything I'd expect things to get even more perverse.
Evolution took a billion years to evolve multi-cellular life, but the jump from apes to humans took far less than a million years.
And we can't reliably extrapolate growth in computing power more than a few years into the future. It's possible that the curve isn't really exponential, but rather an S-curve which will eventually flatten out.
I'm more comfortable predicting that computing power will continue to grow than to predict that it will peter out and everyone will simply sit back and be happy with what we've got.
I didn't say we're pushing up against the limits of processing power, I said that processing power is not growing exponentially, which is true, despite the gains that other advancements and innovation have provided.
We're moving faster than Moore's Law, see "Hyper Moore’s Law":
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/256558-nvidias-ceo-dec...
Why? What challenges?
Can you make a Turing Ant without a Turing Ant Colony?
Done.
For context, the worm (c. elegans, at least) has a very stereotyped nervous system with 302 neurons. The anatomy, down to the cellular level, is known incredibly well. Their behavioral repertoire is not huge and they're fairly easy to study. Nevertheless, we can't even simulate a worm very accurately. (There was a good twitter thread about why yesterday: https://twitter.com/OdedRechavi/status/1086992699528544256)
The human eyeball has about 120M rods, 6.5M cones, and projects to a brain containing ~86B neurons, which is about 8-9 orders of magnitude more cells. The number of possible interactions scales even faster. In summary, we're not close, not at all....
However I have to object in a way about the brain. To me, there's an unanswered question: Is the rest of the human brain as simple and "generic" as the convolutional neural networks we made inspired by the vision system? Or is each networks' architecture and "algorithms" developed specifically for a task? In the latter case we might still be a very long way from anything resembling AGI.
However my personal estimation is that most of the things we do can be modeled using existing tools when scaled and modified appropriately (ie RNNs). There's also the ugly job of stitching those systems together, but it's not that different from what happens in nature.
(parallel arguments but for human/mouse level complexity of bodies and stimuli responded to would suggest that whole brain emulation is going to be an incredibly painful way to attempt to achieve AGI)
It has those things[1]. There’s a video of its simulated body wiggling around on the project’s github repository.
[1] except possibly food, I was skimming the page.
In other words, the simulated worm brain is not yet even capable of causing the wiggling seen in the video. So the question remains, what can the simulated neurons do, f anything?
Saying we don't have mouse level AGI is simply saying human AGI is greater than 5 years away, which isn't a remotely contentious statement.
The difference in intelligence between an amoeba and a mouse is enormous compared to a mouse and us. People greatly under appreciate how intelligent and close to human a mouse/bird/pig are in the grand scheme of things. Emotions, behaviors, motivations, goal setting, memory it's all there already. A flat worm, an ant, a fly - those are the large stepping stone accomplishments.
Think about rate of very long distance communication in humans. It took us tens of thousands of years to get to 2.4 kps dial up modems, and only few decades to get to common 300Mbps. The important signal is seeing a 100bps modem, not a 100Mbps connection.
So the real question is how long until we can replicate a worm's intelligence?