I believe the comment is referring to beliefs that certain achievements like beating humans at chess and go, tagging objects in images, etc. were all at one point another considered to be AI and impossible feats. And each time one of those previously unattainable achievements is completed, critics regard it as "Well that's not true artificial intelligence, its just dueling GAN's that got really good at go". Meaning that once a breakthrough in ML is reached, there are some that move the goal posts of what is an achievement of AI

People do tend to do that. But it's really their mistake of how they define AI to begin with, saying "considered to be AI and impossible" instead of "we didn't invent yet an a good Chess algorithm".

We will not reach AI for anything else than super tight bounded contexts like playing chess or drivning a car.

It's not AI imo. It's a trained model that will never be able to evolve outside those tight boundaries.

And that is because, which is really simple, we don't really have any clue of how the brain works, technically. And besides that, the impact which environments has on the brain.

Why no one is talking about this being a huge driver for Microsoft Azure and what Microsoft as a company will gain from this, baffles me a little. Not sure i like it.

They’re referring to the “AI effect”, where every new development in (narrow) AI causes an equal and opposite shifting of the goalposts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

Many, many human-level benchmarks on narrow AI tasks have been passed in recent years. https://www.eff.org/ai/metrics

So, the “well that’s not intelligence, it’s just computation” arguments can continue until it reaches “well that system isn’t conscious, so it’s not AI”. That argument holds no water, since intelligence != consciousness.

I believe they are claiming that things are "AI" or "Impossible for AI" until AI actually does them, in which case, the goalposts get moved. See: DeepBlue, AlphaGo, GPT-2.

Can you provide sources for this? Like, how many people thought chess or go were literally impossible for computers to play at superhuman level? I'm actually curious about the history, and I don't want us to accidentally attack a straw man.

To me, the fact that Turing wrote the first chess program in the 1950s suggests that people thought computers were capable of playing chess. It doesn't seem too great a leap to imagine that they'd be open to the idea that a supercomputer could play superhuman chess.

It humors me, that we still talk about playing chess when we talk about socalled AI.

That's how long we've come. Playing chess. On a superhuman level. Wow. What is superhuman anyways?

No one shifted the goal post whatsoever in those cases. We've had computers that could beat humans in video games, and board games for decades. Improving those so they could beat better players was not thought to be impossible.

The same goes for writing text articles. Go on any /r/politics thread you'll surely see bots writing text that does a good job of convincing people that it was human written. So slightly, or even significantly, improving those is not something that people doubted would be possible.