For all of our mastery of information processing, our ability to fabricate and motivate fine differentiated structures is really quite incredibly poor relative to biology. The little beetle is basically alien technology relative to the toy. But add in the fact that it can feed itself, repair itself and reproduce itself with a system that can scale 3-5 orders of magnitude up and down based on need is pretty mindblowing.
The mRNA vaccines might be one of the first times where we've leveraged biology to directly fabricate a discrete part with desired properties. Certainly in raw tonnage of output I can't think of anything that comes close. I feel like this is only going to advance with time, to the point where we may be growing robots instead of milling and printing them.
You have a room sized super computer that trains for zillions of hours and can’t even pick out pedestrians with especially good precision.
Then you have a bee with a minuscule brain that can do complex pattern recognition to find flowers, complex manipulation to get nectar and pollen out of them, object avoidance, swarming behaviour, and fancy communicative dances (both performing and interpreting), plus all the other stuff bees do to get by in the world.
Something is up there for sure.
Still, my position is that NO progress has ever been made in the area of AI, and no progress will be made any time soon.
I'll take it a step further (in case I don't get enough downvotes for what I've written so far). I maintain that you CAN NOT build intelligence. You can only TAP INTO it. So the very direction in which all of our AI efforts are headed is a dead-end.
I wouldn't go exactly this far, but I would say that whatever process might exist to create artificial intelligence, it might be closer to gardening than to engineering.
My vague feeling is that there might be some sort of (non-supernatural) "mysterious" component to intelligence that we won't be able to engineer and that might just emerge under the right circumstances.
In that case we would just have to "grow" AI, without being completely sure that our effort will work.
While not squirrel level, this impressed the heck out of me: https://ashish-kmr.github.io/rma-legged-robots/
Isn’t that what alpha go or the StarCraft league are? Organic strategies in well-defined contexts (action options of the squirrel at Tn)? “Squirrel” is a nice reference frame.
That was the original intent, but it appears the dropped it before public demos.
But if you want it control a robot that's going to bring out a pot of tea while you play, you'll be wiping the floor.
A reasonable first step would be autonomous small cheap drones, but I can't say what their missions would be. AlphaStar and Openai Five are mentioned elsewhere here, and these demonstrate that the problem isn't unapproachable.
There probably isn't enough confidence yet to arm autonomous drones, or there isn't a meaningful tactical purpose.
As I've said for years, the big lack in AI is in the "common sense" and unstructured manipulation area. Nobody can build something with squirrel levels of manipulation and agility, even in simulation. Robot manipulation in unstructured situations is still very poor. The people trying to simulate C. elegans at the neuron level can't get that to work, despite a full wiring diagram and years of effort.
Something very low level is not understood. There's a Nobel Prize waiting for whomever figures that out.