A reality check for seemingly unstoppable progress in AI

The big picture: For the past 5 years, Elon Musk and others have warned of a future disaster resulting from unchecked superintelligent AI. But today, much of the field is caught in a rather more elementary tug-of-war over which avenue will imbue AI even with the capacity for basic understanding. Since the field took shape in the 1950s, artificial intelligence has advanced in fits and starts, with various tribes claiming the vanguard at different points. The current period began in the early 2010s, when a trio of researchers in Canada brought AI out of a decadeslong funk by reviving deep learning, aided by new and powerful hardware. Now, some of those same pioneers are warning against leaning too heavily on their contributions, and researchers with one foot in adjacent fields are sounding an increasingly insistent alarm about AI's trajectory.