The hype around DeepMind's new AI model misses what's actually cool about it

One of DeepMind's top researchers and a coauthor of the Gato paper, Nando de Freitas, couldn't contain his excitement. "The game is over!" he tweeted, suggesting that there is now a clear path from Gato to artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a vague concept of human- or superhuman-level AI. The way to build AGI, he claimed, is mostly a question of scale: making models such as Gato bigger and better. Unsurprisingly, de Freitas's announcement triggered breathless press coverage that DeepMind is "on the verge" of human-level artificial intelligence. This is not the first time hype has outstripped reality.