An epic AI Debate--and why everyone should be at least a little bit worried about AI going into 2023

What do Noam Chomsky, living legend of linguistics, Kai-Fu Lee, perhaps the most famous AI researcher in all of China, and Yejin Choi, the 2022 MacArthur Fellowship winner who was profiled earlier this week in The New York Times Magazine--and more than a dozen other scientists, economists, researchers, and elected officials--all have in common? They are all worried about the near-term future of AI. They are all worried about different things. Each spoke last week at December 23's AGI Debate (co-organized by Montreal.AI's Vince Boucher and myself). No summary can capture all that was said (though Tiernan Ray's 8,000 word account at ZDNet comes close), but here are a few of the many concerns that were raised: Noam Chomsky, who led off the night, was worried about whether the current approach to artificial intelligence would ever tell us anything about the thing that he cares about most: what makes the human mind what it is?