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Notes -
Drawing straight lines on graphs, then zooming off to infinity rarely works well. In 1995 computers could barely play chess. In 1997 they beat the best player in the world. But that was hardly a harbinger of imminent AGI as we now know. AI basically went back in the cupboard for a few decades.
This is an interesting timeline. I'm assuming you're talking about general AI playing Pokemon and not just task-specific ones (which can already play it flawlessly, e.g. TAS's) which wouldn't be interesting. I'd say there's a 50-50 chance there's a general AI that can play Pokemon like this in 3 years.
In 1995 computers could kick your ass in chess, unless you are a pretty good player who studied their algorithmic weaknesses -- indeed I'll bet my Vic-20 could kick your ass at chess in 1980. AIUI for a long time their improvements (including things like DeepBlue) were mostly driven by better compute and memory availability -- I guess there's some interesting parallels with neural networks there. But the thing about chess programs is that there's sort of a plateau -- you can only be so good at chess. AI takeoff theory hinges on this not being the case for general intelligence -- which I don't think has been adequately proven.
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