I feel that you are missing the whole point of "AI breakthroughs that will soon kill us all and need regulation". It's not about AI becoming self-aware and start to proactively taking over humanity starting from a Dota game, it's how we are finally capable of putting AI anywhere.
The point Elon Musk was trying to show is that nowadays, we have the technology and the research to replace humans by AI for making judgement calls, no matter how difficult it is. And this was proven with a "simple" game of Dota. And if we are able to build a system to play Dota, we are also able to build AIs for anything at all.
You claim that there had not been any real breakthroughs over the past years but truth to be told, today we have AI playing Go, AI managing self driving systems, AI playing games of Dota against the top players. All of this happened over the last few years, 5 years ago this all felt like a distant future.
"nowadays, we have the technology and the research to replace humans by AI for making judgement calls, no matter how difficult it is"
"if we are able to build a system to play Dota, we are also able to build AIs for anything at all"
These are stated like facts, but are not facts.
There are decisions made by humans which no AI system today can make well, and there are problems for which we have no idea how to build even mediocre AIs. The claim that someday we will have AGI is plausible but not yet certain to be true.
"There are decisions made by humans which no AI system today can make well, (...)"
Exactly, that is precisely the point. Companies and business will just rush to implement the next big neural network to boost their business, no matter how immature the technology is.
And the claim is not about AGI, it's more about the little things. For some reason people like to think really big and exaggerated scenarios when it comes to AI.
Let's take web apps as an example. We can all agree that the state of the art of the current web programming is very poor: JavaScript, NodeJS, Electron, CSS, etc. The technologies are bloated, they are slow, full of hacks and workarounds, and so on. And yet... people use them for everything, it's like the Atwood's law described: "any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript"
I imagine that a similar scenario will happen with AI and neural networks. Can you imagine, for example, start dealing with an AI instead of an human when it comes to customer service? Maybe it is already happening, if you look for stories about Google's customer service in the internet, you would think everything is run by some sort of AI there.
I wouldn't be surprised if they built a neural network to feed all that data to and to have it to produce a UX "optimized" for mass consumption.
We are getting into a time in which everything will be powered by "AI" and I think that's what OpenAI is trying to regulate before we get every single business pestered with an half-assed implementation of neural network and data analytics.
> AI playing games of Dota against the top players
This example weakens your argument. As TFA explains, the bot can only play a very restricted version of Dota - much simpler than chess - which means it was thinkable ever since the '90s, when Deep Blue beat Kasparov.
The point Elon Musk was trying to show is that nowadays, we have the technology and the research to replace humans by AI for making judgement calls, no matter how difficult it is. And this was proven with a "simple" game of Dota. And if we are able to build a system to play Dota, we are also able to build AIs for anything at all.
You claim that there had not been any real breakthroughs over the past years but truth to be told, today we have AI playing Go, AI managing self driving systems, AI playing games of Dota against the top players. All of this happened over the last few years, 5 years ago this all felt like a distant future.