Can today's AI truly learn on its own? Not likely

One of the boldest, most breathless claims being made about artificial intelligence tools is that they have “emergent properties” - impressive abilities gained by these programs that they were supposedly never trained to possess. “60 Minutes,” for example, reported credulously that a Google program taught itself to speak Bengali, while the New York Times misleadingly defined “emergent behavior” in AI as language models gaining “unexpected or unintended abilities” such as writing computer code.