A great interview! Good job, Nick! :) It's nice that a respected researcher and entrepreneur throws the truth to the face of those highbrows...
I've tried, too, but nobody listen until I get a prototype that's creative, speaks, understand language etc. as Nick says. I'd add related reflections of mine related to the problems he discusses in AI/NLP: A Start-up or a PhD? - that is the question<http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2008/08/start-up-or-phd-that-is-question.html> http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2008/08/start-up-or-phd-that-is-question.html What's wrong with NLP? http://research.twenkid.com/agi_english/Whats_wrong_with_NLP_links.htm Part II http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2009/03/whats-wrong-with-natural-language.html Thursday, April 21, 2011 GAI and GAI Conferences and "AI: A Modern --Sorry-- Post-Mortem Approach"<http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2011/04/gai-and-gai-conferences-and-ai-modern.html> http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2011/04/gai-and-gai-conferences-and-ai-modern.html (...) -- The following generation of researchers base their work on the work of the previous ones. Again... Sure, this is science. It should be like that. Of course the state-of-the-art should be known. And one should use the knowledge, accumulated in the past. However, I think the efforts spent on this is should be dosed. Instead of imaging and testing new approaches, most of the time typical NLP researchers do study bibles with models which are proven to lead to very painful and slow progress. (...) It is not easy to state: "I think this is a wrong approach, let's find another one!", especially if you are young. Most researchers accept "this is correct, because - quote prof. A, prof. B... They are from University C, which has the most publication in journals D, E and F, which are ... (Oops, there are no Nobel prizes in NLP). Anyway - therefore, this is the best, because it is quoted there and has 89.95% in this measure, which is accepted by.... Also, the paper suggests 94.34% in the test of "interrelated multipart tagging of coverage structures" etc., so this is real!." and so on. Or they just want to have their PhD now, and the easiest and fastest way is to fetch a topic from the mainstream and do it the way it is done - these topics are... In Bulgarian it's called "Dissertabilni" - acceptable for a PhD. But mainstream is supposed to be behind the cutting edge. So I'll say it again: The reason why so many researchers are doing the same research and progressing so slowly is that they do assume that the others with higher status are right, and base their "original" research too much on it. They do not imagine wildly enough. The same trivial, not original, not really inventive research, dealing with the old obvious parameters and items, supposed to be "the right ones".... (...) *"The importance of Artificial Intelligence in Portugal is visible by the number of PhDs (over 100), the sheer number of researchers ..."* Good... I'm not saying this for the first time, like for example about the "MEXICA" "creative" framework. *Sorry, but what the h* are all these PhDs doing? Hundreds, thousands, 10s of thousands researchers are supposed to be working on "GAI" projects full-time. Thousands of human-months work. Results? Real things?* Real things and progress is actually coming from non-PhDs, such as formally electrical engineer and neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins, or mathematics and physics PhDs [not CS/AI], such as M. Hutter, J.Schmidhuber and B. Goertzel. (...) Dear respectful high status scientists and directors - give us results, please. Pretentious pedantically written PhD theses and a large number of publications or citations are meaningful status-symbol per se mostly in the pretentious environment of the scientific conferences and non-specialists surrounding where the only mean for the others to recognize how big researcher you are is to count your publications and citations or how high you are in the science status - PhD student, PhD, Post-Doc, .... (...) ...If you manage to reach to a fundamental or feasible discovery/theory and have a basis for an impressive PhD, then you may have the ability to create a company and directly realize your ideas into a product which can go to the market, bring you new funding and allow you to do more research... (...) If you have your ideas and topics and you want to do a PhD, you first need to find a University with the appropriate research direction, which might happen be hard or impossible... I don't think it's a good idea to do any PhD, I would select it with attention. If you find a right place, it is possible that what you develop during your studentship would not be your-property, and if you develop something really promising, it might be a disadvantage, you may expose your ideas to more powerful authorities that can steal your idea and create the product before yourself. Finally, while doing a PhD you are supposed to demonstrate that you can perform significant research and contribution by yourself, etc., while if you are in a company, you can freely collaborate and potentially scale your R&D team. In the same time, finding of funding in the early stages of projects is a hard task and it is likely that during a PhD you will lay the milestones of the future development... Capital... Of course, if you don't have funding, you can't found a start-up... You need to do something for a living and you're eating up the time for the real R&D. So doing a PhD, even not the "dream one" may help you to concentrate on research. *Success or Failure PhD paradox * If you have an ingenious project, it is likely to find funding even without a PhD. If you have a project and a basis which are not impressive enough and is yet only of Academic interest or sounds impressive only to scientists, then you're supposed to do a PhD... So if you sort of fail [or you're not ready yet], you go to a PhD to get a higher formal degree and eventually direct to Academia or in the meantime you reach to something better. * If you succeed early, then a PhD is not required for your future success, your capability to do "self-guided significant blah-blah-blah" is obvious. * ** Todor "Tosh" Arnaudov ** *-- Twenkid Research:* http://research.twenkid.com -- *Self-Improving General Intelligence Conference*: http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2012/07/news-sigi-2012-1-first-sigi-agi.htm<http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2012/07/news-sigi-2012-1-first-sigi-agi.html> *-- Todor Arnaudov's Researches Blog**: *http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com From: Ben Goertzel <[email protected]> > To: OpenCog Hong Kong Project <[email protected]>, opencog < > [email protected]>, [email protected] > Subject: Re: Interesting interview with Nick Cassimatis about his new AGI > startup, and the limitations of modern academia... > Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2012 10:12:13 +0800 > This quote from the interview nicely summarizes why academia sucks as > a venue for making AGI progress... > *** > Since our goal is to actually identify mechanisms that are powerful > enough to achieve human-level intelligence, the best way we have of > proving that our theory is correct is to actually implement it and > show it actually understands language at a human level. It’s actually > surprisingly difficult to get research like this published and > supported within normal academic communities because they are more > interested with smaller, incremental results that can be precisely > quantified. It is very difficult to get academic papers about complex > systems published in the quantities you need to thrive in academia. > ... one of the problems with academia today is that one’s career > progress is disproportionately linked to bringing in money (almost > always government money). When one asks oneself how to best ensure > getting a grant, the answer is invariably, “Keep doing more of > whatever got money before.” > *** > On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 10:08 AM, Ben Goertzel <[email protected]> wrote: > > > http://www.forbes.com/sites/markchangizi/2012/11/09/for-siris-new-competitor-skyphrase-academia-isnt-big-enough-for-ai/ > > > > -- > > Ben Goertzel, PhD > > http://goertzel.org > > > > "My humanity is a constant self-overcoming" -- Friedrich Nietzsche -- ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-c97d2393 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-2484a968 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
