On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 8:03 AM, Logan Streondj <[email protected]> wrote: > Most high ranking developers cost around $60 an hour, that's almost $50,000 a > month. > that's why most of the estimates of how much an AGI project would cost, > quickly escalate into the millions and billions.
Isn't it ironic that a project that could theoretically automate all human labor, currently $70 trillion per year, can't get funding? Are investors really betting that its odds of success are worse than the lottery? It all seemed so promising. From http://opencog.org/roadmap/ we have, working back to the present: 2021-2023: Advanced self improvement. Investigation into goal stability in constrained environments. 2019-2021: Full-on human level AGI. 2017-2018: AGI experts: artificial scientist, robotic helpers, virtual assistants. 2015-2016: Advanced learning and reading: integrating research papers with experimental data. 2013-2014: A complete integrated proto-AGI mind: robotic control, experimental language learning. The reality is that every year, students from Google's Summer of Code are filled with ideas and enthusiasm because they get to work on a real AGI project. Then they are handed a mountain of unfinished and buggy code. By the end of the summer, all they have accomplished is the realization that the code doesn't do anything useful. Welcome to the reality of big software projects. To summarize, OpenCog consists of the following components: - DeSTIN, a neural vision system. - MOSES, an evolutionary learner that generates programs to fit training data. - ReLex and Natgen, a rule based parser and sentence generator. - AtomSpace - a complex knowledge representation structure with about 100 different types. AtomSpace is supposed to tie all of the components together. Right now they exist as separate programs written in different languages. That's been the case for several years now. There is some work being done now in integrating RelEx (Java) into AtomSpace (C++). DeSTIN and MOSES appeared very promising when they were graduate research projects several years ago, but to this day they only work on toy problems. Doing anything significant with them would probably require vastly greater computing power. There is currently no research being done on language learning or statistical modeling. There is no work being done in robotics. There has been some work done on distributing AtomSpace across multiple processors, which was mostly a failure. AtomSpace does not scale usefully beyond a single thread. There is no knowledge base, nor any plan to build one as far as I know. Most of the development work in the last couple of years has been on fixing things that break when a dependency is changed, like new libraries or new compiler versions. Simply installing it and getting it to run is a bear. And then there really isn't much you can do with it. It is really just a programming language for a program that they plan to write someday. People are really bad at predicting costs of major projects, especially software. The way that most people estimate lines of code is to take their available funding and divide by $100 per line. Maybe you can do better if you compare your program to something of similar complexity already written. For AGI, that would be your DNA. If you compress it, and compare it to the compressed size of typical code, it comes out to 300 million lines, or $30 billion. Ben, of course, does not believe any of my estimates, especially my claim that the software is such a tiny fraction of the total cost as to be insignificant. Code is easy to copy. The big costs will be hardware and human knowledge collection, the bits that make each of us unique. I've argued all that before and don't need to rehash it. OpenCog is going nowhere. -- -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
