Andrew... [changed the thread name]
On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 10:37 PM, Andrew G. Babian <[email protected]>wrote: > > So to throw something somewhat more positive out there, I just looked at > the website of the people working at Google Research. They've got > literally tons of people in areas like machine perception, AI, machine > learning, machine translation. It does give me the feeling that there are > people, and with enough plugging, they will eventually get AGI as just a > natural progression. Of, course, I think they field and the stuff they use > has some missing bits, but that's just me. You all can tilt at all the > windmills y'all want, but they have money and talent at a level we can't > approach. > I have visited Google Research in Mountain View a number of times, and I know a bunch of researchers there fairly well... Of course their staff are intelligent and talented and so forth.... And they are well paid and have a lot of data and computing resources. I don't think their staff are supernaturally talented or anything like that.... Some of the folks I am working with on AI, in Hong Kong and Addis Ababa, are every bit as talented and clever as the Google Research staff.... Silicon Valley does not have a monopoly on brilliant tech talent, though they may well have the world's best publicists ;-) ... In the end, only a very miniscule portion of the resources of Google -- or any other current large tech company -- is oriented toward AGI in any direct or semi-direct way. When AGI is pursued within these firms, it's currently in teeny-tiny skunkworks projects.... And these skunkworks projects tend to get quasi-randomly dissolved when corporate priorities change (e.g. Sam Adam's now-dormant Joshua Blue AGI project at IBM; some previous Google AGI skunkworks projects I know about via personal commmunications...) So, consider the two possibilities: A) A large company with a teeny skunkworks AGI team, plus a lot of smart guys working on other projects peripherally related to AGI B) A small team working outside any large company or institution, with uncertain but non-zero funding, but focused directly on AGI ... Is it really so obvious that A is going to get to the end goal before B? I don't think so.... Based on general common sense, it seems either one is possible.... There is, of course, a scientific question here: Whether AGI can be achieved by basically integrating a bunch of components created for non-AGI purposes, with some sort of relatively simple "AGI controller" layered on top of it.... I personally don't think this can work. I think that even if the **ideas** underlying a bunch of narrow-AI components are sufficient to guide the creation of modules of an AGI system, in actual practice, the way narrow-AI systems are written generally precludes their integration into an AGI framework.... Integrating components into an AGI framework generally requires allowing each component to infuse knowledge and guidance into the others at a deep level, and generally narrow-AI software is not designed or coded to allow this; and redesigning a piece of narrow-AI software in such a way requires a lot of deep thinking as well as hard engineering.... I have been involved with this sort of work a lot... Finally, and hopefully without being insulting to anyone, I would like to point out that the folks who post on this list are not remotely representative of the community of "AGI researchers unaffiliated with large corporations." .... The folks who choose to spend a lot of time reading and writing on AGI e-mail lists form a quite particular sub-population. On average, they tend to have fewer professional qualifications and less funding for their work, than plenty of other AGI researchers out there... For instance, I think Kris Thorisson at Reykjavik University is making a real stab at AGI, as are the guys at Deep Mind in the UK (Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg etc., with funding from Founders Fund).... Dileep George is making his own effort, and will be keynoting at AGI-13 in Beijing.... So is Itamar Arel at U. Tennessee Knoxville (currently working on adding action & reinforcement to his deep learning perception system). There are plenty of others. These guys (like me) are not working for Google or M$ or IBM for a reason.... We have probably all been recruited by these firms repeatedly (I know I have), but prefer to pursue our own visions rather than being directed by corporate bosses, even though this means we will have a lot less funding and a lot more hassles.... Note that none of these other guys are on this email list... I myself find I have little time to pay attention to this list lately, because I'm spending half my time working on AGI, and half my time working on income-generating (and hopefully eventually wealth-generating) narrow-AI stuff (principally the application of machine learning and NLP to financial prediction). I think this list serves a useful purpose, in that someone who is utterly new to the AGI field can sign up and quickly find others with a common interest.... But please don't assume that it reflects the state of the art in non-big-corporate AGI projects !! -- Ben Goertzel (list founder, and former list administrator...) ------------------------------------------- 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
