Hey Azn,

Of course I would take US$100M or even US$20M personally, even if it
required me to work for the company that paid the $$ for 3 years or
whatever [a common sort of requirement] ...

However, I don't currently have the sort of company that a Google or
Facebook would want to buy....   Deep Mind had ~60 machine learning
programmer/scientists, colocated, with fancy pedigrees -- and they put a
lot of work into making working demos that would impress folks like Google
execs (e.g. video game playing by reinforcement learning & computer vision,
which is not fundamentally hard but requires lots and lots of fiddling to
be surely).... And they worked up to that acquisition via taking $$ from
Silicon Valley insiders (Peter Thiel's Founders Fund) and cultivating
associated relationships..

Vicarious Systems has a similar, though far smaller team, and also had
Founders Fund $$; and also put a lot of work into making the right kind of
working demo .. in their case solving the CAPTCHA problem....  Again,
solving CAPTCHA is not incredibly hard given a deep learning computer
vision system, but it's a long road of fiddling and tweaking given current
technology...

Neither company had/has a great near-term biz model, but both were well
primed for tech biz acquisitions

Point is, grooming a company for potential acquisition or investment by
Silicon Valley types is a specific quest that takes time and special
effort.   It's not a bad path to take.  But it's not the case that these
companies just want to buy any high-quality AI team (and I emphasize the
team because IMNSHO Deep Mind was mainly an acqui-hire); they tend to work
thru their own social networks; etc.

Since I don't have a company of the sort these firms like to buy, my
opportunity regarding such firms would be to get one of them to make a job
for me, and a suitable fraction of my OpenCog colleagues, working on
OpenCog type AGI software.   Most of these companies like proprietary code
so they would probably want us to make a proprietary fork of OpenCog and
integrate with their own internal software systems.   While there would be
no multimillion dollar hiring bonus, there would be the option for a large
personal $$ payout if we made our software do something of value to that
firm a few years down the road....  And of course there would be the option
to convince that big company to progressively put more and more $$ into
said proprietary OpenCog fork...

If I didn't have other interesting options available that might be an
appealing path for me and some of my colleagues.  It's not impossible I
would take that route.  Yet I tend to be a free spirit; I like to be able
to work from home and to travel freely, and to talk freely about what I
do....  And I have a strong intuition that it's better to make AGI in the
open source way, drawing insight from a wide group of folks around the
world with various backgrounds...

If my work with Aidyia Limited, a HK hedge fund I've co-founded, goes well,
then I can make enough $$ myself to fund OpenCog at a level that will
eliminate the need for megacorporate sponsorship.  But of course financial
prediction is risky even with machine learning algorithms on your side, and
work on that application takes time that could be spent on AGI...

And so it goes in early 2014...

;)
Ben




On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 1:50 PM, Azn A <[email protected]> wrote:

> Interesting, but how is selling some of your low level work forcing you
> into a megacorporation? You can probably walk away once the deal is done
> right? With what, $100 million? You say you would only need $60 million to
> get an AGI..
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 10:38 PM, Ben Goertzel <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>> Eventually there will be an AGI that is far beyond human control.  But
>> before that, there will be a gradual path of increasing AGI, when the
>> relationship btw humans and AGIs will be more complicated.    Having this
>> intermediate-stage AGI guided primarily via corporate motives of short-term
>> profits, seems unwise to me...
>>
>> Also, it seems better if all the smart minds in the world can collaborate
>> on creating AGI, not just the few who happen to have been hired by some
>> particular company
>>
>> Joel Pitt and I made these arguments in more detail at
>>
>> http://jetpress.org/v22/goertzel-pitt.htm
>>
>>  Linux demonstrates that OSS can go as far and fast as in-house projects
>> at big companies (or more so), if things fall into place right...
>>
>> -- Ben
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 1:33 PM, Azn A <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> Ben Goertzel wrote:
>>> > I would prefer to make AGI open source, not within a megacorporation..
>>>
>>>
>>> Why? It's like not the AGI can be controlled or whatever...
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 10:28 PM, Alan Grimes <[email protected]>wrote:
>>>
>>>> Ben Goertzel wrote:
>>>> > I would prefer to make AGI open source, not within a
>>>> megacorporation...
>>>>
>>>> Got detailed build instructions for Linux?  I really need to know what
>>>> the status of your project is right now and my only usable computer is a
>>>> linux machine.
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> IQ is a measure of how stupid you feel.
>>>>
>>>> Powers are not rights.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>
>>
>> --
>> Ben Goertzel, PhD
>> http://goertzel.org
>>
>> "In an insane world, the sane man must appear to be insane". -- Capt.
>> James T. Kirk
>>
>> "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free
>> our minds" -- Robert Nesta Marley
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-- 
Ben Goertzel, PhD
http://goertzel.org

"In an insane world, the sane man must appear to be insane". -- Capt. James
T. Kirk

"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our
minds" -- Robert Nesta Marley



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