I've been wondering about Open Source versus Proprietary for a bit of time now.
It appears to me that many companies develop an open source product, then offer
paid support and perhaps an Enterprise version of the product which is
proprietary.I think this is true nowadays of Cassandra, MongoDB, and a few
other products.
I have an new language for AI which I'm trying to figure out how to position.
It's called Premise, and I'm using the language to build the PAM P2 system.
More info at: http://piagetmodeler.tumblr.com
Premise is like "lisp lite" + a Knowledge Base. It's part declarative, part
prototype, and part functional language. It's advantage is that all objects are
persisted, this enables logical and similarity based pattern matching over the
objects in memory. (Imagine a rule based system without the inference engine,
then throw in easy to use asynchronous and concurrent function calls, and easy
to use client / server messaging).
The group is debating whether to only sell and at what price, or to give away a
"free" Community version, and charge for support and the "Enterprise" version.
The fear is thata free Community version will never generate any real sales on
support on the Enterprise version.
Your Thoughts?
~PM
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 07:46:51 -0700
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [agi] Elon Musk And Mark Zuckerberg Have Invested $40 Million In a
so called Artificial Intelligence Company
To: [email protected]
I wonder if the argument over open source vs proprietary is a little too
simple. Instead the model should be more like Lucene/Solr is for
Search/Information retrieval where there is a core open source architecture but
much of the algorithms and processing extending that architecture is done by
proprietary companies. There's a relationship then between open source and
proprietary that is mutually beneficial. When it makes sense to push expansions
from companies back to core then it can be done so, to the benefit of the
larger community. The open source community can focus on maintaining and
expanding the core
architecture and functionality, while companies can still make money off of
applications that they develop.
It seems like for AGI-ish work, it'd be beneficial to have that type model
where there's very simple APIs that can be used by individuals for specific
applications, like game-AI or NLP. The core APIs can then be extended for
proprietary applications, or if it maks sense then those extensions can be
pushed back to the core open source community.
Not trying to criticize OpenCog. I've read most of the first draft of BBM and
largely agree with the overall ideas. It's just so hard to use and get
introduced to. There's no straightforward API that others can use to build
applications and easily
get into the system.
-Chris
On Saturday, March 22, 2014 6:13 AM, Ben Goertzel <[email protected]>
wrote:
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 $$; and also put a lot of work into making the right kind of working demo
.. in their case solving the CAPTCHA problem.... Again, solving CAPTCHA is not
incredibly hard given a deep learning computer vision system, but it's a long
road of fiddling and tweaking given current technology...
Neither company had/has a great near-term biz model, but both were well primed
for tech biz acquisitionsPoint is, grooming a company for potential acquisition
or investment by Silicon Valley types is a specific quest that takes time and
special effort. It's not a bad path to take. But it's not the case that
these companies just want to buy any high-quality AI team (and I emphasize the
team because IMNSHO Deep Mind was mainly an acqui-hire); they tend to work thru
their own social networks; etc.
Since I don't have a company of the sort these firms like to buy, my
opportunity regarding such firms would be to get one of them to make a job for
me, and a suitable fraction of my OpenCog colleagues, working on OpenCog type
AGI software. Most of these companies like proprietary code so they would
probably want us to make a proprietary fork of OpenCog and integrate with their
own internal software systems. While there would be no multimillion dollar
hiring bonus, there would be the option for a large personal $$ 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...;)BenOn 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
companyJoel 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...
-- BenOn 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.
-------------------------------------------
AGI
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/10514698-9a8cda1e
Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
AGI | Archives
| Modify
Your Subscription
-- Ben Goertzel, PhDhttp://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
AGI | Archives
| Modify
Your Subscription
AGI | Archives
| Modify
Your Subscription
-- Ben Goertzel, PhDhttp://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
AGI | Archives
| Modify
Your Subscription
AGI | Archives
| Modify
Your Subscription
-------------------------------------------
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
