Hi Matt, As all these issues have been discussed in prior email threads w/ you, I don't want to take time to go into great detail; but I'll give some quick responses just to ensure your questions don't mislead any newbies on the list ;)
A few points -- There have been a number of publications about OpenCog work since the 2009 one that you cite. Anyone who cares could find them online fairly easily; most have my name on them and my name is not so common... -- We are well aware that it would be beneficial to OpenCog to have a compelling demo of AGI-ish functionality. We're working on it. It's complicated to do stuff within a general intelligence architecture, much more so than to build a task-specific system. -- The current OpenCog implementation does not scale to a massive number of machines. However, OpenCog applications have been built using around a half dozen machines in a distributed network. A design exists for a more broadly distributed OpenCog system, but has not been implemented yet, see http://wiki.opencog.org/w/DistributedAtomspace if you're curious -- Looking at financial successes like Deep Mind and Vicarious Systems and saying "see, you should have done what they did", is a bit like looking at a lottery winner and saying "see, you should have bought a lottery ticket!!" ..... There have been lots of other solid AI companies with interesting demos (including many with more solid business models than Deep Mind or Vicarious), which happened not to hit it big financially, often largely for circumstantial reasons. I don't resent these guys who got a lot of $$ for their projects due to a combination of good work, good salesmanship and good luck; but nor do I assume that copying their methodology is necessarily the best idea. -- Getting a lot of $$ is certainly helpful for achieving success in AGI or any other technology venture. OTOH, having a workable design is also important, and probably more important... -- As far as investment in OpenCog goes, note that it's not a commercial company, so it won't necessarily be appealing to investors who want to put $$ into for-profit firms with a focus on getting ROI. With an investment like Vicarious, investors can think "Well, if they don't achieve AGI, at least if they crack computer vision well enough they can get a profitable exit via selling their proprietary vision IP and team to Facebook or whomever." That kind of story doesn't work as well in terms of getting funds for an open source project... -- Bear in mind, Linux has been worked on for something like 70,000 man/hours. OpenCog has absorbed dozens of man-hours, and building a thinking machine is likely harder than building an OS. I suspect OpenCog can be completed in merely 100s of man-hours rather than 1000s (well aware of the mythical man-month phenomenon, etc. etc.), but still, doing this sort of thing is simply a lot of work given the current state of technology, even if one's design is good. ... Anyway: yeah, our plan is to achieve demonstrable behavior impressive enough to A) drastically increase volunteer programmer contributions, B) bring in a couple million US in funding for OpenCog as an OSS project ... and then, using A and B, bring the project to a sufficiently impressive point that getting large masses of volunteers & $$ is no problem... We shortly (2-3 weeks?) plan to release a new version of the OpenCog game world AI system, along with a TODO list aimed at wannabe OpenCog volunteer contributors ... with a goal of soliciting more people to help us push OpenCog to said "impressive demonstrable behavior"... -- Ben G On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 6:37 AM, Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 10:06 PM, Ben Goertzel <[email protected]> wrote: >> The goal with OpenCog is not to outdo CNNs or statistical MT on the >> particular problems for which they were developed. The goal is to >> address general intelligence... > > I realize that AGI should be able to do everything that the human > brain can do. I should be able to ask OpenCog to translate text to > another language, recognize faces in pictures, drive a car, or play > Jeopardy, and it would do it. I just wonder how you are addressing the > enormous computational resources (hardware, software, and training > data) needed to solve these problems. Certainly it must be a lot > harder to solve all of these problems at once than focus on just one. > > The obvious application of AGI is automating human labor. The ROI over > 15 years of world GDP should be about $1 quadrillion. I find it > curious that companies investing heavily in AI like Google, Facebook, > and IBM won't even invest $1 million in OpenCog. Are they really > setting odds of success at a billion to one against? > > I realize there is a synergy effect in AGI. We do not just recognize > words or faces in isolation. We use context from all of our senses. So > it would seem justified to claim that we won't see any signs of > progress until all of the parts are finished. Then everything will > just work. > > But regardless of whether I buy the argument, those with money don't > seem to. Surely there must be some way to indicate progress. The last > published experimental results or demo I am aware of is the 2009 > virtual puppy video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii-qdubNsx0 > > The puppy video shows a synergy effect of combining a simple 3-D > virtual world, a simple (presumably rule based) language model, and a > simple 13 component model of physiological and emotional state. So it > would presumably be possible to periodically run system wide tests and > measure progress of a synergistic system. Are you doing this? What > results can you show to investors? > > How do you plan to scale up the problem from one CPU to millions of > CPUs? I recall some tests on distributed AtomSpace that showed severe > performance problems. How do you plan to organize thousands of > software developers? How do you plan to collect petabytes of human > knowledge? How do you plan to acquire the computing power? Or do you > claim that solving all of the problems at once is easier than solving > one narrow-AI problem like Google translate or Watson? The last time I > checked, OpenCog is an (unfinished) Linux download I can run on a PC. > > -- > -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] > > > ------------------------------------------- > AGI > Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now > RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/212726-deec6279 > Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- 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 ------------------------------------------- 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
