> Proactively minimizing risk in as > many areas as possible make a venture much more salable, but most AI > ventures tend to be very apparently risky at many levels that have no > relation to the AI research per se and the inability of these > ventures to minimize all that unnecessary risk is a giant mark > against them. > > > Cheers, > > J. Andrew Rogers
I've often heard it said that VC's consider three kinds of risk -- people -- market -- technology and if you have risk in more than one of those areas, you won't get funded. Of course like all such saws this is a big simplification but it has some relevance to this context anyway. AGI is always going to be viewed as a major technology risk, unless one comes into the fundraising process with an extremely strong prototype (and maybe even then). Mitigaging the people-risk requires getting experienced businesspeople on board, which is generically difficult for an AGI company because of the bad reputation AI has. Mitigating the market risk means finding a market niche where incremental work toward AGI is of dramatically more economic value than narrow-AI technology. I think this is really the hard part. (Or, as an alternative, it involves finding gullible investors and making them believe that the incremental work toward AGI will be of dramatically more economic value than narrow-AI technology -- but most good AGI researchers don't have taste for this particular flavor of dishonesty...) In most practical app areas, you can make something that can be spun to customers as almost-as-good-as- a-fractional-AGI, via using clever narrow-AI techniques. The obvious example is Google which isn't nearly as good as a good NLP search engine will be, but is almost-as-useful as a partially-mature NLP search engine, and was a lot easier/cheaper to prototype and initially roll out. As I've said before, I am bullish on virtual worlds and gaming as an area where early-stage AGI tech can have dramatically more economic value than cleverly crafted narrow-AI. Humanoid robotics is clearly another such area, but a trickier area to get started in right now. But I'm not saying these are the only examples. -- Ben G ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=66346729-733843
