On Nov 18, 2007, at 10:45 AM, Benjamin Goertzel wrote:
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).
With a strong prototype, you can get enough of the right people on-
board such that the perception of technology risk can be greatly
mitigated. It is theater, but it does make a useful measure by proxy
of the technology for investors who cannot make a really thorough
evaluation of the technology themselves.
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.
Yes, and a lot of investors use this as a filter for a technology
venture. If you cannot find a competent business person you can sell
the technology venture to, it is interpreted to mean that there is
probably no practical business there. AI is bad in this way, both
because it has a well-deserved poor reputation *and* it is so
difficult to evaluate from the standpoint of someone who is not
deeply technical.
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.
Yes, and this remains true even if you have concrete, demonstrable
proof of solving the general case. If they perceive an incremental
path that can generate revenue, that's the path they want you to take
even if you could ultimately make more money faster by jumping
straight to the end point. It is the way these things work.
The particular risk they are mitigating here is that of poor
execution, which is significant no matter how killer the technology.
The less execution required, the lower the odds you'll do it poorly.
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.
Virtual worlds are an interesting sector because they touch a lot of
areas where current computer science does not have a good off-the-
shelf solution. It is an environment that makes many inadequacies
obvious that software designers have been very good at masking.
I have some significant involvement in the virtual world space
myself; while it does not interest me per se, there are a number of
interesting business opportunities surrounding it.
Cheers,
J. Andrew Rogers
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