Ask HN: Who is most likely to develop true AI?
The definition of a true AI system is obviously up for debate, but for the sake of this conversation let's assume we are talking about "Artificial General Intelligence".
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): Sometimes referred to as Strong AI, or Human-Level AI, Artificial General Intelligence refers to a computer that is as smart as a human across the board—a machine that can perform any intellectual task that a human being can. Creating AGI is a much harder task than creating ANI, and we’re yet to do it. Professor Linda Gottfredson describes intelligence as “a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience.” AGI would be able to do all of those things as easily as you can. [1]
I'll put the top candidates in the comments for you to vote on, and leave replies under each candidate with your reasoning. If you have another candidate, please add it as a main comment.
[1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
62 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] thread> How do I submit a poll?
> . http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll .
But I think you need t let 200 karma to use it.
My opinion is that nobody will do it, because "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
There will probably be an interesting landmark when AI no longer needs us to survive. At the moment if all humans disappeared the power would go off and computers would stop working. At some point we may reach the stage where AIs could send robots out to man the power plants and similar. At that point it would be hard to claim that there isn't proper AI.
A strong AI would need a true understanding of language, which requires a radically different approach which few people are even thinking about.
If you don't agree, please do tell how you formed your opinion.
Some completely unknown amateur will stumble upon it more or less by accident.
An amateur is someone who does something for the love of it -- rather than someone who is getting paid for it.
And while the experts focus on some very narrow algorithm or process and release tools like tensorflow to the public -- somebody with a pile of mac minis in his livingroom will combine those tools in some novel way that the experts would have never considered.
Don't discount the possibility of a real breakthrough coming from an amateur. You know, like a patent clerk mulling over physics problems on his own time, or a destitute kid in India doing independent mathematics research.
Indeed, that's often where breakthroughs come from: left field.
A state actor with AGI will own electronic warfare. AGI would also be able to bring swift advancements to the first state that created it, so inventing it would quickly follow with leaps in conventional weapons. Assuming the AGI wants to collaborate.
Many of the algorithms that are making headlines theses days are decades old. It seems to me that we just crossed some computational power threshold a couple of years ago that made it possible to produce qualitatively better results with the algorithms that we already knew about. There wasn't any qualitative break-through -- just years and years of small incremental improvements, both on the computer science and hardware fronts -- and there won't be a "monopoly of AI". That is industrial-era thinking. AI is not like railways, light bulbs or power plants.
On the other hand, I am worried that all the hype currently surrounding AI could lead to a second AI winter. The media cycle and investors seems to have terribly low attention spans, and are prone to lose interest as easily as they become hyper-excited.
No human fits into "Strong AI" definition, I believe no human can fulfill the professor Lindas definition of Intelligence, if they think they can, well thats like your opinion man, just like I can program a chatbot to always respond "yes" to the question "are you cool".
And why haven't they released it. (oscar isaac probably has his own opinion about why).
I'm not sayin' it's a wild AI, but...
(Autoplay video warning) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-10/mystery-du...
As I see it, it's most likely to evolve from a combination of translation software (which needs some sense of the semantics and context of a sentence to do really well) and DWIM-orientated search. But attempts at building a huge ontological model of the world in the hope of producing a formal-reasoning intelligence have been going for years with little fruit (Cyc etc.).
Next AI step to watch for: computerised bureaucracy assistants. It's one thing to have a team of human experts turning the tax code into a program; it's another to be able to just feed all the text of the law into a program and then engage in a dialogue with it to have it fill in the form for you.
Do you know something I don't or it's based on their well-known Siri the hardcoded automaton?
Also, Apple have an extraordinary amount of money to spend.
Exactly.