IBM, Facebook, Nuance, and most importantly: Google Google Google. "Google Search Will Be Your Next Brain"[1] is a good start, plus it's follow-up[2]. Some lay-

IBM, Facebook, Nuance, and most importantly: Google Google Google. "Google Search Will Be Your Next Brain"[1] is a good start, plus it's follow-up[2]. Some lay-of-the-land, least-to-most cool IMO: * Facebook's interest is in AI for social purposes (face recognition, NLP), rather than AGI (reason DeepMind turned them down). But they're still solidly in the field / a worthy target. * IBM has been interested in AGI for a very long time, hence Watson. NLP, neural nets, machine learning, etc. Dig into Watson, lots of fun here. * Nuance. Smaller, Dragon Speak. NLP & Markov Models primarily, but their creator Ray Kurzweil (now at Google) is the biggest AGI champion you'll see. He started this Singularity religion based on what AGI will bring to bear, see "The Singularity is Near" and "How to Create a Mind". Super fun stuff; inspiring follow, if not exaggerated. Both Nuance, and a ~similar company Wolfram Alpha (which Siri uses) would be really cool targets. * Google. G's always been interested in AI for NLP for translating web queries & mobile speech queries; speech synthesis for play-back; computer vision, robotics, & machine-learning (neural nets) for self-driving cars; you name it. If it's AI, G's on it. Importantly, one Geoff Hinton recently tweaked an AI algorithm which unblocked a clog in the field, and now shit is _throwing down_, catalyzing Hinton & Jeff Dean's G-internal "Google Brain" project. Shortly after, G acquired DeepMind[3], and _this_ my friend... this is the grail. Deepmind is working on some benign-seeming game-playing algos presently, feeding some findings back into search. But its CEO is not _at all_ shy about his ultimate goal for human-level AGI. In fact, it's DeepMind (well, and that sophist book "Superintelligence") that got all these hot-shots up in arms[4]. These guys are the SpaceX / Tesla of AGI. If you want to shoot for the moon: DeepMind. [1] https://medium.com/backchannel/google-search-will-be-your-next-brain-5207c26e4523 https://medium.com/backchannel/google-search-will-be-your-ne... [2] https://medium.com/backchannel/the-deep-mind-of-demis-hassabis-156112890d8a https://medium.com/backchannel/the-deep-mind-of-demis-hassab... [3] http://deepmind.com/ http://deepmind.com/ [4] http://time.com/3973500/elon-musk-stephen-hawking-ai-weapons/ http://time.com/3973500/elon-musk-stephen-hawking-ai-weapons...