5 ms·
Ask HN: Who is most likely to develop true AI?
AI is a hot topic, and just about every major tech company has departments developing various forms of AI and working on AI related challenges. Who is most likely develop a true AI system?
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
- bossx 11y agoGoogle
- bossx 11y agoFacebook
- bossx 11y agoMicrosoft
- bossx 11y agoBaidu
- bossx 11y agoApple
- bossx 11y agoAmazon
- gus_massa 11y agoFrom the FAQ: > How do I submit a poll? > . http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- bossx 11y agoThanks I didn't know about polls, unfortunately I lack the karma to start one! This is an interesting theory and certainly good to include in the debate.
- tim333 11y ago>AI is whatever hasn't been done yet 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.
- JamesMcMinn 11y agoI'm not sure we'll ever get to Strong AI, but if we do, I don't expect any company that exists today will still be around.
- hunterjrj 11y agoTwo Kids in a Garage
- underscoremark 11y agoIDSIA : http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/ http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/
- pinouchon 11y agoSchmidhuber also founded a company called nnaisence (https://nnaisense.com/ https://nnaisense.com/)
- mlvljr 11y agoThe Chinese :|
- jordhy 11y agoLeslor
- TheLogothete 11y agoI don't think there is a possibility of it happening at all (in the foreseeble future).
- TheLogothete 11y agoLol, downvotes in this thread? That is just ridiculous.
- darfs 11y agoCounter Upvote because it's valid.
- dreen 11y agoVery much this. Simply put: current state-of-the art is very task-specific. True AI is not and we are possibly hundreds of noble prizes away from it.
- TillE 11y agoMachine translation is a good example. Google Translate is probably the best around, and it's just using statistical techniques to produce some pretty bad results. A strong AI would need a true understanding of language, which requires a radically different approach which few people are even thinking about.
- koder2016 11y agoUpvoted, because maybe for him/her 'foreseeble' means a year.
- TheLogothete 11y agoForeseeable for me means several hundreds of years. If you don't agree, please do tell how you formed your opinion.
- stray 11y ago> Who is most likely develop a true AI system? Some completely unknown amateur will stumble upon it more or less by accident.
- Loughla 11y agoDo you honestly believe this?
- stray 11y agoOf course. 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.
- koder2016 11y agoLet's hope that amateur will also have a powerful personal cloud.
- kafkaesq 11y agoOr perhaps not "by accident" -- but by simply not being beholden to the conventional wisdom (and having nothing to lose by trying something bold and unorthodox).
- 3pt14159 11y agoEither Google or the US DoD. The former has the raw information, researchers, and computation skills; the later has the raw funding and motive. 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.
- fredley 11y agoGo today, urban warfare tomorrow.
- TelmoMenezes 11y agoI very much doubt there will be a Hollywood-movie-event when "company X developed true AI" will be in the news. I think it's more likely that more and more algorithmic building blocks as well as computational power gradually become available, and that humanity collectively gets closer to AGI capabilities. 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.
- tim333 11y agoThe AI winter was caused to a large extent by the hardware of the day not being powerful enough to do much that was useful. That seems less likely to be a problem this time around.
- TheLogothete 11y agoFrom what I've read, the winter was caused by complete lack of direction. No one knew how to even approach the problems. This doesn't seem to have changed at all.
- tim333 11y agoWe're getting some practical multi billion dollar products this time like self driving cars. That didn't happen the first time around - you couldn't build that sort of stuff with the 1970s computers.
- TheLogothete 11y ago
- tim333 11y agoDeep Mind who wrote AlphaGo look like favourites. They are owned by Google but not Google's only AI operation. They have produced a general but far sub human level AI system to play Atari games and working on reverse engineering the hippocampus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-NdPtFKq0&feature=youtu.be&t=25m36s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-NdPtFKq0&feature=youtu.be...
- TheArcane 11y agoGoogle is also a major shareholder in DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence)
- fsiefken 11y agoben goertzel
- antocv 11y agoIntelligence is not defined, from your quote, what is a general mental capability? Mental? What is that? Is that when you eat alof of mentos while listening to metal and thus become Mental? 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".
- awinter-py 11y agoscarier question -- who is most likely to have already developed 'true AI' (let's define this as a bot that can make jokes about the presidential elections and also write code in, say, ocaml). And why haven't they released it. (oscar isaac probably has his own opinion about why).
- taneq 11y agoRemember that story a few days ago about a mysterious investor throwing millions of dollars around on the Turkish stock market? I'm not sayin' it's a wild AI, but... (Autoplay video warning) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-10/mystery-dude-rattles-turkish-stock-traders-with-massive-bets http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-10/mystery-du...
- pjc50 11y agoGoogle are the obvious candidate, with Apple close behind. 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.
- koder2016 11y ago> Apple close behind Do you know something I don't or it's based on their well-known Siri the hardcoded automaton?
- pjc50 11y agoWe're all speculating here; based on Siri the product rather than the implementation. There's competition for voice-based "virtual assistants" that's likely to drive innovation. Also, Apple have an extraordinary amount of money to spend.
- pinouchon 11y agohttp://www.vicarious.com/ http://www.vicarious.com/
- pinouchon 11y agoNumenta (http://numenta.com/ http://numenta.com/ http://numenta.org/ http://numenta.org/)
- falsestprophet 11y agoRoy Philipose
- wcummings 11y agoGeneral AI is right around the corner like cold fusion is right around the corner. I'm not holding my breath.
- maxerickson 11y agoCold fusion is dismissed out of hand. It's energy positive (and then sustained and then practical) hot fusion that is around the corner. Energy consuming fusion reactors have existed for a long time.
- wcummings 11y ago>Cold fusion is dismissed out of hand. Exactly.
- maxerickson 11y agoYes, I realized your meaning a while after I commented.
- mrfusion 11y agoIt's not as impossible as you'd think: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- andrewfromx 11y agoit's so obvious. everyone else missed it. the company is: http://www.dwavesys.com http://www.dwavesys.com and it happended yesterday.
- TheArcane 11y agoQuantum Computing != True AI
- andrewfromx 11y agobetween dwavesys and http://home.cern http://home.cern i think the "scientific method" is a little out of date. No longer is it just what we can observe in this universe that's true science. Very related to AI.
- versteegen 11y agoIt would be amusing to open a question at http://www.gjopen.com http://www.gjopen.com (Good Judgement Open) or a similar site; seems like a decent place to run an informed poll. My money has been on Google for ~15 years now as the most likely, though I still give them <<< 50%. (Why do so many consider them an ad company? They've been AI since day one.)
- koder2016 11y agoSome less-known bio-tech startup in 50 years on an island in neutral waters. It's easier to improve the existing solution.
- drdeca 11y agoI don't think that making a strong AI is necessarily impossible, but I don't think it will ever happen. (And by 'ever' I do mean 'ever', not just "ever in the next century") I think it would be very difficult, and I don't think it's, uh, part of the plan I guess. I'm not certain that it won't happen, and it seems interesting to try, I just don't think it will succeed.
- MagicIsntReal 11y agoTrue AI will never exist. It's just a fairytale told by vain blowhard liars to VCs who have too much money & not enough IQ. All that AI does now is build thoughtless goosestepping monsters slogging cluelessly thru digital bogs, with their dreadful simpleminded APIs, rigor mortis like tasks and tunnel vision so narrow and dense that even LOLs can't escape it. Forget AI, we'll all be dead before we can even get something as mundane as a petabyte flash drive. No greatness, no vision, no innovation - just turd polishers layering the same old pig with yet another colorful shade of lipstick.
- max_ 11y agoI think it will be Facebook, they have the largest collection of data on human intelligence, plus they also have Yann LeCun http://yann.lecun.com http://yann.lecun.com one of (if not the top) the top three AI experts (others: Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton)
- nextweek2 11y agoI think we're a long way off from the diversity that the human mind can achieve. Each of the recent advances has been in a narrow field using a lot of processing power. We are still a massive factor away from AGI: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163051-simulating-1-second-of-human-brain-activity-takes-82944-processors http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163051-simulating-1-secon... What you should be asking is: Which financial companies are doing AI research? High frequency trading is the current technology darling in finance, however the next step will be replacing fund managers and venture capitalist with AI. An AI with access to billions will be an interesting concept. However to stake my claim, I'll say "Some company from India or China that we've never heard about."