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My comment was in the context of GAI feasibility - possibly "the brain" would have been clearer than "a brain"? I didn't want to exclude non-human/non-mammalian

by sambe 10y ago

My comment was in the context of GAI feasibility - possibly "the brain" would have been clearer than "a brain"? I didn't want to exclude non-human/non-mammalian brains, even if very similar. Simulating an existing, specific brain was not my intention: that seems like it would involve - as you say - a rather different and larger set of problems. If "all the hype" is a single HN question (not even an assertion) this counts as "over the top", then what would be an appropriate amount of discussion other than none at all?

notahacker 10y ago
Simulating "the brain" for any non trivial brain[1] sounds even harder than simulating "a brain" (or creating AI in some non-brain-resembling form) since it would appear to imply identifying what the billions of constituent parts of a brain do well enough to generalise rather than merely copy patterns of brain function. Someone who probably isn't wholly uninformed asking if we're getting close to AGI this year is obviously a symptom rather than the cause of the hype. I mean, if we're working on Ray Kurzweil's Singularity is Near timescale, I'll be able to buy computational power equivalent to the human brain for $999 in three years' time. Still, Peter Diamindis did update that a couple of years ago by pushing that deadline out to 2025, so I guess at least I'll still be smarter than my next bottom-spec Macbook Air. [1]C elegans is pretty trivial
AnimalMuppet 10y ago
> If "all the hype" is a single HN question... It's not, though. It comes up over and over here, and often it's a link to an external article rather than an "Ask HN".
- sambe 10y ago
  I can't recall a single instance of a story or serious comment. Do you have some example stories?
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    https://hn.algolia.com/?query=artificial%20general%20intelligence&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=artificial%20general%20intelli... shows a dozen articles in the last year, so an average of one a month. I only searched on "general artificial intelligence"; other search strings might find additional articles.
    - sambe 10y ago
      Most have no comments/less than 5 points or only happen to contain the word "general". Many are simply asking questions such as "what does GAI mean?" and "is it possible at all?". You can count that as hype if you want, I guess. I also wish all of the sugar beverage hype would stop (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=coca%20cola&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastYear&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=coca%20cola&sort=byPopularity&...).

by sambe 10y ago

notahacker 10y ago

Simulating "the brain" for any non trivial brain[1] sounds even harder than simulating "a brain" (or creating AI in some non-brain-resembling form) since it would appear to imply identifying what the billions of constituent parts of a brain do well enough to generalise rather than merely copy patterns of brain function. Someone who probably isn't wholly uninformed asking if we're getting close to AGI this year is obviously a symptom rather than the cause of the hype. I mean, if we're working on Ray Kurzweil's Singularity is Near timescale, I'll be able to buy computational power equivalent to the human brain for $999 in three years' time. Still, Peter Diamindis did update that a couple of years ago by pushing that deadline out to 2025, so I guess at least I'll still be smarter than my next bottom-spec Macbook Air. [1]C elegans is pretty trivial

AnimalMuppet 10y ago

> If "all the hype" is a single HN question... It's not, though. It comes up over and over here, and often it's a link to an external article rather than an "Ask HN".

sambe 10y ago
I can't recall a single instance of a story or serious comment. Do you have some example stories?
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  https://hn.algolia.com/?query=artificial%20general%20intelligence&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=artificial%20general%20intelli... shows a dozen articles in the last year, so an average of one a month. I only searched on "general artificial intelligence"; other search strings might find additional articles.
  - sambe 10y ago
    Most have no comments/less than 5 points or only happen to contain the word "general". Many are simply asking questions such as "what does GAI mean?" and "is it possible at all?". You can count that as hype if you want, I guess. I also wish all of the sugar beverage hype would stop (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=coca%20cola&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastYear&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=coca%20cola&sort=byPopularity&...).