Ask HN: Who is most likely to develop true AI? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who is most likely to develop true AI?

39 pointsbossx60 comments

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

I 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.

The 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.

From 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.

We'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.

That is true, but those products have little to do with OP is talking about. Self driving cars are using nothing more than a calcullator. A very sophisticated one, for sure, but it a calculator nonetheless. It is dubbed "AI" because it sounds sexier.

Yeah but the AI winter was mostly a period of low funding for AI due to disappointment at the research in the 70s and 80 not producing useful products. No one then was expecting human level intelligence but they were hoping to get some return on investment.

Google 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.

> Apple close behind

Do you know something I don't or it's based on their well-known Siri the hardcoded automaton?

We'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.

Either 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.

Go today, urban warfare tomorrow.

I'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.

I don't think there is a possibility of it happening at all (in the foreseeble future).

Very 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.

Machine 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.

Lol, downvotes in this thread? That is just ridiculous.

Counter Upvote because it's valid.

Upvoted, because maybe for him/her 'foreseeble' means a year.

Foreseeable for me means several hundreds of years.

If you don't agree, please do tell how you formed your opinion.

IDSIA : http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/

Schmidhuber also founded a company called nnaisence (https://nnaisense.com/)

Deep 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...

Google is also a major shareholder in DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence)

From the FAQ:

> 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

Thanks 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.

>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.

Numenta (http://numenta.com/ http://numenta.org/)

General AI is right around the corner like cold fusion is right around the corner. I'm not holding my breath.

Cold 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.

>Cold fusion is dismissed out of hand.

Exactly.

Yes, I realized your meaning a while after I commented.

It's not as impossible as you'd think: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion

True 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.

> Who is most likely develop a true AI system?

Some completely unknown amateur will stumble upon it more or less by accident.

Or 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).

Let's hope that amateur will also have a powerful personal cloud.

Do you honestly believe this?

Of 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.

I 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.

Some less-known bio-tech startup in 50 years on an island in neutral waters. It's easier to improve the existing solution.

I 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-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."

Two Kids in a Garage

Google

It would be amusing to open a question at 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.)

I 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 one of (if not the top) the top three AI experts (others: Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton)

http://www.vicarious.com/

scarier 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).

Remember 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-du...

it's so obvious. everyone else missed it. the company is:

http://www.dwavesys.com

and it happended yesterday.

Quantum Computing != True AI

between dwavesys and 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.

Roy Philipose

Baidu

Leslor

ben goertzel

Facebook

Microsoft

Apple

Amazon

Intelligence 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".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com