Hacker News Reader

Comment by vonnik | Hacker News Reader

This guy has no idea what he's talking about, and the original post of which the linked article is an update was published in 2014. That's a lifetime in AI research, which is moving very fast. Real advances are happening monthly. The people closest to those advances in AI, at DeepMind for example, are moving the field forward quickly and can see strong AI on the horizon. Compute will determine how quickly we get there, but new chips and hardware are coming onto the market that will speed this along.

View on HN

You should address actual points instead of appealing to authority and ad-hominem attacks.

Let me help you out by responding as an authority to the parent.

I worked at DeepMind as an AI researcher. I can guarantee you will not see "AGI" or "strong AI" in your or your children's lifetimes. It's fun to believe, it gives us something to look forward to, talk about with friends, and discuss on HN. But in reality, we are so far from artificial general intelligence, even with an exponential curve, it will take us 100 more years. The current deep learning era (or more aptly named, pattern recognition) will last another 5-10 years, at best. Then another winter will come.

I can assure you that some of your former colleagues disagree with you.

What on Earth do you think you know, and how on Earth do you think you know it?

Most people actually doing AI research are much more conservative about their estimates and expectations of AGI. They understand very clearly how much of current AI "breakthroughs" really just barely nudge the ball forward (market speak aside). Do you use an virtual assistant -- OK Google, Alexa, Siri, etc? Has your experience with those assistants consistently improved or do they regress in annoying ways that make them seem obviously ignorant of basic facts, previously known facts, or common sense?

Actually, opinions about AGI are quite mixed. People like Ng are more conservative; people like Schmidhuber are more aggressive in their predictions; both are eminent researchers.

RE: Siri and Alexa - Industry deployments of AI are a lagging indicator of what AI can do. AI is moving at two speeds: research and business/consumer applications. The research is moving faster than the apps.

AlphaGo and many other fundamental papers to come out in the last two years have done more than nudge the ball forward. They constitute significant steps, and bundled together they are an even greater achievement.

There is too much wrong with this post to address all his points. It's just more noise in an already noisy space. To be clear, I didn't attack the author. I simply asserted that he is speaking from ignorance as evidenced by his statements.

But I did raise a major objection, which is simply that his post is obsolete. It might have been reasonable to say what he said in 2014/2015. It isn't as we enter 2017.

Other people in this thread have already rightly stated that corporations are not superhuman AIs. This is true. Strong AI will be one or more models that operate as a coherent whole and be composed of machines, not humans. Corporations are mostly wetware. That's why they're not "artificial".

He claims there is a lack of incentive. That is not true. There is a well-funded escalation of research among large organizations that is well known and reported on, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

>> Strong AI will be one or more models that operate as a coherent whole

Why think that, though? Why not suppose that Strong AI would be distributed? Why suppose it would have a singular sort of intelligence? Isn't that basically a pre-internet way of thinking about AI? Maybe Super AI will be diffused across the environment, not having any sort of singular intent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com