> What you can see here is that, since Novamente/OpenCog have not been > well-funded, we've been scrambling to get stuff done via > collaborations with external entities, which has been an effective > strategy to some extent, but has also had lots of ups and downs... > > Rest assured there are lots more stories where these come from. Note > also that there is no massive business organization behind all this, > brokering deals and making alliances. There is one guy -- me -- ... > pretty much > it's been me plus some technical folks.... Given this situation, it's > hardly shocking that our progress on the business/money side has not > been > dramatic.... Nor is it shocking that I've taken a while to finish up > "Building Better Minds" in my spare time!!
It's reasonable to look at, say, Microsoft or Apple's progress on some product, and criticize them in the vein "Why didn't you do X or Y or Z, which would have been a good thing to do, with the product...." They have lots of resources, for implementation, conception and planning.... So if there is some clearly worthwhile thing related to one of their products, that they didn't do, it was probably bad judgment on the part of some of their executives... On the other hand, for a small project like OpenCog, it's not as though there's some large pool of resources that has been given to OpenCog, and which it has then spent unwisely via pursuing a variety of loosely related projects using various aspects of the codebase, to various degrees of completion.... And when something cool or pointful has not been done with OpenCog, it's usually not because we didn't think of it -- it's usually because we were struggling to get something else done with the limited resources at our disposal... The $$ for OpenCog has been cobbled together from various sources with various particular interests and time-durations, and that has influenced the course of development significantly, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. Had the amount of $$ put into OpenCog for various purposes, been put in purely for AGI development rather than for particular purposes using various OpenCog aspects, we would be a lot further along now.... But that's not the reality.... The same economic and psychological reality that has brought us awesome stuff like semiconductors and the Internet, also makes it difficult to get AGI funded in a direct way.... But I do believe this era of paltry AGI funding and struggly scraggly little AGI projects is going to look quaint, archaic and weird at some point, not too long in the future. AGI **will** be a big industry like silicon chips, search engines and medical research are now.... Someone is going to make a demonstrable breakthrough -- not in playing Jeopardy or recognizing cats on the Internet, but in actual AGI... and after that, the floodgates will open ;) .... Maybe OpenCog will make the breakthrough, maybe someone else... But I bet the breakthrough will NOT come from lossless text compression research ;-p ... -- Ben ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
