On Jun 12, 2005, at 2:02 AM, Ben Goertzel wrote:
But, your assertion that any competently articulated, competently led
AGI project should be able to fairly easily raise $5M in venture
funding is *also* based on a basket of assumptions, which you didn't
make explicit in your message!
Yes, very true. There is no such thing as a context-free opinion. :-)
However, I also used non-AI development and implementation metrics that
would apply to AI development and implementation to build my
assumption. The "new" part of AGI development is a new design space
from a computer science perspective, but the fundamental mechanics of
implementation of a new design space will not be that different and a
lot of the ancillary stuff is well-described. If it takes a long time
to implement, it will be because parts of the AGI design are poorly
described such that no one knows if/how they will work.
The only potential money sink that I consider plausible is very large
and exotic hardware, but the necessity of this does not seem apparent
to many people actually working on it. High-end vanilla hardware seems
to be what most people require.
And my suggestion is that the path from here to AGI is almost
inevitably going to involve a few years of research-oriented
engineering/experimentation prior to any period of more deterministic
product-development-like engineering/tuning.
The differences in opinion seem to revolve around whether or not useful
products can be spun off the main technology track as the technology is
developed. While I would agree that it can be a diversion of sorts, a
carefully selected mezzanine product target should be reasonably
doable. How feasible this actually is is a function of the
architecture and design to a great extent.
I'm not really sure how you're defining these terms, in this context.
In terms of creating AGI, as far as I'm concerned, even if you're in
"late stage development" of your *software system*, until you've
demonstrated robust human-level AGI behaviors, you're still doing
speculative research.... This is only fair given the demonstrated
difficulty of the AGI problem. I apply this to my own work as well
as yours and anyone else's....
I was referring to the ability to demonstrate robust AGI-ish behaviors
in implementation. It does not have to be a completely implemented or
solved system if one can demonstrate genuinely new capabilities -- this
will have intrinsic business value AGI or not.
In other words, the pitch should be no less than "we can deliver this
wicked coolness *right now*, and with some additional funding we can
greatly extend the envelope to more wicked coolness". The problem is
that the initial demonstration of "wicked coolness" has to be a clear
differentiator from other half-baked AI ideas, most of which claim to
show some type of vague novelty very early on. It is not easy.
And, VC's criteria for "indistinguishability" in this context are
generally quite crude...
Heh, yes. The problem of education is very real and there is
relatively little one can do about this. Hence the value of having a
bright shiny object for them to fixate on immediately.
Very few people grok the current theory space (which is somewhat
independent of personal theoretical biases), and unlike nanotech, the
field is neither straightforward or obvious from basic principles that
everyone understands. For almost everyone, it really *is* a crap
shoot.
cheers,
j. andrew rogers
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