HI,
Currently Ben's Novamente is among the most mature and promising AGIs
out there, which I think is no small accomplishment. But still, it is
not yet clear that NM will be the *ultimate* winner, if we take
into consideration the entry of the "big guys" (eg Microsoft, Google,
DARPA etc) into this game. Right now Ben seems to be complacent about
being a "local" winner but I think this smugness is deadly if one
aims at winning in the long term. Currently NM is the most
resourceful but the situation will quickly reverse upon the entry of
the big guys.
According to this view, it seems that whoever has the deepest pocket
will win, but that's not entirely true. We still have a chance -- I
think the *ultimate* critical factor is: /whoever can recruit the
brightest talents and make them work together, will win/.
A few comments...
1) Clearly, "whomever has the deepest pockets will win" is not true.
That is generically false throughout the history of technology: it may
apply (in some circumstances) to the productization of mature
technologies, but definitely not to the development of disruptive
technologies.
2) DARPA has already tried AGI in a big way. They funded most recently
the BICA program, aimed explicitly at AGI, then cancelled it after Phase
I because the products produced by the individuals they funded weren't
promising enough. There have been other similar DARPA programs too.
3) M$ has also tried in a fairly big way. They have a lot of AI folks
on staff at M$ research. Google also has a lot of AI PhDs on staff,
including some famous ones. M$ and Google are currently committed to
the narrow-AI path to AGI, is the main point.
4) So, the question is not whether DARPA, M$ or Google will "enter the
AI race" -- they are there. The question is whether they will adopt a
workable approach and put money behind it. History shows that large
organizations often fail to do so, even when workable approaches exist,
allowing the disruptive innovations to be made by smaller organizations
that are oriented toward taking bigger risks.
5) I don't want to get into arguments about my own personality and
motivations, but I don't think anyone who knows me F2F would consider me
"complacent" ;-) .... In fact I am frustrated at the Novamente
project's relatively slow progress, and actively trying to solve this
problem via bringing in funding to hire more staff. I am please to
observe that our progress is exponentially accelerating, but frustrated
that the exponent is not larger! I may be "complacent" in the sense
that I think the Novamente AGI design is workable and doesn't need
fundamental rethinking, though, if that's what you mean.
6) I agree with you that there is more than one workable AGI design.
But I still think that coming up with a workable AGI design is **hard
problem**. It sure took me a long time. Once you get beyond the
various conceptual mistakes that are endemic to the AI and cognitive
science fields and really understand the nature of the problem, the
hardest issues are computational resource efficiency, and complexity of
parametric dependencies. Novamente is not ideal in these regards but
it's much better than anything I came up with before, and IMO better
than anything else I've read about.... But of course I don't know the
details of other proprietary AGI designs.
-- Ben G
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