Interesting question you raise there, Matt (vs :) YKY How many of us would be prepared to work FULL-TIME on AGI: (0) If a department of defense/military organisation paid you develop a secret AGI for national defense/intelligence purpose? (1) If a Microsoft, Google, Sun or IBM came along and hired you full-time to work on either (1a) Open-Source; or (1b) Proprietary AGI? (2) A more 'friendly' research group came along (e.g. University, government agency) to pay you fulltime (2a) on *their* design/architecture or (2b) on YOUR design but having to share your findings with the larger community (shared credit)? (3) If you had sufficient funds of your own? Re (3) I have often wondered how much time one could really spend continuously on working on AGI - refer to the Princeton Instititue of Advanced Studies where established geniuses (such as Einstein) were/are paid to devote fulltime efforts to thinking but actually not many earthshaking ideas have come out of it. Don't we need a lot of 'time wasted' on trivia such as a real job, leaking plumbing and family in order to have these 1 or 2 hours of creative thinking/work each day? Would it help to have consolidated 8 hour or longer blocks each day? Do people like Ben, Leitz and Peter (Voss) really have so much time to think creatively/design or is my suspicion right that a lot of their (your :) time is spent on fundraising, PR, communication, management? The grass always seems greener on the other side... Jean-Paul
>>> Matt Mahoney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 2007/05/07 03:47:28 >>> > I think we should not go FOSS just because we arn't confident of ourselves, > or to try to avoid competition. We love our work and should go the extra > miles to make it profitable. Those who're not interested in business > matters can leave that to somebody else in the group. The problem with closed source is you have to pay your employees. Personally, I am not interested in making a lot of money. I already make enough to buy what I want. It is more important to have free time to pursue my interests. AGI, especially language, is one of my interests. But I don't want to build something aimlessly like Cyc. I would like to see an application, a goal in which progress can be measured. I currently use text compression for this purpose. Do you have a better idea? ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
