I don't think the big breakthroughs in artificial general intelligence are going to come from well funded scientific researchers anyways, they are going to come out of left field from where you least expect it.
Simply stated, an AI that writes AI.(Forget the halting problem for a moment) How many iterations can it create in 3 hours?
Imagine a massively parallel optical computer with the same transistor density as the human brain, the size of an olympic swimming pool running at the speed of light, and networked with 1000s of other similar computers around the world.
Foomp, superintelligence, you won't even be able to pinpoint the source.
So certainly you would get the baby situation first, but going from manageable baby to astral foetus could potentially happen rapidly and unexpectedly as the rate of progress accelerates to unfathomable speeds, which is what's happened already in going from tribal man to modern civilization, and if you extrapolate that very consistent and reliable trendline, it leads to progress happening in a foomp step perceived as a foomp in real time. Really, all life is just one big accelerating foomp.
We don't need to rely only on humans to design every aspect of neural networks. We are already computationally searching for AI designs that work better. In a recent paper, hundreds of variations of design for the neuron of the LSTM network have been tried to see which one is the best and which of its components are important.
Also, we can play with networks like clay - starting from already trained networks, we can add new layers, make layers wider, transfer knowledge from one complex network into a simpler one and initialize new networks from old networks so as they don't start from scratch every time. We can download models trained by other groups and just plug them in (see word2vec for example). This makes iterative experimenting and building on previous success much faster.
I don't think evolving a super intelligence will happen by simple accident, it will be an incremental process of search. The next big things I predict will be capable robots and decent dialogue agents.
There are different ideas for what constitutes AI. Expert systems and knowledge-based reasoners? Pattern-recognizer black boxes? Chatbots? AGI?
Over the years the concept of AI shifted. Until recent years "AI" was mostly used for things like A* search, creating algorithms that play turn-based table games for example (see the Russell-Norvig book), symbolic manipulation, ontologies etc., a few years ago it began to also refer to machine learning like neural networks again.
Neural networks are good at what they are designed for. Whether they will lead to the path to human-like artificial intelligence is a speculative question. But symbolic manipulation alone won't be able to handle the messiness of sensory data for sure. I think neural nets are much better suited for open-ended development than hand engineered pipelines that were state of the art until recently (like extracting corner points, describing them with something like SIFT, clustering the descriptors and using an SVM over bag-of-words histograms). Hand engineering seems too restrictive.
you're not alone in thinking so
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483846
i get the impression that terminology bifurcated into "AI" and "cognitive science" around the time Marr published Vision in the 80's.
quibbles and q-bits aside, i was glad to see the announcement from the perspective of a if-not-free-then-at-least-probably-open-source-ish software appreciator.
More fundamentally, we are trying to achieve what we can't even define. Define AI, and implementing it should be quite easy.
"Human level AI" seems like trying to define problems through observed characteristics.
I think it was Douglas Hofstadter who had said something to the order that we don't even exactly understand what 'intelligence' means, let alone a clear definition reducible to a mathematical equation or a implementable program.
Your chess programs, are really not 'thinking' in pure sense, there are trying to replace 'thinking' with an algorithm that resembles the outcome of 'thinking'.
Additionally the second paragraph:
We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as is possible safely.
This infers they think AI will be used for hostile means. Such as wiping out the human race maybe? It is just un-informed people making un-informed decisions and then informing other un-informed people of said decisions as if they were informed.
And yes, AI will definitely be used for all sorts of purposes including hostile means. Just like anything else, really. Financial manipulation, spying, intelligent military devices, cracking infrastructure security, etc.
These are realistic concerns, we shouldn't fall for the Skynet red herring. We can have problems with ethical AI use, even if it's not a self-aware super-human superintelligence.
The downside is that much of the research is probably held secret for business advantages. The public releases are more of a PR and hiring strategy than anything else in my opinion. By sending papers to conferences, Google's employees can get to know the researchers and attract them to Google.
Others say there's nothing to worry about, Google and Facebook are just today's equivalent of Bell Labs, which gave numerous contributions to computer technologies without causing much harm.
EDIT: I have to agree with _delirium's skepticism towards them doing much in that regard though.
Also, I see a distinct lack of "fear-mongering" in this post.
All three of those links are about neural networks.
This is not over-glorifying. That is fact.
Now, the human brain is definitely a complicated thing to study and understand (by whom? by itself!), but framing it as if the brain was a computer that received a task that it then solved, is the wrong way of thinking about this.
Much more useful than static data on a hard drive.
A hard drive would find it much faster.
http://humanorigins.si.edu/research/climate-research/effects
I just don't understand the folks that are so confident that strong AI is either not possible, or not achievable within our lifetimes.
If you're in the camp that thinks it's not possible, then you must ascribe some sort of magical or spiritual significance to the human brain.
If you don't think it's possible inside of 100 years, then you're probably just extrapolating on history. The thing about breakthroughs is they never look like they're coming. Until they do.