Really? OpenAI is a thing. Numenta has been a lovely scam for VCs for years. I found an "AGI" company just yesterday that actually publishes peer-reviewed research (http://www.maluuba.com/research/). There's another one that's kinda cranky but sent a guy to give a talk at MIT CSAIL last October or so (http://www.vicarious.com/).
Seems like it's a space where you can pitch yourself as "AGI", but you have to get your revenue from solving real-world machine learning problems. That seems pretty appropriate to me: you have to solve someone's problem to have a business.
Numenta, OpenCog et al... all of their founders want to create AGI, but they aren't evangelical - they are focused on creating companies which can move progress forward on NAI. Which by the way makes perfect sense, that's exactly what I do because it's impossible to fund AGI for it's own sake. In fact I NEVER talk to investors about how our goal is in the AGI space. For a million different reasons.
Seems like it's a space where you can pitch yourself as "AGI", but you have to get your revenue from solving real-world machine learning problems.
In fact it's worse. If you pitch yourself as AGI you'll get 99% of investors to walk away immediately.
No what I am saying we are not hearing is this:
"The purpose of humanity is to build an Artificial General Intelligence, it's the thing that we should all dedicate our lives to because it's the offspring of humanity and the most important thing any of us will ever contribute to."
Nobody is out there beating that drum yet, and it's a shame.
Nobody is beating that drum because it comes off as religious crazy-talk. I see zero reason why it should be our purpose to create any kind of metaphorical species-offspring, especially when you yourself say that any concept of making it safe for us to share a planet with is oxymoronic. That sounds like saying, "our purpose is to build an apocalypse and die for its greater glory". Again, that comes off as religious crazy-talk of the suicidal kind.
It seems to me there are entirely sane reasons to work on advanced machine learning and increasingly general AI. That's just not at all one of them.
Well nothing, we get to determine it. According to what you write, your assumption is that the "grand goal" is to "enjoy life."
I say, that's probably not it - or rather I don't think so (based on my experience/research, general revealed preferences for humans writ large).
So my proposition is that our "grand goal" should be to build AGI.
Such a narrow view of life is a tragic waste, regardless of what you think that destiny is. I expressed my frustration with the narrowness of your perspective in a metaphorical way. I am not literally assuming that you don't go outside.
But you pretty much have to believe the first (our intelligence is just neurons, there is no magic behind the curtain) in order to believe in AGI at all.
Right now, Humanity has no "goal" as it is currently with AGI - we haven't figured out a seed goal for AGI yet. In my view we should agree that the meaning for humanity is to create our successor: AGI. This fits into the evolution progression, only it becomes self directed.
In the sense that they take large amounts of money from VCs, don't ship a product, don't make a profit, and then clean up their books and start another company eventually, yeah. OTOH, if you're one of their investors, you might have a better look at their business model than me, so I could well be completely wrong. They've never gone public, so what would I know?
More importantly, they never really cared about making a profit. Their main goal has always been reverse engineering the neocortex. And regarding "shipping a product", both production-ready [0], and research [1] codebases are both open source, and being actively worked on.
Next time please refrain from making bold claims about companies you know very little about.
[0] https://github.com/numenta/nupic [1] https://github.com/numenta/nupic.research
http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/feb/15/what-if-the-singula...
A corporation optimizes for shareholder value, market cap or some other X related to business/market goals. They do not optimize for global intelligence capability. They do not benchmark the company based on quantitative capacity to meet or beat human capabilities across the spectrum of activities. Corporations focus on one or a handful of market specific metrics where they meet or beat their competitors. Full stop.
You could argue that it would be in the company's interest to focus on general corporate capabilities, in theory giving them a major advantage in the market, but they functionally don't do that, and I would argue can't because that's not what they are designed to do. I think the only major company that might be doing something close is Alphabet, and even they are hamstrung by it.
What I do agree with is this part: Lack of incentives means very little strong AI work is happening
Which is my primary frustration with the field. Most people don't even want to discuss it, let alone try and specifically work on it (even if it means working on subsets which could help lead to it).
I think there needs to be a philosophical MOVEMENT to create AGI. I think it will take that to get there in a short horizon. I think it will happen regardless, but without evangelical AGI proponents it's going to take a lot longer.