The only real feedback is failure. One camp goes a long time without producing an AGI. That's considered "proof" their approach will never work and that the New Idea will.
I'm just going to make a fictional analogy. It doesn't prove anything, but I hope it illustrates my frustration:
"Look at these idiots trying to build artificial flight by putting together large piles of feathers. Can't they see feathers are just pieces of a much more complicated puzzle?
And over there another group is dropping objects off buildings. Trying to find things that can stay in the air the longest. Even if they find something, it will never actually fly, just fall slightly slower.
There are people inflating balloons with gasses. Have you ever seen a bird made of balloons? It's absurd. Maybe eventually they will get something that hovers off the ground. But it will never fly gracefully like an eagle. It will never fool pigeons into thinking it's another pigeon.
One group has managed to make really strong artificial wings. They have gotten them stronger and faster than even real birds. But they need an entire steam engine to power them. And they don't even use feathers.
My group is going to build an artificial bird from the ground up, based on real biology. Teams of mechanics are working on designing tiny joints and artificial muscles. We have a prototype that can flutter across a room. At this rate we may only be decades away from true artificial flight."
Eh?
http://www.cyc.com/platform/opencyc
Also: "Cycorp also offers a complete version of Cyc, including many more assertions and additional NL capabilities, under a ResearchCyc license at no cost for research purposes."
Tl;Dr.: Cyc is military precise, OpenCyc is not. Use case: Terror-Cell and threat identification, Information Gathering, Reconnaissance, Data-Fusion
It never made sense to me that the whole process would be manual. I would've developed an AI that could use their "complicated and cumbersome" forms automatically based on "Speech or Written" Input
There is also: http://www.larkc.eu/ and many other alternatives "Expert Systems". I heard the the military version of http://clipsrules.sourceforge.net/ is pretty good and in use here and there. But I don't know of the current progress and use of such systems. Can someone involved or knowledgeable give us an update on the state-of-art in AI/Expert-Systems used by the mliitary? I like to stalk military technology based developments =)
I don't know, I would be happy with just a dog brain or even a spider brain as a starting point. Or even a billion ant brains (simple individually, complex collectively).
It's also neither closed source nor secret. The article is a bit crap so don't base your criticism of the project just from what you read there.
It's been popping up for ages, for example Businessweek, 1997:
We're looking for intern candidates for Fall 2014. Details for how to apply are at http://numenta.com/company/#team.
If you'd like to talk with a current intern, email [email protected] and the person running the program can give your contact info to the current group.
Is it? How do we know? You've been working on a product "in stealth" for 30 years, shown practically nobody outside your company, and provided us with nothing more than a vaporous description of its capabilities (in Businessinsider, no less). I'm left wondering not only how seriously I should be taking this claim, but also exactly what the claim even is.
Artificial intelligence is hard. I did an internship at Numenta [1], where Jeff Hawkins is approaching AI from this same biological-first model. He hypothesized how a small subset of the brain works, constructed a model of it, and admirably hired dozens of engineers to build it. The guys behind the Numenta software are some of the best engineers I've met, with combined centuries of experience, and it's taken them almost ten years to get the software to its current, extremely primitive state. Right now, the model is implemented, and you can use the API to apply it to specific applications (predictive analytics, anomaly detection). But we are a long way off from the capability of applying it to "general input."
The fact is, AI is not going to impress anyone until it can handle an equivalently general class of inputs to what a human can handle. And think about the inputs that humans receive. The five senses are just the beginning. They're the concrete inputs we receive from the world. In addition to them, there's a near infinite class of more abstract inputs that build on top of them. As humans, we interpret social cues, hormonal feedback, the emotions our body often inexplicably generates, and dozens of other "second-order" inputs that are derived from our fundamental sensory ones, but seem equally fundamental to us.
Ok, sure. Maybe you can model the brain, and maybe it can respond to inputs from its sensory environment. But those inputs are the absolute lowest building block of the totality of input into our brain. We have an entire subconscience dedicated to processing those fundamental sensory inputs, and generating derivative ones for our consciousness to process. The difficulty in AI, in 2014, is modeling that subconscience. How do we go from basic environmental input to its infinitely more complex derivatives? How do we build a subconscience that our current AI can interpret as an input of its own?
We are a long way off from this capability. Nobody is going to figure it out on their own, and neither is a company of a few dozen. To me, it seems incredibly wasteful to spend 30 years working on this product without revealing any of the journey. After all this time, what do you have to show for it? Basically nothing. Your AI can apparently complete tasks of a similar complexity to state of the art that's been developed in less than a decade.
I want to see models, and I want the community to discuss them, problem solve with them, and build on them. Enough of this closed source, proprietary, snail's pace AI development.
Software is constrained by computing limitations. Fundamentally, there can be no computational model that even approaches the complexity of a brain. At least not today. So why not forget about trying to build Skynet, and work with the community to further the field together?
[1] www.numenta.org