Artificial General Intelligence. Quite interesting note ... we started in the 80s. How far are we now?
Artificial General Intelligence: Are We Close, and Does it Even Make Sense to Try? By MIT Technology Review, August 25, 2021
The idea of artificial general intelligence as we know it today starts with a dot-com blowout on Broadway.
Twenty years ago—before Shane Legg clicked with neuroscience postgrad Demis Hassabis over a shared fascination with intelligence; before the pair hooked up with Hassabis's childhood friend Mustafa Suleyman, a progressive activist, to spin that fascination into a company called DeepMind; before Google bought that company for more than half a billion dollars four years later—Legg worked at a startup in New York called Webmind, set up by AI researcher Ben Goertzel. Today the two men represent two very different branches of the future of artificial intelligence, but their roots reach back to common ground.
Even for the heady days of the dot-com bubble, Webmind's goals were ambitious. Goertzel wanted to create a digital baby brain and release it onto the internet, where he believed it would grow up to become fully self-aware and far smarter than humans. "We are on the verge of a transition equal in magnitude to the advent of intelligence, or the emergence of language," he told the Christian Science Monitor in 1998.
Webmind tried to bankroll itself by building a tool for predicting the behavior of financial markets on the side, but the bigger dream never came off. After burning through $20 million, Webmind was evicted from its offices at the southern tip of Manhattan and stopped paying its staff. It filed for bankruptcy in 2001 ...
Part of the problem is that artificial general intelligence is a catchall for the hopes and fears surrounding an entire technology ....
From MIT Technology Review
No comments:
Post a Comment