AI is a hot topic, and just about every major tech company has departments developing various forms of AI and working on AI related challenges. Who is most likely develop a true AI system?<p>The definition of a true AI system is obviously up for debate, but for the sake of this conversation let's assume we are talking about
"Artificial General Intelligence".<p>Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): Sometimes referred to as Strong AI, or Human-Level AI, Artificial General Intelligence refers to a computer that is as smart as a human across the board—a machine that can perform any intellectual task that a human being can. Creating AGI is a much harder task than creating ANI, and we’re yet to do it. Professor Linda Gottfredson describes intelligence as “a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience.” AGI would be able to do all of those things as easily as you can. [1]<p>I'll put the top candidates in the comments for you to vote on, and leave replies under each candidate with your reasoning. If you have another candidate, please add it as a main comment.<p>[1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
I very much doubt there will be a Hollywood-movie-event when "company X developed true AI" will be in the news. I think it's more likely that more and more algorithmic building blocks as well as computational power gradually become available, and that humanity collectively gets closer to AGI capabilities.<p>Many of the algorithms that are making headlines theses days are decades old. It seems to me that we just crossed some computational power threshold a couple of years ago that made it possible to produce qualitatively better results with the algorithms that we already knew about. There wasn't any qualitative break-through -- just years and years of small incremental improvements, both on the computer science and hardware fronts -- and there won't be a "monopoly of AI". That is industrial-era thinking. AI is not like railways, light bulbs or power plants.<p>On the other hand, I am worried that all the hype currently surrounding AI could lead to a second AI winter. The media cycle and investors seems to have terribly low attention spans, and are prone to lose interest as easily as they become hyper-excited.
Google are the obvious candidate, with Apple close behind.<p>As I see it, it's most likely to evolve from a combination of translation software (which needs some sense of the semantics and context of a sentence to do really well) and DWIM-orientated search. But attempts at building a huge ontological model of the world in the hope of producing a formal-reasoning intelligence have been going for <i>years</i> with little fruit (Cyc etc.).<p>Next AI step to watch for: computerised bureaucracy assistants. It's one thing to have a team of human experts turning the tax code into a program; it's another to be able to just feed all the text of the law into a program and then engage in a dialogue with it to have it fill in the form for you.
Either Google or the US DoD. The former has the raw information, researchers, and computation skills; the later has the raw funding and motive.<p>A state actor with AGI will <i>own</i> electronic warfare. AGI would also be able to bring swift advancements to the first state that created it, so inventing it would quickly follow with leaps in conventional weapons. Assuming the AGI wants to collaborate.
Deep Mind who wrote AlphaGo look like favourites. They are owned by Google but not Google's only AI operation. They have produced a general but far sub human level AI system to play Atari games and working on reverse engineering the hippocampus. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-NdPtFKq0&feature=youtu.be&t=25m36s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-NdPtFKq0&feature=youtu.be...</a>
From the FAQ:<p>> <i>How do I submit a poll?</i><p>> <i>. <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll</a> .</i><p>But I think you need t let 200 karma to use it.<p>My opinion is that nobody will do it, because "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect</a>
True AI will never exist. It's just a fairytale told by vain blowhard liars to VCs who have too much money & not enough IQ. All that AI does now is build thoughtless goosestepping monsters slogging cluelessly thru digital bogs, with their dreadful simpleminded APIs, rigor mortis like tasks and tunnel vision so narrow and dense that even LOLs can't escape it.<p>Forget AI, we'll all be dead before we can even get something as mundane as a petabyte flash drive.<p>No greatness, no vision, no innovation - just turd polishers layering the same old pig with yet another colorful shade of lipstick.
I don't think that making a strong AI is necessarily impossible, but I don't think it will ever happen. (And by 'ever' I do mean 'ever', not just "ever in the next century")<p>I think it would be very difficult, and I don't think it's, uh, part of the plan I guess.<p>I'm not certain that it won't happen, and it seems interesting to try, I just don't think it will succeed.
I think we're a long way off from the diversity that the human mind can achieve. Each of the recent advances has been in a narrow field using a lot of processing power.<p>We are still a massive factor away from AGI:
<a href="http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163051-simulating-1-second-of-human-brain-activity-takes-82944-processors" rel="nofollow">http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163051-simulating-1-secon...</a><p>What you should be asking is: Which financial companies are doing AI research? High frequency trading is the current technology darling in finance, however the next step will be replacing fund managers and venture capitalist with AI. An AI with access to billions will be an interesting concept.<p>However to stake my claim, I'll say "Some company from India or China that we've never heard about."
It would be amusing to open a question at <a href="http://www.gjopen.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.gjopen.com</a> (Good Judgement Open) or a similar site; seems like a decent place to run an informed poll.<p>My money has been on Google for ~15 years now as the most likely, though I still give them <<< 50%. (Why do so many consider them an ad company? They've been AI since day one.)
I think it will be Facebook, they have the largest collection of data on human intelligence, plus they also have Yann LeCun <a href="http://yann.lecun.com" rel="nofollow">http://yann.lecun.com</a> one of (if not the top) the top three AI experts (others: Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton)
scarier question -- who is most likely to have already developed 'true AI' (let's define this as a bot that can make jokes about the presidential elections and also write code in, say, ocaml).<p>And why haven't they released it. (oscar isaac probably has his own opinion about why).
it's so obvious. everyone else missed it. the company is:<p><a href="http://www.dwavesys.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.dwavesys.com</a><p>and it happended yesterday.
Intelligence is not defined, from your quote, what is a general mental capability? Mental? What is that? Is that when you eat alof of mentos while listening to metal and thus become Mental?<p>No human fits into "Strong AI" definition, I believe no human can fulfill the professor Lindas definition of Intelligence, if they think they can, well thats like your opinion man, just like I can program a chatbot to always respond "yes" to the question "are you cool".