
Ask HN: Who is most likely to develop true AI? - bossx
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&#x27;s assume we are talking about 
&quot;Artificial General Intelligence&quot;.<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&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;waitbutwhy.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
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TelmoMenezes
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.

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.

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.

~~~
tim333
The AI winter was caused to a large extent by the hardware of the day not
being powerful enough to do much that was useful. That seems less likely to be
a problem this time around.

~~~
TheLogothete
From what I've read, the winter was caused by complete lack of direction. No
one knew how to even approach the problems. This doesn't seem to have changed
at all.

~~~
tim333
We're getting some practical multi billion dollar products this time like self
driving cars. That didn't happen the first time around - you couldn't build
that sort of stuff with the 1970s computers.

~~~
TheLogothete
That is true, but those products have little to do with OP is talking about.
Self driving cars are using nothing more than a calcullator. A very
sophisticated one, for sure, but it a calculator nonetheless. It is dubbed
"AI" because it sounds sexier.

~~~
tim333
Yeah but the AI winter was mostly a period of low funding for AI due to
disappointment at the research in the 70s and 80 not producing useful
products. No one then was expecting human level intelligence but they were
hoping to get some return on investment.

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pjc50
Google are the obvious candidate, with Apple close behind.

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 _years_ with little fruit (Cyc etc.).

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.

~~~
koder2016
_> Apple close behind_

Do you know something I don't or it's based on their well-known Siri the
hardcoded automaton?

~~~
pjc50
We're all speculating here; based on Siri _the product_ rather than the
implementation. There's competition for voice-based "virtual assistants"
that's likely to drive innovation.

Also, Apple have an extraordinary amount of money to spend.

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3pt14159
Either Google or the US DoD. The former has the raw information, researchers,
and computation skills; the later has the raw funding and motive.

A state actor with AGI will _own_ 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.

~~~
fredley
Go today, urban warfare tomorrow.

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JamesMcMinn
I'm not sure we'll ever get to Strong AI, but if we do, I don't expect any
company that exists today will still be around.

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TheLogothete
I don't think there is a possibility of it happening at all (in the foreseeble
future).

~~~
dreen
Very much this. Simply put: current state-of-the art is very task-specific.
True AI is not and we are possibly hundreds of noble prizes away from it.

~~~
TillE
Machine translation is a good example. Google Translate is probably the best
around, and it's just using statistical techniques to produce some pretty bad
results.

A strong AI would need a true understanding of language, which requires a
radically different approach which few people are even thinking about.

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underscoremark
IDSIA : [http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/)

~~~
pinouchon
Schmidhuber also founded a company called nnaisence
([https://nnaisense.com/](https://nnaisense.com/))

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tim333
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.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-NdPtFKq0&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-NdPtFKq0&feature=youtu.be&t=25m36s)

~~~
TheArcane
Google is also a major shareholder in DFKI (German Research Center for
Artificial Intelligence)

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gus_massa
From the FAQ:

> _How do I submit a poll?_

> _.[http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll](http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll)
> ._

But I think you need t let 200 karma to use it.

My opinion is that nobody will do it, because "AI is whatever hasn't been done
yet."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect)

~~~
bossx
Thanks I didn't know about polls, unfortunately I lack the karma to start one!
This is an interesting theory and certainly good to include in the debate.

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pinouchon
Numenta ([http://numenta.com/](http://numenta.com/)
[http://numenta.org/](http://numenta.org/))

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wcummings
General AI is right around the corner like cold fusion is right around the
corner. I'm not holding my breath.

~~~
maxerickson
Cold fusion is dismissed out of hand. It's energy positive (and then sustained
and then practical) hot fusion that is around the corner. Energy consuming
fusion reactors have existed for a long time.

~~~
wcummings
>Cold fusion is dismissed out of hand.

Exactly.

~~~
maxerickson
Yes, I realized your meaning a while after I commented.

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MagicIsntReal
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.

Forget AI, we'll all be dead before we can even get something as mundane as a
petabyte flash drive.

No greatness, no vision, no innovation - just turd polishers layering the same
old pig with yet another colorful shade of lipstick.

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stray
> Who is most likely develop a true AI system?

Some completely unknown amateur will stumble upon it more or less by accident.

~~~
Loughla
Do you honestly believe this?

~~~
stray
Of course.

An amateur is someone who does something for the love of it -- rather than
someone who is getting paid for it.

And while the experts focus on some very narrow algorithm or process and
release tools like tensorflow to the public -- somebody with a pile of mac
minis in his livingroom will combine those tools in some novel way that the
experts would have never considered.

Don't discount the possibility of a real breakthrough coming from an amateur.
You know, like a patent clerk mulling over physics problems on his own time,
or a destitute kid in India doing independent mathematics research.

Indeed, that's often where breakthroughs come from: left field.

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drdeca
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")

I think it would be very difficult, and I don't think it's, uh, part of the
plan I guess.

I'm not certain that it won't happen, and it seems interesting to try, I just
don't think it will succeed.

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koder2016
Some less-known bio-tech startup in 50 years on an island in neutral waters.
It's easier to improve the existing solution.

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nextweek2
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.

We are still a massive factor away from AGI:
[http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163051-simulating-1-secon...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163051-simulating-1-second-
of-human-brain-activity-takes-82944-processors)

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.

However to stake my claim, I'll say "Some company from India or China that
we've never heard about."

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hunterjrj
Two Kids in a Garage

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bossx
Google

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versteegen
It would be amusing to open a question at
[http://www.gjopen.com](http://www.gjopen.com) (Good Judgement Open) or a
similar site; seems like a decent place to run an informed poll.

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.)

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max_
I think it will be Facebook, they have the largest collection of data on human
intelligence, plus they also have Yann LeCun
[http://yann.lecun.com](http://yann.lecun.com) one of (if not the top) the top
three AI experts (others: Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton)

------
pinouchon
[http://www.vicarious.com/](http://www.vicarious.com/)

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awinter-py
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).

And why haven't they released it. (oscar isaac probably has his own opinion
about why).

~~~
taneq
Remember that story a few days ago about a mysterious investor throwing
millions of dollars around on the Turkish stock market?

I'm not sayin' it's a wild AI, but...

(Autoplay video warning)
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-10/mystery-
du...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-10/mystery-dude-rattles-
turkish-stock-traders-with-massive-bets)

------
andrewfromx
it's so obvious. everyone else missed it. the company is:

[http://www.dwavesys.com](http://www.dwavesys.com)

and it happended yesterday.

~~~
TheArcane
Quantum Computing != True AI

~~~
andrewfromx
between dwavesys and [http://home.cern](http://home.cern) i think the
"scientific method" is a little out of date. No longer is it just what we can
observe in this universe that's true science. Very related to AI.

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falsestprophet
Roy Philipose

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bossx
Baidu

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jordhy
Leslor

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fsiefken
ben goertzel

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bossx
Facebook

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bossx
Microsoft

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bossx
Apple

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bossx
Amazon

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antocv
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?

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".

