
Ask HN: Who/what companies are working on artificial general intelligence? - arthurcolle
I recognize that Google&#x2F;Alphabet is seen as one of the largest investors&#x2F;acquirers of technology related to machine learning and is actively researching artificial general intelligence.<p>I always thought that the Human Brain Project would yield some kind of deeper understanding of how consciousness manifests in humans and I&#x27;ve always had my own thoughts of how memory and cognition might work based on my computer science background, but what is the avenue to pursue if you want to work on potentially building thinking machines?
======
cdvonstinkpot
This sounds like it would be a good question for a service I've had a good
experience with called 'Wonder' [1]

They were able to provide an in-depth answer to a question I had asked various
communities about & received no answer to.

It's a paid service, charging ~$20 per answer, but I didn't have to pay for
some reason- I don't recall. IIRC the first question is free, but I could be
wrong.

[1] [https://wonderlib.com/request](https://wonderlib.com/request)

------
dennybritz
Deepmind ([http://deepmind.com/](http://deepmind.com/)) comes to mind. It was
acquired by Google though. Their vision it is "We combine the best techniques
from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful
general‑purpose learning algorithms."

AFAIK they work mostly on reinforcement learning coupled with Neural Networks

------
brudgers
IBM -> Watson.

The problem with separating one kind of AI from another (such as machine
learning) is that anything we do with a computer can be described at as a
Chinese Room [1] at a high level of abstraction.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room)

~~~
lefnire
Fun philosophical debate :) AI devs argue that the man responding in Chinese
is consulting a look-up table (input to output rule-book). Table-lookups
aren't tractable for complex AI agents, and so must be boiled down to
algorithms which yield the same results (and can be represented in code more
compactly / efficiently). If the man knew the algorithm to convert input to
output, then he knows Chinese.

------
TuringNYC
The non-Alphabet AI company I am most excited about is MetaMind:
[https://www.metamind.io/](https://www.metamind.io/)

------
1arity
is your goal to contribute to the effort or get mega rich by birthing general
intelligence?

if it's the former, work anywhere you feel you are making an impact.

if it's the latter, work in secret until you have the money to protect and
launch your ideas.

this business is invested in now as if it is highly lucrative. if you are
known and good you'll be agressively poached.

------
arthurcolle
*what is the avenue to pursue if you want to work on potentially building thinking/self-aware machines?

------
lefnire
IBM, Facebook, Nuance, and most importantly: Google Google Google. "Google
Search Will Be Your Next Brain"[1] is a good start, plus it's follow-up[2].
Some lay-of-the-land, least-to-most cool IMO:

* Facebook's interest is in AI for social purposes (face recognition, NLP), rather than AGI (reason DeepMind turned them down). But they're still solidly in the field / a worthy target.

* IBM has been interested in AGI for a very long time, hence Watson. NLP, neural nets, machine learning, etc. Dig into Watson, lots of fun here.

* Nuance. Smaller, Dragon Speak. NLP & Markov Models primarily, but their creator Ray Kurzweil (now at Google) is the biggest AGI champion you'll see. He started this Singularity religion based on what AGI will bring to bear, see "The Singularity is Near" and "How to Create a Mind". Super fun stuff; inspiring follow, if not exaggerated. Both Nuance, and a ~similar company Wolfram Alpha (which Siri uses) would be really cool targets.

* Google. G's always been interested in AI for NLP for translating web queries & mobile speech queries; speech synthesis for play-back; computer vision, robotics, & machine-learning (neural nets) for self-driving cars; you name it. If it's AI, G's on it. Importantly, one Geoff Hinton recently tweaked an AI algorithm which unblocked a clog in the field, and now shit is _throwing down_, catalyzing Hinton & Jeff Dean's G-internal "Google Brain" project. Shortly after, G acquired DeepMind[3], and _this_ my friend... this is the grail. Deepmind is working on some benign-seeming game-playing algos presently, feeding some findings back into search. But its CEO is not _at all_ shy about his ultimate goal for human-level AGI. In fact, it's DeepMind (well, and that sophist book "Superintelligence") that got all these hot-shots up in arms[4]. These guys are the SpaceX / Tesla of AGI. If you want to shoot for the moon: DeepMind.

[1] [https://medium.com/backchannel/google-search-will-be-your-
ne...](https://medium.com/backchannel/google-search-will-be-your-next-
brain-5207c26e4523)

[2] [https://medium.com/backchannel/the-deep-mind-of-demis-
hassab...](https://medium.com/backchannel/the-deep-mind-of-demis-
hassabis-156112890d8a)

[3] [http://deepmind.com/](http://deepmind.com/)

[4] [http://time.com/3973500/elon-musk-stephen-hawking-ai-
weapons...](http://time.com/3973500/elon-musk-stephen-hawking-ai-weapons/)

------
nicholas73
Numenta (open source)

