Is Google Pursuing AGI?
See...
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5382048
where it says
"But some people think they detect an even more grandiose design. Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr Saffo, .they're trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test..in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina."
Peter Norvig (one of Google's AI leaders) shed some light onto this at his talk at the ACC05 conference last September.
What he alluded to there was a goal, in 5+ years from now, of having a system that can answer any natural language query whose answer exists somewhere on the Internet.
E.g. if asked "Who was the first President of the US" it would answer "George Washington" because somewhere there is a web page with a sentence such as "George Washington, the first President of the United States, blah blah."
This would be Step 1. He didn't talk about it, but it's obvious Step 2 would be something that could answer questions whose answers are not contained on any single Web page.
To see how far off we are from this Step 2 now, peruse the results of the Pascal Challenge on "Recognizing Textual Entailment", from last year:
http://www.pascal-network.org/Challenges/RTE/
Anyway, I suspect what Norvig described reflects Google's intentions; and IMO is not exactly a direct approach at AGI in the sense that it has no focus on self-understanding, creativity, and so forth. However, I can see how proceeding in this direction could in time create a system that could (with appropriate expenditure of additional effort) be turned into an AGI.
-- Ben Goertzel
posted by Ben @ 2:16 PM
3 Comments:
I doubt that Google is persuing AGI directly, but there does seem to be a clear selective pressure in that direction. It's obviously advantageous for the search engine companies to devise systems which can understand written text more accurately. I think it's a shame that although the semantic web idea has been around for quite a few years now it doesn't seem have gained any popularity.
I don't think that people see it as being plausible yet. I'd be interested to see if Google might fund a promising AGI project if one could generate something legitimately interesting. It would be very un-google-like to pass it up.
I heard somebody say Google had automated idiomatic chinese-to-english translation...or vice versa. Was that you by any chance, ben?
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