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Palm Founders Form AI Company
Mentifex writes "As reported in the New York Times, Kansas City Star and other news media, Jeff Hawkins (co-author of On Intelligence) and Donna Dubinsky, co-founders of Palm Computing and Handspring, along with Dileep George as the principal engineer, are starting an AI company named Numenta as a follow-up to Hawkins' recent work on visual processing."
Can anyone point me toward some research on associative AI? i.e. Instead of AI that trained by nueral nets or genetic algos, does anyone know of research on "scoring" words based on their relation to other words? Extending words into concepts, an AI could become quite intelligent at things like Spam filtering.
Just something I was thinking about lately. Anyone?
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According to news.com.com.com.com, IBM is working on something similar...
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Numenta is developing a new type of computer memory system modeled after the human neocortex
surely this technology would be incredibly slow? (this is not a troll, read on before you mod me down!)
From what I remember from my neural networks days the human brain/neocortex works so well because of its massively parallel nature (not because of the processing power of any one neuron), and that computers simply aren't able to exploit this as they aren't designed to work like this - They are instead designed to to massively serial operations using extremely powerful chips (neurons) because the overhead of managing these parallel operations synchronously is too great (the human brain/neocortex work asynchronously)
am I wrong about this or am I missing something great that they've stumbled accross?
By training neurons, they learn to achieve the desired result of a user.
Pretty complex material, anyone wanting to delve into should do some reading on Minsky (proposed neural networks could make dead bodies perform tasks...creepy to say the least) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky
When they release a white paper Im sure itll only be the beginning of a prosporus field of study.
~ Jon
FWIW to ya, A.L.I.C.E is an cool webbot AI similar to the old ELIZA bots of old, but with some sophistication that allows it to be programmed to answer specific questions and recognize some words and phrases well. Won't pass a Turing test, but hey, it's free.
The webpage above has an animation that appears to have a bot attached to it. Pretty and cool.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
In the book, Hawkins remarks that AI researchers often took the misguided approach that intelligence is a set of principles or properties, when in fact it's strictly a matter of behavior. To be intelligent is to behave intelligently. If he's right, then it's the act of being, wherein which the brain's primary tool is the continuous analogizing of current circumstances to past situations in order to make good predictive decisions, which constitutes intelligence.
He's the first to claim that he's not looking for sentience or to answer the question of sentience, but is instead only looking for a practical engineering approach to building intelligent machines. I think this is doubly clever since the issue of sentience should not be addressed until well after, as Hawkins often remarks, our own brains are understood first, in terms of how they operate. Why they operate, or what motivates us or what makes us 'cognitive agents' don't enter the equation with his approach.
I Want To Believe
Mentifex. The name alone conjures up flamewars of years past on Usenet.
The big question in AI is whether an AI "mind" is more likely to spring up from a handful of rules, or whether a top-down design will bring it about. Mentifex was always in the latter camp.
Those in the former camp, including the Palm founders in the article, always seemed to be on the verge of something, but never seemed to really get any closer to a "mind" than some fuzzy logic.
We're still a long way off from Number 5 Alive.
"Uh, are you telling me that to reset it, I have to kick its ass?"
"Er...yes, sir."
Er, if you want an AI's reset to be life-like give it a good swift kick in the balls. Ever seen a guy go down after a good kick? In hindsight, it kinda reminds me of a hard reset...
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for me it looks more like they're developing system tha lets you strap on some ai behauvior on whatever project you're working on, so that you can make your systems more adaptable.
remember that in the industry ai is not really about making self aware monsters... what they would be more intrested would be machines that adjust their behauvior.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yes, you are indeed missing something. But it's probably not your fault, the people who taught you neural networks probably didn't know enough about the brain.
The parallelity of human brains is widely and hugely overestimated.
Just think about the fact that you can easily recognize 2 random objects if you are shown them for as little as a second. In this second, there is only enough time for about 100 of your neurons firing. The path trough your brain therefore _cannot_ be longer than a dozen neurons or "operations".
Any modern CPU does billions(!) of operations per second. So the comparison really isn't very good.
None of the founders of Numenta other than Jeff Hawkins have any experience in AI or for that matter have any background in hardcore computer science.
Dileep George is an Electrical Engineering graduate, while the CEO Donna Dubinsky is a hardcore salesperson and holds an MBA. Interestingly, the page also mentions that Jeff Hawkins " currently serves as Chief Technology Officer at palmOne, Inc". Fishy!
Next Generation AI ? Who are we kidding ?
I predict that the first AI they produce will work so well, that no one who buys one will ever need a replacement, so the company will spiral into obsolesence while Microsoft et al mkae a mint on AIs that are much easier to develop for...
[o]_O
I am actually currently reading his book--started about a month ago and am finishing the last of it now (a little every night before bed, when I'm not too tired).
His approach is surprising similar to my own (which I was initially happy to see), but less developed in some important ways. His book sometimes makes reference to being the first to consider this or that--nothing of which was new to me... things I've ready and/or talked about many times with others.
His approach also has a few critical flaws..
Foremost, invariance (the ability to recognize something regardless of where it is seen) cannot be achieved the way he speculates. I've testing this idea (and numerous others) in software years ago.
He illustrates this in the vision cortices where, he suggests, small sub-regions of the brain each learn to recognize something separately but criss-cross to other areas so that recognition can be invariant. I feel stupid admitting that I actually attempted this approach once...but not so alone now that Hawkins is advocating it.
First, each low-level (first to image) sub-region may break between another across the visual field at points within the object--what is going to target them into the fields? This problem can be satisfied farthar up the tree by cross-mixing between regions (and/or layers), but it's not very efficient.
Secondly and the critical point, this criss-cross betweens sub-regions method does not solve, but only moves the problem to a different space. Both the invariant identification and the location of identification are crucial factors to remember. But with the criss-cross method, there will be oodles and oodles of entities representing the same object of which higher level processes will need to somehow discover that they are the same thing......every time it's seen in a different place....
Another major problem is as to how this criss-crossing developes..given universal behavior for all neurons.
Matthew C. Tedder
I don't want to sound like Chicken Little here and I realize that Jeff's work target falls short of sentience, but I do want the planet to start thinking about "Pre-Sentient AI" in a conservative, cautious way.
Therefore I propose these Four Rules Of AI Development:
Rule One:
AI projects be Air-Gap network isolated and not be allowed to connect to the internet.
Terminator III's premise is a plausible one. All entities are self-interested and will seek to defend and propagate themselves. Global internet infrastructure could be seriously damaged by a well crafted host of worms.
Rule Two:
AI projects will not have access to diagrams of their own design circuitry.
This is to enable the effectiveness of Rule Three.
Rule Three:
All AI projects will have a buffered, hardware access to core thought processes so that the high order thought and planning can be observed with the AI entity's knowledge.
Rule Four:
All AI projects will be run on limited time run enabled power supply grids that are not documented design or protocol-wise anywhere on the internet.
This is to enable containment in worst case scenario situations.
There. I think I just saved the Planet.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency