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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."
You had to reset Palm PDAs in interesting ways, like poking a tiny button hidden ina hole with a paper clip. Imagine what you'd have to do a bot with Palm-like AI...
"Sir, to reset the machine, you'll need to sharply press its reset button, located at the back of the machine, just before its legs. just quickly pop your foot against it to press it."
"Uh, are you telling me that to reset it, I have to kick its ass?"
"Er...yes, sir."
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Great, just what I need, an AI app that keeps poping up saying, "You know you should go to that meeting. What do you mean you don't want to go? Did you remember your wedding anniversary? Have you called your wife? Who's this 'Elle' person in your phone book. You should stop playing 'Tetris' so often..."
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
According to news.com.com.com.com, IBM is working on something similar...
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
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?
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
HAL: Dave, do I need a penis enlargement?
Dave: For the millionth time HAL, no. You don't have one, remember?
HAL: But if I did, do you think I would get better functionality if I used Viatroxx?
Dave: No. Now Hal...
HAL: Dave, it looks like there's another poor Nigerian who needs my help.
Dave: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggg!
HAL: Dave? What are you doing Dave?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
- Crow T. Trollbot
The article gives little detail of the technology, and it's not like the general ideas Hawkins describes haven't been explored by people during the many decades of AI/neural networks research. The Numenta website gives the following:
HTM is "hierarchical" because it consists of memory modules connected in a hierarchical fashion. The hierarchy resembles an inverted tree with many memory modules at the bottom of the hierarchy and fewer at the top. HTM is "temporal" because each memory module stores and recalls sequences of patterns. HTM is hierarchical both temporally and spatially. An HTM system is not programmed in a traditional sense; instead it is trained. Sensory data is applied to the bottom of the hierarchy and the HTM system automatically discovers the underlying patterns in the sensory input. You might say it "learns" what objects are in the world and how to recognize them. Time is an essential element of how HTM systems work. First, to learn the patterns in the world, the sensory data must flow over time just as we move our eyes to see and move our hands to feel. Second, because every memory module stores sequences of patterns, HTM systems can be used to make predictions of the future. They not only discover and recognize objects but they can make predictions about how objects will behave going forward in time.That sounds like a number of neural network approaches, including Stephen Grossberg's work at BU. Although Hawkins seems to be a very bright guy, this field is littered with very bright researchers who made bold claims, and none of those efforts have yielded revolutionary businesses. Anyone remember (Stanford AI researcher) Edward Feigenbaum's Fifth Generation book in the 1980s? Doug Lenat's Cyc project?
Remember the huge difference between one neuron's firing rate and the clock speed for processors. The brain operates in a way that's fundamentally different from how we program and how computers operate: massive parallelism with slow components versus (mostly) serial computation. So when a company says they'll market a software solution to something which scientists haven't figured out yet, I am indeed skeptical. This is really more research effort than commercial venture, and Numenta admits this: "It may well take several years before products based on HTM systems are commercially available."
I hope there's something here. I'd love to see an outsider come in with fresh ideas and create a software platform to explore neuro-inspired programs. But let's be realistic and remember the history of AI. A red flag is the lack of any scientific papers available from the Numenta web site. If they are far enough along to make a software development kit, they should have been publishing results in peer-reviewed journals (with appropriate patent filings if necessary). So far, the only literature published is a trade book: On Intelligence.