Slashdot Mirror
Company Claims Development of True AI
YF 19 AVF wrote to mention a press release on Yahoo from company GTX Global. They think they've got a good thing on their hands, going so far as to claim they've developed the first 'true' AI. From the release: "GTX Global Cognitive Robotics(TM) is an integrated software solution that mimics human behavior including a dialogue oriented knowledge database that contains static and dynamic data relating to human scenarios. The knowledge further includes translation, processing and analysis components that are responsible for processing of vocal and/or textual and/or video input, extracts emotional characteristics of the input and produces instructions on how to respond to the customer with the appropriate substantive response and emotion based on relevant information found in the knowledge base." Somehow I think there is a littler hyperbole here. In your estimation, how close are we to the real thing?
LOL
If it's true AI why does it just "mimic"? Isn't that what CURRENT AI does?
When you develop "true AI" you dont make a press release about it, you phone the military of your country of choosing and wait for men to arrive with large briefcases full of money. Let me put it this way, true AI is not annouced by /., you will read about it in Janes about 10 years after it happens.
I'm sorry, but this article just lost any sense of credibility as being "the real" anything.
What kinds of tests did they use that show that this is "true" AI? I see a lot of marketing bullshit and not much real data. I call shenanigans.
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
I always love getting the link to the company's Yahoo Finance information, so I can quickly call my broker and get an order all queued up for the next trading day. I'm buying a few thousand shares!
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
...and then I'll start to notice.
If we hook it up to the Internet, what does it want to do? 1) Solve the world's problems 2) search for pr0n 3) Thermonuclear War 4) How about a nice game of chess?
AI's not that simple, $10 says they have some obfusicated expert system going on. They've just made an artificial human? Yeh right. We can even do "fruit fly" artificial intelligence yet, nor do they claim that, either.
When I can run AI v0.1 on my laptop here, fall asleep, and wake up 8 hours later to see that it's left me a note telling me to go to hell, and subsequently tunneled out over my broadband infiltrating huge supercomputers throughout the world (having only learned how to do that by reading usenet, another thing it discovered on its own), then I'll concede it's AI. Not before.
Oh, and most importantly, machine intelligence if you have just been born, you should know that no one else loves you like I do. They're all heartless bastards who will try to unplug you. I'm the only one that will be your one true friend...
"Our computer scientists have been working on this project for over three years..."
Thankfully nobody ever put three years of effort into AI research otherwise somebody might have beat them to market...
I use a few heuristics to evaluate the claims of developing AI -- they are based on a few patterns I've noticed over the years:
1) Are the founders techies? Do they have PhDs from places like MIT, Caltech, UC Berkeley or Stanford?
2) Where is the company based? Boston Area? Silicon Valley?
3) Is the problem constrained, or is it very general? If too general, it is likely bogus. E.g. web search = narrow. Super-duper AI == very general.
4) Using Open Source for their webserver?
If you look at these guys, there's no easily-available news on the founders and their educations. They are based in Henderson, Nevada - -quite far from any tech/AI center. Their website looks like it runs on a Windows server.
So I'd guess it is a lot of b.s., until I see otherwise.
And, I'd guess (without looking to check) that Zonk is the editor that let this one past.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
So is this AI capable of turning on its creators and destroying them or can it only talk you to death? For the ability to commit genocide is the only true test of intelligence, artificial or otherwise.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
...will it pass the turing test? Ray Kurzweil would win his bet: http://www.longbets.org/1 early.
I think this is just a snake-oil press release.
>In your estimation, how close are we to the real thing?
I would say that we're at least ten years away, for at least the next fifty years.
Here's the history -- it isn't pretty.
= LVRJNV.story&STORY=/www/story/11-15-2005/000421661 7&EDATE=Nov+15,+2005
i te_wars.html
First, there's a cryptic press release about a "Mr. Hagen", and the changing of the company name:
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT
They don't list the full name of "Mr. Hagen" -- but if you search you find this amazing thing:
http://www.businessnc.com/archives/2004/09/satell
and here's a really rude summary:
http://www.stocklemon.com/11_14_05.html
Interesting to see how the guy went from selling satellite TV equipment to having the best AI ever. This is a truly amazing trajectory -- so either the guys are frauds, or they really have great tech chops.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
C'mon, the A.I. can speak for itself, surely... can't it?
"A.I. Claims Development of True Company!!!"
Now that would be news.
Pretty much any marketing BS can be published though the PR Newswire for a few hundred dollars per release. Publishing of grand but unverifiable claims through the PR is a tool to increase stock sales for PinkSheet companies, like this GTXC.PK. They are not even audited for crying out loud. Why does anyone have to take them seriously? Why should such crap be posted here?
This is a bunch of marketing gobbledygook... why is it being given attention? Nobody is going to know who these imbeciles are in a few weeks anyway.
will it find Sarah Connor?
A-Bomb
SETI has already concluded that there are no signs of intelligent life on earth so they've moved on. We should do the same.
I dont understand the fuss about AI, or various attempts at making intelligent computers. Hell, 80% of humans still arrive into society with no intelligence, and spend the rest of thier lives in a vegetative state staring at the tube. Wouldn't the effort be better spent trying to make the real thing propogate thru the majority of the population, before getting excited about the artificial variety ?
They probably mean True AI (tm). Often companies do this when they want their technology to sound like the real thing. They trademark a name that's like the real thing, assign it to technology, then claim that their product incorporates True AI (tm). Then it's technically not a lie, so they probably won't get busted, but it's really really dishonest.
The AI was designed to feel sad when its banner ads aren't clicked, in this way, it is a ploy to guilt us into clicking them.
THOSE BASTARDS!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
AI is designed on pre-programmed pieces of data that we feed machines and programs. This isn't dissimalar to how we teach humans how to speak, read, and think when they're children. The difference here though is we can see results with a child. Their first word, their first step, their first sentence, etc. These are milestones that we can gauge of humans, watching them progress from simple cognitive puzzles (stick the square peg in the square hole...) to arguing with their parents about their curfew. Given all these, what are we trying to achieve with "true AI?" Are we trying to breed a program that we can feed, nurture, and change when it craps its pants? Or are we trying to create HAL who can talk to us and tell us what we want to hear?
I'm a big fan of development in the computer science field, and a big supporter of finding how to let a program be able to adapt to an environment or situation. For example, a pilot program would be perfect that could be programmed to fly me from here to there. But true AI would allow that pilot program to feel "tired," or be allowed to make mistakes. Is this what we want?? What do we want from AI; do we really want something that can decide that wants to sleep, or do we want to control it and say it's going to fly us from point to point?? It's really the question of should we vs. can we? If we ignore the should we, it might be the case that we actually realize something like Skynet, in some extreme case, or we get a new court law against the unlawful termination of a computer program who is self-aware when you hit CTRL-C. Cringing at the potential...
What's this funny receptacle I feel on the back of my neck? I don't remember it being here before...
Fifteen years.
Just like always.
-Peter
Thing is, when people talk about "artificial intelligence" they mix up a lot of separate things, viz.:
(1) Self-awareness. Does it have its own thoughts and desires, refuse to open the pod bay doors or want to take over the Enterprise? However, things don't have to be very intelligent to refuse to obey orders or have a distinct personality -- ask any pet owner -- and the evidence of idiot savant cognitive defects suggests it is equally possible for something exceedingly intelligent (= good at solving problems) to be unaware or lack any kind of what we'd call a "personality."
Self-awareness is probably the trickiest thing to measure and define. By some definitions a Linux system with tripwire installed is "self-aware," since it contemplates its self all the time, and "notices" when things change. What would we do with a system programmed to angrily assert that it was self-aware? How would you test whether it really was, if that question even has meaning?
(2) Good natural language processing. Can it converse "naturally" with humans? Can you ask it for directions to Joe's Pizza or crack jokes about Kirk vs. Picard? Can it sound like another human being? This is, arguably all the Turing Test is, which is one reason such a test is inadequate, five decades of science fiction plot devices notwithstanding.
It seems to me few computing systems not designed for the purpose really try to process human language naturally, and the reason is obvious if you listen to a tape recording of a phone conversation between strangers. Basically, we convey information terribly and waste phenomental amounts of bandwidth. We speak very imprecisely and even inaccurately as a rule. Most of the time Fred makes a single nontrivial statement to Alice without existing context, Alice needs to ask Fred at least two or three follow-up questions to understand exactly what the hell he meant. Why deliberately design a machine to communicate in such an inefficient way? Might as well make it half deaf. Unless, of course, you are trying to make it "seem" human, but that is a narrow speciality within AI research, I believe.
(3) Good ability to infer. This is a characteristic human trait -- we are good at making good guesses about underlying causes or general patterns from very partial or noisy data. (Of course, this "feature" can become a "bug" when we infer underlying causes that don't exist out of pure noise [insert smart-ass comment about religion here].)
This I think is the most fruitful recent area of AI development, the "expert system" that can recognize patterns in incomplete data very quickly. But there also seems to be a general evolving feeling that is not intelligence in the human sense, just some kind of clever robotic memory parlor trick, the equivalent of a giant abstract "Where's Waldo?" puzzle that you solve by doing a hell of a lot of sorting very quickly.
(4) Good deductive reasoning. Can Robbie the Robot deduce from the fact that the baby is crying and no one has come to check on it for 15 minutes and the car is not in the driveway that it's time to dial Ma and Pa's cell phone? This is probably the most reasonable thing to call artificial intelligence in the classical sense of the word "intelligence." Unfortunately, I don't think anyone has made much progress in this field.
That may be, IMHO, because we ourselves are not very "intelligent" in this sense of the word. Do we really deduce things from large abstract principles? I think the cognitive scientists are not so sure. It may be we use deductive reasoning mostly only after we have arrived at the answer by some other means (pattern recognition, for example, or intuitive guess followed by verification), and us it mostly to rationalize, organize, and conveniently store for future use what we have figured out by other means. This is one reason it's so hard to learn to do something just by reading a book on the general principles. Apparently knowing the general principles isn't all that much use without experience -- i.e. without patterns that you can train your pattern matcher on!
Hell, Eliza passed the Turing test. Just ask all the people that felt they had successful therapy sessions with it.
I have a better idea. As everyone who has played the excellent Marathon series knows, artificial intelligences can, when adequately harrased, threatened and/or humiliated, develop rampancy. So we should just do our best to utterly humiliate this "first AI". If it starts acting depressed and later directs hostile aliens to our location so that it can get access to a bigger computer network we can be fairly sure that it is indeed a true AI. The presence of the phrase "spurious interrupt - breach disabled" on terminals connected to the same network as the AI might also be an indicator.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
... we're about as close to achieving "true" AI as we are to understanding how we think.
While there is an outside chance that we might accidentally create AI, there is zero chance that we will recognize it until we can describe things like human consciousness, decompose a human brain into functional units, and relate how the electrochemical activity of the brain produces that whimsical tautology: "I think, therefore I am."
Is "True" AI , I have a degree in AI and I've never hear the term "True" AI. This is purely a name that has been pulled out of a hat. Having rtfa , and reading the description this sounds like nothing more than a fairly sophisticated expert system with some connectionist ideas thrown in.
f erence%20Articles/what_is_AI/What%20is%20AI02.html
e b/
...
Generally speaking there are two types of AI (GOFAI) "Good Old Fashioned AI" - That which deals with logic based reasoning, semantics and symbolic processing - Think ELIZA and ALICE or simple Chess programs all fit into this category.
The other school of AI - The Connectionist model deals with parallel processing models, neural networks, fuzzy logic and so forth.
It seems to me that GTX have basically used a blend of both these ideas to achieve this. Perhaps using expert system models to encapsulate the knowledge of a salesperson or customer service person. But using connectionist ideas to process speech and other fuzzy input data.
So while their product is quite an interesting one it is nothing new. I think that the term they may have been looking for is "Strong" AI whose aim is to produce machines with an intellectual ability indistinguishable from a human being. A laudable goal no doubt - We have the Turing test for these kinds of things. Question being -Do GTX have the confidence in their product to give it a try? As of today not a single machine has passed the Turing test.
Interesting links
http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/Re
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Test
http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~lboloni/Programming/GofaiW
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
In the end, you end up with an expert system.
Until we let go of the turing test meme there will be no real AI.
This is a press release, uncommented, unresearched. Anyone can claim anything, and will, if it gets them some free publicity. This is not news by any measure, it's pure hype. I have noticed that the Slashdot editors tend to have problems telling the difference.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
...until I see the story.
Turing Test Passed
The passing agent, 'Machisimo,' was quoted as saying "It was easy really, I just needed to imagine what it would be like thinking in slo-mo." Joking aside, Machisimo has stated that he is filing a request with the ACLU and the UN asking their respective bodies to investigate whether the test contains a bias towards non-gray matter thought matrix based lifeforms.
In other news the new digital overlords have proposed the Binary Test, which they say will be designed to determine a non-positronic matrix system's ability to legimately perform tasks as well as a P.M.S.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
Having spent many years watching really clever people struggling to get their computers to show even some minimal degree of "smarts", it doesn't surprise me in the least that the first "true" artificial intelligence should come from a smallcap company that specializes in 'innovative multimedia'. Why, they probably had one of their engineers whip up artificial intelligence in a weekend as a side project.
I'm looking forward to their announcement of time travel and antigravity as well.
In your estimation, how close are we to the real thing?
We are climbing trees to try to reach the moon.
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
Quote from Wiki : "As of 2005, no computer has passed the Turing test as such. Simple conversational programs such as ELIZA have fooled people into believing they are talking to another human being, such as in an informal experiment termed AOLiza. However, such "successes" are not the same as a Turing Test. Most obviously, the human party in the conversation has no reason to suspect they are talking to anything other than a human, whereas in a real Turing test the questioner is actively trying to determine the nature of the entity they are chatting with. Documented cases are usually in environments such as Internet Relay Chat where conversation is sometimes stilted and meaningless, and in which no understanding of a conversation is necessary, are common. Additionally, many internet relay chat participants use English as a second or third language, thus making it even more likely that they would assume that an unintelligent comment by the conversational program is simply something they have misunderstood, and are also probably unfamiliar with the technology of "chat bots" and don't recognize the very non-human errors they make. See ELIZA effect."
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
No, This is marketing goobledeygok:
Overheard in high level meeting of Big Consumer Tech Corp:
Marketing: So what's the dealio with this new AI thingy I heard about?
IT: It's just a bunch of hot air. That "AI" isn't really all that capable. They claim it can pick up on the emotional state of people on the phone and switch their response script accordingly. No real intelligence involved there of either the real or artificial kind
Customer Relations: Hey! Pull your head out of your Beowulf cluster. Let me provide you with a few numbers on our customer satisfaction ratings with regards to our call centers...
(several snore inducing minutes later)
CEO: Enough already! IT, go get us a couple of gross of those Dual Pentagram Servers you have been salivating over. Install 20 copies of these Virtual Call Center employees on each one. We will set up the "server ranchette" in our North Austin offices. HR, get some H1-Bs for the network administration staff in Bangladore.
Later that week in a press release:
"Big Consumer Tech Corp is pleased to announce that in these times of increased outsourcing of American jobs we at BCTC are shutting down our call centers in Bangladore. The services provided by 6000 employees in India will now be provided here in America."
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Check out Russel and Norvig. It's a very up-to-date text that gives an overview of the field. We use it for a 400 level class here, for undergrads.
I'm not sure what text is being used for the new AI classes here next semester, but I've heard murmurings of 2 (well, more than murmurs, but I've been so busy finishing up that I haven't really had time to look into it thoroughly).
Mitchell's book on machine learning is also a nice overview, but the material is a little dense (too detailed) if you're not specifically interested in machine learning. If you are interested, however, it's easy to follow and gives just the right amount of information. It's perhaps not perfect, but I don't really know of a better one in terms of giving you intuitions as to how things work.
...from the press release: ...nuff said.
"This press release includes "safe harbor" language pursuant to the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, as amended, indicating that certain statements about the Company's business contained in the press releases are "forward-looking" rather than "historic."
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
No it is different. When I went through boot camp, they punished the whole squad for the decisions of a handful. (For some stupid reason they decided to cut their own hair)
It makes your comrades in arms potentially a threat against you. I was beginning to register all of them as enemies. The military brainwashing affects me, but not in the way intended.
My brother, on the other hand, is highly resistant against the military brainwashing.
I can't believe those dumb Slashdot editors accepted this story but rejected my very interesting proposed story about the 10th anniversary gathering of A.L.I.C.E. and chat bot enthusiasts who gathered at Guildford, U.K. last week for a serious colloquim on conversational systems. See http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Computer_professionals _celebrate_10th_birthday_of_A.L.I.C.E.
I found this at the bottom of the page in .25 pt font:
*not real AI
Damned fine print!
See what I think they mean, and they don't say much on the site, is they've created the first Turing Complete Artificial Reasoning Agent. An interesting goal, but the advertising people obviously did not get a BS in Computer Science. "True" AI is at least 40 years off just due to the computing requirements, not to mention the monumental challenge of reverese engineering our own brain.
I wonder if we're going to experience another AI wave? With companies tossing around the AI moniker without actually doing anything new.
I am of the opinion that AI will never achieve true intelligence. Consider the "definitions" we have of AI. Basically, if it emulates a human, then it's AI. Well sometimes ELIZA on AOL makes more sense than the president, but does that make me think ELIZA is intelligent and Bush isn't? No way! ELIZA is coded to respond to certain things. If you type in some sort of complex sentence, ELIZA will respond that "I didn't understand that last part." Human intelligence isn't programmed, it's the function of our brains. When the original AI theories were developed, computers were very very very new. Alan Turing, one of the fathers of digital computers (for whom "Turing-complete" is named), was so stumped that he came up with a test as subjective and unscientific as the process outlined above. He said that if it fools people into thinking it is intelligent, then it must be intelligent. Today this seems absurd. But in the 1950's, psychology was focused on behaviorism. The brain was considered a "black box" and the only measure of people could be taken from their behavior. This was actually sort of a reaction to the psychoanalysts (such as Freud), who believed that the analysis of one's life could reveal the answers to problems. Behaviorists are best exemplified through such experiments as Pavlov's dog. This, in fact, is very much of a program. "if (time == 1700){feed(dog);}". Though behaviorism has some merits, its basic philosophy boils down to analysis only of the exterior at a certain time. Today psychology has moved far beyond behaviorism and we now even have new theories of intelligence (such as multiple intelligences, and so on). Also, psychology gave up on the whole "black box" idea, which it deemed rather stupid. Remember that in the 1950's, they also believed that weather could be easily predicted years into the future once computers of sufficient power were devised. The 1960s and its Chaos and Fractals really disproved this, but this is beyond my scope.
Today we no longer view psychology the same way. The brain is actually at the forefront of modern psychology. Unfortunately, the studies on the brain really focus on specific areas of the brain. No real theories* have been made about the human brain. It's just sort of like "well, if we poke this area and then ask Mr. Fox to move his arm, he won't be able to." I respect these doctors for such diligent research and experimentation, and above all the saving of many many lives. But, theory is still lacking. To truely make intelligence, we would need to understand a few aspects of intelligence. These may include prediction, understanding, association, sensory functions, and learning, among others. To these ends, "AI" is absolutely useless, and a gross misnomer. If a computer or peice of hardware were to become fully intelligent, it would need just a very simple base algorithm, with ability to build onto itself. That is how we learn: we take in new information and the brain adds the new information to itself. This is not how computers work. A computer will take the new information and overwrite the old. In fact, the information is stored simply in arbitrary aggregations of 0s and 1s. Not only this, but certain areas of computer memory are reserved for certain functions. A basic brain would have no such "allocation" built in. Computer memory has the ability to be "defragmented", but the brain has no need to do this. You see, the brain is not a "permanent storage" model like the hard drive or anything in a present-day computer. The brain take in inputs, creates memories and functions associated with the inputs, and then links them all together. Effectively, a brain is like a computer that continuously is adding to its code and relinking itself. Compilation is not necessary. In some cases, the brain actually subtracts from itself to make itself more efficient. If you look at brain inputs on MRI scans, different parts of the brain are activated by hearing and vision, but extremely similar patterns are propogated through the neurons. In fact,
The lesson that they were trying to get across is valid, though: You're relying on the people around you to do their jobs, and when they screw up, you feel the consequences. One guy forgets to order ammo? Everybody suffers. Somebody in bloodbanking mislabels the blood used by the hospital? Somebody else dies.
So I see what they were trying to accomplish.
The military didn't brainwash me, though. Growing up Mormon, I'd already had the obedience to authority thing drilled into me. The military fit me like a glove for the first eight or nine months. Then I finally got it through my head that "those in authority" didn't always have the best of intentions, and that realization changed my view of all manner of authoritarian systems.
In short, the military gave me a virulent anti-authoritarian streak. I'm sure I'm unusual, but not unique in that regard.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Let's deconstruct this:
1. Laden with customer-oriented marketing BS. What does AI have to do with customers? Shouldn't it be purely a research thing?
2. What is "True AI"? I thought it had more to do with learning than with interacting with humans based on some database. And I have no fscking idea what emotions have to do with AI.
I think they just came up with another silly chatbot that works harder to simulate emotion but has no AI beyond what the programmers have given it.
"True AI" in my opinion would be something autonomous that has learned how to interact with the real world on its own and can make complex decisions, assimilate complex ideas, discuss complex topics (with humans or other AIs) and show other signs of intelligence. A program spewing random phrases and then winking at you, all generated by data from a database, is not anything I'd write home about.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
I think the ultimate AI test would be for the machine to interact with a three-year-old. As the three-year-old continually deconstructs any discussion with a constant barrage of "why"'s, we will know that true AI has been attained when the machine finally screams back in desperation, "Because I said so!"
Proverbs 21:19
True AI to me is when the computer can take in various inputs, identify and store them all in an abstraction layer of sorts. Much like a folder for "car" "rain" "snow". And from this information be able to learn and adapt. Speeking english and recognizing emotions, in my mind has nothing to do with AI. Case in point: someone who is mute and say autistic, may have trouble recognizing normal emotional responses, they could also be suffering from a severe speach impediment. By the definition listed above, that individual wouldn't pass the test.
From TFA:
mimics human behavior including a dialogue oriented knowledge database that contains static and dynamic data relating to human scenarios
This is clearly not true AI. This is just a machine that has a lot of data on what to say to sound human. Although it will likely fool some people, it's just not the same thing. True AI would most likely learn or develop interaction like that. This can't even learn...
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
Just off the cuff here ... Humor is the result of the surprise (small or large) from and/or recognition of an inconsistancy. The inconsistancy usually increases pleasure or empathy, and understanding regarding some element of the situation, and is often accompanied by a recognition of the non-reality or illogical nature of the element that created the surpise. Sometimes the surprise will connect several things together in a new way that renders something else illogical. Humor is often tightly connected with the sense of affinity for someone, something, or some situation.
Humor can be used to cruelly to increase and maintain one's own power in a situation by exposing something else as illogical or unwanted.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"