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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
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_
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.
will it find Sarah Connor?
A-Bomb
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.
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...
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)
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.
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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.
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
The GTX site hasn't been updated since 2004 and is co-located with a lot of very non-technical entertainment sites, according to Netcraft.
The Vizco site is hosted in a house in a remote part of Charlotte, NC, and doesn't appear to have much substance to it yet. Since it's a TWC subnet, I would hazard a guess that it's a cable modem's static IP address hooked to someone's cheap-ass Windoze machine.
And then you get to the meat at the bottom of the press release:
I feel like I need to take a shower after reading that.
&laz;
when it rains, it gets real soggy. when it pours, i'm under the tap just _waiting_ for the joy
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
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"