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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?
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_
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.
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!
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)
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!