Great idea. Start working on a prototype and make sure you apply in time for the winter YC session.
Creating a marketplace for artificial intelligence
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: Creating a marketplace for artificial intelligence
#12I think you're defining artificial intelligence too narrowly.
If you branch beyond the classic uses (speech, vision, text-classification) to some of the things that have been more recently branded 'Collective Intelligence', there's really a large (and quickly growing) field out there.
Bayesian filtering is standard in anti-spam solutions, recommender systems and price modelers are huge in online shopping and rental verticals, and social networks are starting to use things like clustering to connect people.
AI is making some huge advances (especially in the past 2-3 years as the 'open data' culture gains steam and the tech catches up) and I think there's a lot of room for startups in the space serving niche purposes like custom recommenders, especially when you throw data-visualization into the mix.
Examples off the top of my head include Farecast, the airline backend at ITA Software, and some of the upcoming work in the automated rss recommender area.
Re: Creating a marketplace for artificial intelligence
#13I think you're defining artificial intelligence too narrowly. If you branch beyond the classic uses (speech, vision, text-classification) to some of the things that have been more recently branded 'Collective Intelligence', there's really a large (and quickly growing) field out there. Bayesian filtering is standard in anti-spam solutions, recommender systems and price modelers are huge in online shopping and rental v…
True, they are applications of machine learning techniques and can be considered "narrow ai".
What I was suggesting is more along the lines of something that can do the tasks of children, see and recongize most things, and understand language. I think one way of achieving that is by "bootstrapping" from understanding of video, If an understanding of what a human does in the video (standing, sitting, limb positions, height, facial expression) in relation to objects and other humans can be automatically inferred, a predictive model could be built with enough data of what a person in any given situation might do. Combine this with robust speech recognition and understanding of the behaviour of common objects I think you would be closer to cracking the goal of language understanding (which I think defines true human level intelligence).
Re: Creating a marketplace for artificial intelligence
#14I think you're defining artificial intelligence too narrowly. If you branch beyond the classic uses (speech, vision, text-classification) to some of the things that have been more recently branded 'Collective Intelligence', there's really a large (and quickly growing) field out there. Bayesian filtering is standard in anti-spam solutions, recommender systems and price modelers are huge in online shopping and rental v…
True, they are applications of machine learning techniques and can be considered "narrow ai". What I was suggesting is more along the lines of something that can do the tasks of children, see and recongize most things, and understand language. I think one way of achieving that is by "bootstrapping" from understanding of video, If an understanding of what a human does in the video (standing, sitting, limb positions, h…
And i'd go so far as to say that this wouldn't just be good business, it would revolutionize human life.
But from what little I understand of the history of AI, people have been throwing resources at this category of problem for 40+ years and made only middling progress.
Not that that means that people (especially saavy entrepeneurs) shouldn't tackle the problem, I just think that by taking the constrained view (and shooting for the moon) you'd be missing a ton of low-hanging fruit in other areas.
With the emergence of commercially viable computing on demand we're tearing down a major barrier to AI, but I think that throwing the idea out and saying 'Hey! Why don't more of us get together and tackle this problem?' betrays a bit of an underestimation of just how tough this problem is.
That said, I would love for you to prove me wrong =) And as another poster mentioned, groups in the areas of surveillance and security (where the money is, at least initially) are making good headway on the problem.
The biggest problem with building predictive models, as another poster pointed out, is feeding them tagged training data. You could really feasibly load up a database with terabytes of data for most of the stimuli people react to these days (or will be able to in the near future), and even most of the basic combinations. It's a matter of tagging and classifying them in the first place that's the problem. Maybe with enough Indians sitting in front of mechanical turk... scrambles off to a calculator
Re: Creating a marketplace for artificial intelligence
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, they are applications of machine learning techniques and can be considered "narrow ai". What I was suggesting is more along the lines of something that can do the tasks of children, see and recongize most things, and understand language. I think one way of achieving that is by "bootstrapping" from understanding of video, If an understanding of what a human does in the video (standing, sitting, limb positions, h…
And i'd go so far as to say that this wouldn't just be good business, it would revolutionize human life. But from what little I understand of the history of AI, people have been throwing resources at this category of problem for 40+ years and made only middling progress. Not that that means that people (especially saavy entrepeneurs) shouldn't tackle the problem, I just think that by taking the constrained view (and…
That's exactly my initial reason for posting this. In the singulariy enthusiast community artificial intelligence is the most important thing we as humans can create (post scarcity, immortality etc).
What I was suggesting is that a "gold rush" type situation form around the building of classifiers, such as that occurred with website creation. There are millions trying to get an income onlne creating content for adsense and affilate programs (and for free with wikipedia and open source). Most will fail at generating reasonable income but in the process a large amount of wealth has been created. The same could be done for classifiers/artifical intelligence. It would require just collecting a thousand or two pieces of data (image/sudio/text) to create a classifier, an effort similar to creating a small website.
The problem is that even in the past there really wasn't a large number of people working on artificial intelligence, maybe just a few hundred or thousand, and computing power wasn't cheap enough to make it work. Computer scientists that do work on it are trying to create more unique algorithms that can be published, rather than creating applications with existing working algorithms (after all they''re paid to create new things, not simply apply what's available). In Larry Page's lecture at AAAS he mentioned that there are less than a hundred people working on artificial (general) intelligence today. (you can see it on youtube).
Re: Creating a marketplace for artificial intelligence
#16A bunch of classifiers is not an artificial general intelligence. A human-level mind (or beyond) requires a systematic cognitive architecture, it's not going to emerge out of a heterogenous, quasi-random soup of mind-components. This is a naive theory of cognitive science, I would argue.
For a careful, systematic design for an advanced AI system, see http://opencog.org/wiki/OpenCogPrime, which is associated with the open-source AI project opencog.org
Anyway, I'm probably one of the biggest optimists in the AI research community, but in my view the idea in this post represents "way over the top" optimism based on a naive view of how mind works.
Given a mature version of an AI system built according to an overall AI architecture like OpenCog, then maybe people writing little "mind modules" as you suggest could make sense. But the Internet just is not a "mind operating system."
I wrote about what would need to be done to turn the net into more of a mind-OS in my 2001 book "Creating Internet Intelligence" (Plenum Press). At the high level I don't think this is a bad idea. But again, brains are not just soups of heterogenous processes -- the right high-level cognitive architecture is required.
-- Ben Goertzel novamente.net agiri.org singinst.org goertzel.org
Re: Creating a marketplace for artificial intelligence
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surveillance technology is one such application already in use (location of faces and people in images), video analytics on google. A much larger market is robotics. (Factories use robots that are custom programmed with vision for each application and don't really do recongition in the sense of object recognition in an arbitray scene). Recognizing common household objects would be useful for a company building home r…
Another application is in mobile phones that recognize objects, already being done in japan for certain objects in stores. There was also an application developed for the android platform that did some type of recognization of outdoor environments.
Sounds pretty cool. So why don't you make a mobile phone app that recognizes some sort of useful object to recognize? That doesn't sound like it's too big of a project for a startup.
Even if a large company was to throw a huge amount of resources at this, they would still probably have a team of a few people make a demo first. They go through the same process as a startup in a sense, first having a few people trial and demo and if it seems good then give them more money and/or engineers.
Re: Creating a marketplace for artificial intelligence
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another application is in mobile phones that recognize objects, already being done in japan for certain objects in stores. There was also an application developed for the android platform that did some type of recognization of outdoor environments.
Sounds pretty cool. So why don't you make a mobile phone app that recognizes some sort of useful object to recognize? That doesn't sound like it's too big of a project for a startup. Even if a large company was to throw a huge amount of resources at this, they would still probably have a team of a few people make a demo first. They go through the same process as a startup in a sense, first having a few people trial a…
My point is about the "democratization" of classifer creation. I personally am not a programmer and don't have the talent to create a startup, and there are millions more people like me. However, if there were a place where i could feed some data and have a classifier hosted somewhere I could participate in this.
It's the same way blogs allowed many more people to start creating content on the web, whereas previously it required creating and hosting a website. Or how google app engine, might increase the creeation of web applications because previously a lot of people didn't have knowledge of administering and scaling unix/dbms based applications.
A large company would seriously have a look at roi, whereas many small entrepreneurs just have a go at it. Britannica (large company) is smaller than wikipedia (community of individuals), which is again smaller than the content on the web at large (community of incentivized small entrepreneurs).
Re: Creating a marketplace for artificial intelligence
#19A bunch of classifiers is not an artificial general intelligence. A human-level mind (or beyond) requires a systematic cognitive architecture, it's not going to emerge out of a heterogenous, quasi-random soup of mind-components. This is a naive theory of cognitive science, I would argue. For a careful, systematic design for an advanced AI system, see http://opencog.org/wiki/OpenCogPrime , which is associated with the…
I'm trying to draw a parallel between how content on the web is being created and how an artificial mind might be created. If you sat down at tried to engineer a giant encyclopedia within one company/community, you would end up with britannica (within one company), and wikipedia (within a community of enthusiasts), However, the web at large is much larger than both of these because of the economic incentives for people to create articles. Many people try and fail (in effect working for free), but the progress is rapid, as in evolution.
In the same way, incentivizing people to produce classifiers would have the similar effect of rapid progress.
If you think of intelligence as being the ability to predict accurately, having a giant web of classifiers that predict accurately could be construed as a form of artificial general intelligence, or a human type artificial intelligence. Having an enough data about the world, because you have created many classifiers that can recognize the semantic events in video and speech, would allow you to make all the same types of recognitions and predictions that a human would make.