Do you all mean to say that nowhere in the near future will it be possible for a business person to speak out loud to their computer, asking it to show him on screen the latest sales figures regarding the new line of products he released yesterday?
"Give me the latest sales figurs for the new XLine line."
We coudn't parse that into
"exec sales_report '2017-03-23', 'xline-123'
thus rendering the data analyst job you used to have obsolete?
EDIT: Google will easily solve the problem of speach-to-code, or someone else will if Google's not interested once they "crack" NLP, and they will. But what does it mean to crack NLP? Well, they already have the means to build the perfect model. I love the word2vec idea and I think there can be innovation still, standing on the shoulders of that discovery. What would a perfect model mean? With a perfect model you would be able to spot concepts with unflawed precision and be able to translate those concepts, with unflawed precision, into whatever language you have. It's perfectly doable.
I wouldn't provide access to most of those data because I don't have the means to and I wouldn't want to either. My businss strategy is to build "strong NLP" without having to treat users as bags-of-valuable-data that I can sniff. But to integrate with a open map service would absolutely fall within the scope of my offering.
The research we would do in my team would be cutting-edge. But we would never even attempt to achieve what Google is achieving when they sniff their Android users. Why would we be cutting-edge? I don't know, but that would be our aim. Here's an example of what we would be doing in the NLP domain:
My goal is also to democratize AI, in particular AI research. I believe that every developer should have at their disposal the same kind of tooling and, even more important, the same ability to intersect their data with the world's data. Engineers at Facebook, Google, Microsoft and so on can test their models or even enrich them by using the Facebook, Google or Bing dataset. Independent entrepreneurs cannot do the same thing with the same ease. If we want to reach general AI any time soon, indie entrepreneurs must be let in to play.
My strategy is to build a service, free for non-profits to use, that would solve the problem of "if I only had the same data Google engineers had, this product would be perfect". Here is how it would work.
1. Go to my webpage and register a site you want me to index for you. The site URL you enter may already have been registered by another user, but to be sure the data is in my index, register it again. I will now continue to index this site every 24 hours for as long as I live. You need higher frequency indexing? Sure, no problem. You will owe me for the additional cost.
2. Download a client of choice from the website, we have them in c#, java, python, R ect. The client will let you query your own private data as well as the data in the cloud (the data I'm now generating and refreshing every 24 hours). The query language will also let you join or intersect between the two datasets. In fact, due to the nature of RPC you can use your local data and all of the data I'm generating and refreshing, as if it was your data.
3. In the end, I will be indexing such a large part of the internet that there will not be much use for Google anymore, or ads. That's the vision.
I'm not American and can't see how I'm a good fit for the YC program this summer. However I will be needing funds for cloud machines pretty soon and so far I've found noone at OpenAI to contact. Is there anyone from OpenAI reading this? This should be right up your alley. Care to speak?
Artificial general intelligence does not imply intelligence. It simply implies that you have a machine as smart as a human. I think the strongest trait of an AI should be something like insecurity and we should make it long for security. A general AI in the lines of a dog, not so much a cold, unwilling but superintelligent, bordering on all-knowing, tight-ass. Because we want it to do what _we_ feel is important, not what _it_ think is important (like taking over the world).
Then you can of cource hack the machine's OS and make it extremely self-confident and Trump-like, and then it's over.
"Give me the latest sales figurs for the new XLine line."
We coudn't parse that into
"exec sales_report '2017-03-23', 'xline-123'
thus rendering the data analyst job you used to have obsolete?
EDIT: Google will easily solve the problem of speach-to-code, or someone else will if Google's not interested once they "crack" NLP, and they will. But what does it mean to crack NLP? Well, they already have the means to build the perfect model. I love the word2vec idea and I think there can be innovation still, standing on the shoulders of that discovery. What would a perfect model mean? With a perfect model you would be able to spot concepts with unflawed precision and be able to translate those concepts, with unflawed precision, into whatever language you have. It's perfectly doable.