Morendil comments on Advice for AI makers - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 14 January 2010 11:32AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 16 January 2010 04:35:13AM *  30 points [-]

This article (which I happened across today) written by Ben Goertzel should make interesting reading for a would-be AI maker. It details Ben's experience trying to build an AGI during the dot-com bubble. His startup company, Webmind, Inc., apparently had up to 130 (!) employees at its peak.

According to the article, the AGI was almost completed, and the main reason his effort failed was that the company ran out of money due to the bursting of the bubble. Together with the anthropic principle, this seems to imply that Ben is the person responsible for the stock market crash of 2000.

I was always puzzled why SIAI hired Ben Goertzel to be its research director, and this article only deepens the mystery. If Ben has done an Eliezer-style mind-change since writing that article, I think I've missed it.

ETA: Apparently Ben has recently been helping his friend Hugo de Garis build an AI at Xiamen University under a grant from the Chinese government. How do you convince someone to give up building an AGI when your own research director is essentially helping the Chinese government build one?

Comment author: timtyler 25 June 2011 12:06:47PM *  7 points [-]

I was always puzzled why SIAI hired Ben Goertzel to be its research director, and this article only deepens the mystery.

Ben has a Phd, can program, has written books on the subject and has some credibility. Those kinds of things can help a little if you are trying to get people to give you money in the hope of you building a superintelligent machine. For more see here:

It has similarly been a general rule with the Singularity Institute that, whatever it is we're supposed to do to be more credible, when we actually do it, nothing much changes. "Do you do any sort of code development? I'm not interested in supporting an organization that doesn't develop code" -> OpenCog -> nothing changes. "Eliezer Yudkowsky lacks academic credentials" -> Professor Ben Goertzel installed as Director of Research -> nothing changes. The one thing that actually has seemed to raise credibility, is famous people associating with the organization, like Peter Thiel funding us, or Ray Kurzweil on the Board.

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