[argonaut]

Is there a story somewhere of AI researchers concluding general object recognition was the holy grail of AI?

I get that a lot of people downplay achievements in machine learning by saying it's nothing like AGI, but it's almost a meme now that "once upon a time everyone thought that was the holy grail and they're moving the signposts" even when 1) nobody thought that, or 2) some people thought that and some people didn't think that.

[bonoboTP]

In fact, the first thing you learn in an introductory computer vision class is that Marvin Minsky assigned "computer vision" to an undergrad as a summer project in 1966 (wire up a camera to a computer and write a program to understand images). It was the opposite of a holy grail.

Even today, it's hard to make laymen appreciate the advancements in computer vision because for them "seeing" doesn't seem like a difficult thing. Even stupid chickens can see. A chess program is much more impressive to laypeople.

[MrQuincle]

I - for what it is worth - would still say general object recognition, with the emphasis on general, is indeed the holy grail.

The ability to recognize objects like people do is not properly represented by current benchmarks. I can imagine that you can built a perfect robotic "bird spotter" but if you put that in a self-driving car I would not be surprised if it stops for something that's just a shadow, or if you put it on a humanoid it's unable to distinguish its own hand from that of its clone. Imagine two of them cleaning out the dishwasher. :-)

A lot of AI is still working only in lab conditions or restricted application domains. That's why I consider robots and cars so important in driving AI towards the "general" dimension.

[MrQuincle]

Now a nice article that addresses some limitations of vision: https://medium.com/@andrewt3000/tesla-mobileeye-and-deep-lea...

[rbanffy]

What problems wouldn't be solved in this space by an AGI?

[Houshalter]

Well I can't find any specific references, but I definitely recall getting that impression from old machine vision work. Decades of work to get models that were incredibly complex and hand crafted and barely worked. I don't know if I thought it would require AGI, but it would definitely require significant progress towards general AI.