[zackmorris]

I argued back in 2000 (a year after I got my computer engineering degree) that AI wouldn't take off until computing moved from single threaded/single core to multithreaded/ multicore processing. The fact that we are only hearing about this stuff 15 years later makes me feel that that assertion was largely right.

The biggest problem I see in AI is that the algorithms are generally fairly straightforward, but people haven't had the computing power to explore the problem space. We are seeing drastic improvement in things like video cards (routinely 1000+ cores) and data processing locality (map reduce). But processors have stagnated.

If we really want AI in any reasonable timescale, we need large arrays of general-purpose cores with a sane communication protocol that doesn't fixate on things like caching, we need a hybrid between Go and Erlang to do concurrent functional programming in a readable way with automagic scaling over a network, and we need all this yesterday. The fancy schmancy AI algorithms will become apparent when processing power is no longer the primary limitation, and at that point we can optimize them.