[snikolov]

"Brain-based" AI should stay in the dark ages. Optimization-based AI is the present and the future.

Humans can see. Computer vision systems suck. There's a perfectly good one in our brains. Why not try to understand what already works?

Contrary to what most would believe, brain-based computer vision has made a lot of progress in the past 20 years. Some might think there is a fundamental flaw in the "brain-based" approach given past failures, but that ignores that fact that those failures very likely happened due to a poor understanding of the brain at the time.

The work in brain-based computer vision however has been mostly academic. Brain-based computer vision startups are even more recent, and I think it's exciting to see the startup approach to solving what has been mostly an academic problem. In a startup, the engineering mindset, quick iteration, as well as a lack of concern for publishing and other forces at play in academia could produce very different results.

I do agree that the 5 year promise is extreme, but I think we need time to see how this relatively new mode of work (both in terms of the technical approach, and the process of implementation in a startup) will play out before we call it a failure.

Full Disclosure: I was an intern at Numenta last summer.

[icandoitbetter]

Is Numenta's approach really that informed by findings regarding actual brain function? It's been a while and I don't remember most of Hawkins' model, but I don't feel that one needs to consult any actual neuroscientific results to use the general concepts of hierarchical design or top-down processing, which seem to capture the basic idea of his work.

This whole neuro-A.I. fad began with artificial neural networks, which had nothing to do with brains, and still hasn't died.

[snikolov]

Numenta's most recent algorithms are actually very strongly neurobiological. If you have looked at earlier work, you should check out the most recent white paper from a couple of months ago, which detail more than year of recent efforts in that direction.

http://www.numenta.com/htm-overview/education/HTM_CorticalLe...

There is also a recent talk by Jeff Hawkins from a few months ago on the same subject.

http://www.archive.org/details/Redwood_Center_2010_12_02_vs2...

You are correct that neural networks had almost nothing to do with brains. Numenta's new cortical learning algorithms, on the other hand, are very closely modeled on the structure and function of the neocortex.