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That's exactly my initial reason for posting this. In the singulariy enthusiast community artificial intelligence is the most important thing we as humans can create (post scarcity, immortality etc).

What I was suggesting is that a "gold rush" type situation form around the building of classifiers, such as that occurred with website creation. There are millions trying to get an income onlne creating content for adsense and affilate programs (and for free with wikipedia and open source). Most will fail at generating reasonable income but in the process a large amount of wealth has been created. The same could be done for classifiers/artifical intelligence. It would require just collecting a thousand or two pieces of data (image/sudio/text) to create a classifier, an effort similar to creating a small website.

The problem is that even in the past there really wasn't a large number of people working on artificial intelligence, maybe just a few hundred or thousand, and computing power wasn't cheap enough to make it work. Computer scientists that do work on it are trying to create more unique algorithms that can be published, rather than creating applications with existing working algorithms (after all they''re paid to create new things, not simply apply what's available). In Larry Page's lecture at AAAS he mentioned that there are less than a hundred people working on artificial (general) intelligence today. (you can see it on youtube).