[eli_gottlieb]

I checked and yes. Which bugs me even more.

Come on, guys, put up or shut up. If you've made the kind of advance in machine learning that entitles you to talk about human-level cognition, take out a patent and then publish some freaking papers. Or take over the world.

There are accepted ways of proving claims like this, and founding company after company without releasing a product or publishing research isn't one of them.

[aufreak3]

While that criticism is valid, it is also possible for them to think that the details of it be better kept a trade secret than be revealed to the public through either a patent document or a detailed enough paper. (Just giving them the benefit of doubt.)

If you look at Gary Drescher's work published in "Made up minds" [1], it seems possible that an AI that can influence the world can more efficiently arrive at intelligence than one that simply observes it - i.e. one that can learn by performing experiments rather than only looking at data coming out of everywhere. So there does seem to be scope for approaches to AI that aren't in the "data trumps everything" gang.

[1] http://books.google.co.in/books/about/Made_up_Minds.html?id=...

[eli_gottlieb]

Sorry, I didn't mean to disagree with the underlying message that AI/ML should be getting away from the "just eat huge amounts of data and process it" paradigm.

What I more meant is: why on Earth should we accept that whenever someone says the magic words "intelligence", "cognition", "mind", or "consciousness", we switch our scientific brains off and start openly espousing blatant woo? Any real advancement in high-level AI not only should but must involve a scientific theory of intelligence: what is it, how does it operate, how can we measure it? Is it made up of smaller component parts or is it a unified "thing"? How can we detect it if shown a non-human intelligence?

If someone has such a theory, it should be entirely possible to publish the theory without revealing details of their proprietary algorithms. If, in fact, they believe that there is only one algorithm that gives rise to intelligence in the entire universe, then they might want to keep a trade secret, but they should have to justify to a Senate subcommittee or something why the hell they're trying to keep one of the deepest, most fundamental secrets of Nature a secret.

A true science of AI should do for intelligence what the Wright Brothers did for human flight: stop the cargo-cult and find the underlying principles. In fact, a true science of AI should split the field into three branches: theory of intelligence, taxonomy of naturally-occurring agents, and engineering of artificial agents.

Given all that, anyone and everyone who takes the "I'VE FOUND THE SECRET BUT I'M NOT TELLING YOU PATENTS PENDING NEENER NEENER NEENER BUT TOTALLY INVEST IN MY COMPANY" approach... comes off like a Renaissance gentleman scientist suddenly claiming to have discovered the Philosopher's Stone.