Connectionists: Geoff Hinton, Elon Musk, and a bet at garymarcus.substack.com

[Gary Marcus]

Dear Connectionists, and especially Geoff Hinton,

It has come to my attention that Geoff Hinton is looking for challenging targets. In a just-released episode of The Robot Brains podcast [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Otcau-C_Yc], he said 

“If any of the people who say [deep learning] is hitting a wall would just write down a list of the things it’s not going to be able to do then five years later, we’d be able to show we’d done them.”

Now, as it so happens, I (with the help of Ernie Davis) did just write down exactly such a list of things, last weekm and indeed offered Elon Musk a $100,000 bet along similar lines.

Precise details are here, towards the end of the essay: 

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/dear-elon-musk-here-are-five-things

Five are specific milestones, in video and text comprehension, cooking, math, etc; the sixth is the proviso that for an intelligence to be deemed “general” (which is what Musk was discussing in a remark that prompted my proposal), it would need to solve a majority of the problems. We can probably all agree that narrow AI for any single problem on its own might be less interesting.

Although there is no word yet from Elon, Kevin Kelly offered to host the bet at LongNow.Org, and Metaculus.com has transformed the bet into 6 questions that the community can comment on.  Vivek Wadhwa, cc’d, quickly offered to double the bet, and several others followed suit;  the bet to Elon (should he choose to take it) currently stands at $500,000.

If you’d like in on the bet, Geoff, please let me know. 

More generally, I’d love to hear what the connectionists community thinks of six criteria I laid out (as well as the arguments at the top of the essay, as to why AGI might not be as imminent as Musk seems to think).

Cheers.
Gary Marcus
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