Google buys Deep Mind ...
Wow, did you see this?
That is the company I often pointed out as being the most likely competitor to OpenCog in really pushing toward AGI...
And I happen to know (from my friendship with their co-founder Shane Legg, who will now become a very wealthy Google employee) that Deep Mind has nothing technologically besides some interesting proto-AGI R&D code.... Nothing that works, really.
So it's pretty much an acqui-hire .... And 50 programmers for $400M is a really fat acquihire; $1M - $2M per programmer is way more typical... this shows that Google values anything Al or robotics ish quite a lot these days...
One read of the overall situation would be "Google is going to win the race to AGI" -- they have a lot of $5 and are looking to hire the entire Al and robotics field... Maybe they will change their name to CyberDyne systems (cf "Terminator" ...)
OTOH, more money doesn't •always• win; having the right set of ideas also means a lot.... Linux, not Windows, dominates supercomputing and
the Internet.... And they are not doing proto-AGI within Google X, they're doing it in their main product dev division, which brings a complicated set of compromises... Hmmm...
Interesting times !!!
more later...
ben
Ben Goertzel, PhD
http://goertzel.org
"In an insane world, the sane man must appear to be insane". -- Capt.
James T. Kirk