(no subject)

Maybe I should wait till after your birthday to pursue the AI discussion, but it's fresh in my mind now so I'll send this email now ... if you don't feel like reading it on your birthday you'll wait ;-)

Seriously, my view is

-- those letters show that, in the view of some prestigious and rather conservative AI profs, this is not a bogus project. It's a real, solid research project ... it's good AI research

-- whether the project will lay the golden egg, those profs did not have the info to judge. And unless someone pays them a bunch of $S to study my project carefully, they are not going to pay enough attention to gather enough info to judge

How I think you should look at this is: "if Ben has even a 5% chance of success, it's worth the $$, because the upside potential is TREMENDOUS"

And I think you SHOULD consider it to have a 5% chance of success ... greater...

The fact that these AI profs think it's interesting but aren't convinced of its transformative potential, doesn't mean anything bad... if you think so, you don't understand academics ;-p

If the $$ is an issue for you, I can do this for $500H/year here in China, using some of my Brazilian team as well.

$1.5M for the first true breakthrough in AI history, and a big step toward the Singularity ;-) ... it's a lot of $$ to most people, but not much to you. What else are you donating to that has the same potential? The labs you've funded at Harvard and MIT and Stanford are good labs, but they're not going to change the world.... My project will, if someone with $$ and vision will fund it...

But, you already know what I think and feel.... I'm not a salesman; and I don't really know how else to convince you, except to somehow build the damn thing on somebody else's dollar, and then along with everyone else you'll see in retrospect that I actually wasn't full of shit ;p

Oh, by the way, I was so concerned about my AI project I didn't notice you mentioned your birthday in the chat...

Happy birthday!! ;-)

Now if you want to have 100000 more birthdays you should fund my AI project so we can create a thinking machine that will solve the problem of mortality!!! ;-D