RE: Open Source Friendly AI? (was Singularity and the general public)

From: Ben Goertzel (ben@webmind.com)
Date: Fri Apr 13 2001 - 13:23:21 MDT


> Having an initial implementation that is
> superbly engineered sets the architecture standard for when the unwashed
> programming masses get their hands on it, making it much easier
> to control
> down the road if nothing else.

Absolutely

>
> In this particular instance, I suspect this would not be the case. There
> is way too much religion involved for most groups that attempt to do this
> type of thing.

I agree also. I can tell you from experience that roping together people
with diverse views to contribute to a single AI system is difficult EVEN
WHEN YOU'RE PAYING THEM ALL...

> Furthermore, I don't think that the code for something like this could be
> easily broken down into a lot of independent pieces that you can throw
> hundreds of developers at. I expect the core codebase would be
> relatively
> small and functionally very dense. There might be a use for outside
> developers on software components peripheral to the core engine, but you
> wouldn't want more than a half-dozen good developers working on the core
> engine itself.

This is exactly right as well.

For example, the Webmind AI Engine project is just now at the point where we
can benefit from open-sourcing various parts of the AI architecture, and we
probably will do so in roughly 4 months. But we still won't open-source the
"cognitive core." We've been at it long enough that our system is well
componentized (it took us 3 years of experimentation to arrive at the right
componentization), and some of the peripheral components can easily benefit
from the open-source engineering approach.

Ben



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