by Peter High, published on Forbes
4-11-2016
Vicarious has the mission to “build the next generation of artificial intelligence algorithms.” That said, its objectives are longer-term in nature. Vicarious has assembled a who’s who of technology legends as investors, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg. Co-founder, Scott Phoenix is clear that the biggest value Vicarious can contribute will be in the long-term, in the form of artificial general intelligence (AGI), or human-like intelligence. There will be plenty of value created in the interim in the form of what Phoenix refers to as the “exhaust” of the process.
Phoenix is a veteran entrepreneur, having served as CEO of Frogmetrics, which was a Y Combinator company in the class of 2008. He was also the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Founders Fund, among other roles he has played. In this interview, Phoenix describes the goals of his 30 person organization, how he weighs the risks versus the rewards of artificial general intelligence, how AI may replace more jobs than it creates, new economic and social constructs that could ease the societal shift, Vicarious’s decision to prioritize social good over investor returns, and why more companies should do the same.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fourth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, and Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies. To read future articles in the series, including with Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Neil Jacobstein of Singularity University, Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You are the co-founder of Vicarious, a company that is within the artificial intelligence (AI) realm. I thought we could begin with a definition of AI. It is a term that is thrown around in a variety of ways and I would like to take have you unbundle it a little bit.
Scott Phoenix: Artificial intelligence is a really funny thing for a couple of reasons. One is the “moving goal posts phenomena,” which is as soon as something that was formerly called artificial intelligence is solved, it is no longer included the umbra of what is AI. Since it is such a funny term, you can apply it to almost any business or product or company that is developing anything. You could have a consumer gadget that has AI for making sure your windows are clean, or AI in your spam filter.
At Vicarious, we have a particular and specific definition of what we mean when we say AI, which is artificial general intelligence, or human-like intelligence. To put an even more specific frame around it, we say, “given the same sensory experiences that a human being has from birth to adulthood, we are trying to write a program that learns the same concepts and has the same abilities.” That is a specific thing, whereas artificial narrow intelligence (AI as it is commonly used today) can mean just a computer that does some stuff that is useful.
High: As we have machines that are able to do a lot of the processing that humans do today is there any worry that there are aspects of the way that we think or work that are going to change profoundly?
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