Yann LeCun's big bet for building intelligent machines

For LeCun, the proposals could be the first steps on a path to building machines with the ability to reason and plan like humans--what many call artificial general intelligence, or AGI. He also steps away from today's hottest trends in machine learning, resurrecting some old ideas that have gone out of fashion. But his vision is far from comprehensive; indeed, it may raise more questions than it answers. The biggest question mark, as LeCun points out himself, is that he does not know how to build what he describes. The centerpiece of the new approach is a neural network that can learn to view the world at different levels of detail.