Sharpening The AI Problem

In 2017, the cognitive scientist and entrepreneur, Gary Marcus, argued that AGI needs a moonshot. In an interview with Alice Lloyd George, he said, "Let's have an international consortium kind of like we had for CERN, the large hadron collider. What if you had $7 billion dollars that was carefully orchestrated towards a common goal." Marcus felt that the political climate of the time made such a collective effort unlikely. But the moonshot analogy for AGI has taken hold in the private sector and captured the public imagination. In a 2017 talk, the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, evoked the moonshot analogy to describe his company as "a kind of Apollo program effort for artificial intelligence." Hassabis unpacks his vision with pitch deck efficiency: First they'll understand human intelligence, then they'll recreate it artificially.