From: Jeffrey Epstein <jeevacation®gmail.com> To: Ben Goertzel Subject: Re: AI startup Vicarious secures $40 million in investment funding Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:57:40 +0000 understood , the major difference between him and you was that he had a demo. I have been consistant that optimism needs to be coupled with demonstrations. On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 5:13 AM, Ben Goertzel l> wrote: Hi, I guess you saw this news, right? http://venturebeat.corn/2014/03/21/arti ficia I- intelligence-startup-vicarious-grabs-40m-from-zuckerberg-musk- kutcher-others/ I know Dileep George (the founder of Vicarious Systems) a bit. At my invitation, he spoke at our AGI-13 conference in Beijing. As Dileep told me then, the sole focus of his company is on visual object recognition --- identifying what are the objects in a picture. Once they crack that, they will move onto recognizing events in videos. Once they crack that, they will move on to other aspects of intelligence. Dileep, like his mentor Jeff Hawkins, believes that perceptual data processing is the key to general intelligence... and that vision is the paradigm case of human perceptual data processing... Given Facebook's large trove of pictures and the nature of their business, it seems they would have great value for software that can effectively identify objects in pictures. Privately: I felt Dileep's overall understanding of AGI issues, beyond perception processing, was pretty weak. Demis Hassabis (founder of Deep Mind, recently purchased by Google for —US$500M), always struck me as having a much broader, deeper view. Note that Facebook just made a big announcement about the success of their face recognition software, which they saddled with the perplexingly bad name "Deep Face": (a bit Linda Lovelace, no?) http:thvww.extremetech.corn/extreme/178777-facebooks-facial-recognition-software-is-now-as-accurate-as- the-human-brain-but-what-now Actually DeepFace uses a standard, well known "textbook" A