This apparently is very common in the field of AI, whatever one means by that. AI is akin to the Cheshire Cat and his pronouncements, namely it means whatever one wants it to mean.
AI falls into many camps, and that is the problem. Fundamentally AI is the use of a collection of data processing tools along with personal judgements entered into weighting schema to draw conclusions. Thus AI techniques do reasonable speech recognition, facial recognition, image recognition, text conversion and the like. AI may be useful as an adjunct to such fields as radiology but not yet really in pathology, and God only knows of psychiatry.
Along comes a writer in the NY Times who states:
If the race for powerful A.I. is indeed a
race among civilizations for control of the future, the United States
and European nations should be spending at least 50 times the amount
they do on public funding of basic A.I. research. Their model should be
the research that led to the internet, funded by the Advanced Research
Projects Agency, created by the Eisenhower administration and arguably
the most successful publicly funded science project in American history. To
their credit, companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are
spending considerable money on advanced research. Google has been willing to lose
about $500 million a year on DeepMind, an artificial intelligence lab,
and Microsoft has invested $1 billion in its independent OpenAI
laboratory. In these efforts they are part of a tradition of
pathbreaking corporate laboratories like Bell Labs, Xerox’s Palo Alto
Research Center and Cisco Systems in its prime.
Firsr it is interesting to see the three companies. Bell Labs was a machine to maximize the profit of AT&T. The research was a cover to that engine. It collapsed on its own obesity and lack of innovation. It was akin to a Government run complex. Xerox ran the center into the ground but more quickly. As for Cisco, in my experience and in my opinion of over 30 years as a customer, they had a strategy of buying technology and selling it when it was too old.
Second, AI is not the moon shot. You knew when you got there. With AI it is really a multi layered set of solutions incrementally improving. There is no AI end state, not AI, "I win". In fact any computer "child" can create their own AI tool, depending on the application. But there are multiple philosophies. At one end is structured systems, like those using Newton's laws. At the other end is the grossly unstructured systems using anything as an input and seeking some output. The latter are the neural network crowd. If you have enough computers and enough inputs you can connect anything to anything else.
So why are statements like this in my opinion and based upon my experience futile if not unproductive, simply because we really do not have any real "AI". It is an approach, not a process, not an end point. It is a sales pitch to raise money. Don't expect a big return on the overall idea. There is no moon to land on.
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