alt Hacker NewsIt's always been this way. I remember, speaking of Microsoft, when they came to my school around 2002 or so giving a talk on AI. They very confidently stated that AGI had already been "solved", we know exactly how to do it, only problem is the hardware. But they estimated that would come in about ten years...
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letmevoteplease • today at 5:15 PM
Let me just repeat that: "Microsoft" came to your school in 2002 and "confidently stated" that AI had been solved. Really interesting story.
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jakeydus • today at 2:38 PM
I knew flappy bird was a bigger deal than it got credit for. Didn’t realize it was agi until just now.
I'm curious, do you recall if they gave any technical details about how they thought about AGI? Like, was it based on neural networks or something else, like symbolic AI?
Asking because, reading the tea leaves from the outside, until ChatGPT came along, MSFT (via Bill Gates) seemed to heavily favor symbolic AI approaches. I suspect this may be partly why they were falling so far behind Google in the AI race, which could leverage its data dominance with large neural networks.
So based on the current AI boom, MSFT may have been chasing a losing strategy with symbolic AI, but if they were all-in on NN, they were on the right track.