Hybrid Artificial Intelligence Systems

Originally posted August 19, 2018

Even though I specialize in deep learning at work I sceptical about achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) using only neural networks (of any architecture). My friend and two time colleague Ben Goertzel has been working on a hybrid approach to AGI in the OpenCog organization with a large team for many years.

AIsentience.net

In my personal-time project AIsentience.net, I have been working on my own hybrid general AI framework for a number of years. Common Lisp is still my favorite language for research programming and the latest edition of my book Loving Common Lisp, or the Savvy Programmer’s Secret Weaponcontains a section on using Armed Bear Common Lisp With DeepLearning4j. ABCL is implemented in Java and while not as performant as SBCL it offers interop with Java libraries like DeepLearning4j. For now, I am happy enough being able to train specific deep learning models for word2vec, seq2seq, and summarization and write functional wrappers around these models for easy access in Common Lisp code. Probably not a popular opinion but I also believe that symbolic systems (rules) and Bayesean graph representation and inferencing are (probably) necessary parts of an AGI development platform.
I use TensorFlow and Keras at work but I have experimented sufficiently with DeepLearning4j for several years and it is fine for my purposes. I did also experiment using Google’s unofficial Haskell bindings for TensorFlow and seriously considered using Haskell for my side project AIsentience.netbut, frankly, I have much more experience using Common Lisp. For people with more Haskell experience, Haskell is a fine language for research programming.

My Summer in Illinois

It has been a year since Carol and I moved to Urbana/Champaign Illinois and I started a job at Capital One managing a machine learning team at the UIUC Research Park. Living in a university town is great - lots to do, but we still look forward to returning to our home in Sedona Arizona in (about)a year. I have spend 90 minutes on the phone this weekend with old friends in Sedona and look forward to seeing them again in person.
In addition to work I have re-started a very old hobby: playing the game of Go. I had not played a serious tournament game since 1980 but after starting to play at a local club at the university I spent a week in Williamsburg Virginia in July playing in the US Go Open Tournament. I am starting study with a professional Go player who runs the American Yunguseng Dojang - The online Go School.

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a w...
Read more

I am moving back to the Google platform, less excited by what Apple is offering

I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...
Read more