[boomzilla]

I am of the opinion that `true AI` is the science/engineering of understanding and replicating human intelligence. Why are we able to come up with abstract concepts from the surrounding physical environments? Why do we look at the stars and wonder what they are (and why)? How are we able to communicate with one another through pictures, words, writings, snapchat. Is that something special about our brains, our collective society, or something else, that enables such remarkable different behaviors from other any animal on earth? I don't know which direction we can start to go down to answer these questions, but collecting good data sets is probably as good as anything. Maybe we'll get the `quantity` of smarter specialized systems first, and once we get the `quantity`, maybe the `quality` will follow?

[pinouchon]

I agree. I think the fields of "computational cognitive science" and developmental psychology are the ones to look into to make progress towards the "hard fundamental problems". Some of the leading labs working on this are MIT CBMM (https://cbmm.mit.edu/, they have a nice youtube channel) and Berkeley Cocosci (https://cocosci.berkeley.edu/index.php).

Google Brain/DeepMind are also pushing some of those ideas. They must be, since they aggressively poach all the top researchers from those labs...

Ng approach is different: he wants a world powered by Deep Learning, so his goal is to make applied deep learning thrive. His strategy to do that: give those data-hungry models even more data, which is completely reasonable.

Those two approaches - fundamental research and applied deep learning - are often referred to as AI, causing much confusion.