4 comments

  • Animats 1832 days ago
    "Create and operate a National AI infrastructure" "National AI Research Centers" "National AI Laboratories" It's all about getting Government money.

    Ed Feigenbaum was writing stuff like that in the 1980s. He was calling for a national AI lab, headed by him, to fight off the threat from Japan. See his book, "The Fifth Generation".[1] This was all for "expert systems", which didn't do much and led to the "AI Winter".

    This time around, we don't need that, because machine learning already has profitable applications. Finding applications outside adtech, Big Brother, and finance might be useful.

    Remember the "BRAIN initiative" from 2013 or so?[2] Whatever happened with that?

    [1] https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Artificial-Intellige...

    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRAIN_Initiative

    • mattkrause 1831 days ago
      The BRAIN Initiative is still happening.

      We published some stuff funded by it (via DARPA's RAM/RAM Replay programs) earlier this month. I'm pretty sure there are other active grants and funding programs (RFAs, etc) out there too.

      The program wasn't meant to completely solve the brain--that's going to take far longer than ten years. Instead, the goal, especially of DARPA's portion, was to give neuroscience a jumpstart and then let the promising results get picked up by more traditional mechanisms (NIH Institutes, industry, etc). That's worked pretty well: companies have come out of it (Nia Therapeutics was spun off from UPENN's work on RAM), along with a slew of new data, tools, and papers. On a very personal level, I'm working on something totally different than I planned on, and it's going well.

      • thatoneuser 1831 days ago
        This is very interesting to me. What are you working on?
        • mattkrause 1831 days ago
          Non-invasive brain stimulation, and specifically a family of techniques called transcranial electrical stimulation (tES). These use electrodes, placed right on the intact scalp, to generate weak electric fields around the head. The hope is that (some of) it passes through the skin, skull, and CSF and affects the electrical activity of the neurons beneath.

          While people have gone crazy trying this for every sort of problem (basic science experiments, clinical conditions, performance enhancements), it's been unclear how tES works—or, indeed, if it works at all.

          The human data is a mess: some of it reports dramatic effects, others find nothing at all, and many of the experiments are...not the best to begin with. Animal data has mostly come from isolated tissue or rodents, which have very different brains and heads (the mouse skull is paper-thin, for example, and the brain is smooth, which makes it easier to get an electric field in there).

          To address this, we apply tES to awake monkeys playing "video games" (boring ones, but still). Monkey anatomy is pretty similar to humans, as is their behavior, but we can also monitor neural activity via tiny implanted electrodes.

          To my immense surprise, tES appears to have effects on both brain activity and behavior. In our 2017 study, we used direct current and looked at effects in areas on the brain's surface. Someone wrote a nice blog post about it here: https://hackaday.com/2017/11/13/shockingly-darpas-brain-stim... (which also has a copy of the paper). More recently, we managed to find some effects on individual neurons and in deep brain areas that are often targeted for neurostimulation (twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/prokraustinator/status/11026751895638220...).

          Never would have gone down this road without DARPA, but it's been fun (and exhausting). I do like that it's got some fairly obvious clinical applications, unlike my PhD stuff.

    • fakename11 1832 days ago
      Looks like it's funding different projects: https://www.braininitiative.nih.gov/funding/funded-awards
  • basitmakine 1832 days ago
    Whenever I read a research paper like this on AI, I feel a sudden urge and motivation to go ahead and invent AGI. It passes a moment later tho.
    • nkozyra 1832 days ago
      Yep, this is the same reason I nearly create cold fusion at home every few months.
  • harmful_stereo 1831 days ago
    I'm assuming some varieties of ai research will only occur as part of an arms race, as happened with nukes. Buy maybe that's just assuming what's past is present.
    • killjoywashere 1831 days ago
      The cost of the Manhatten Project wasn't in Los Alamos. It was in Oak Ridge with the gas centrifuge operation. If I recall, the total program was 33B and 25B went to enrichment ops.

      That will be AI. Whoever funds annotation and digitization will win.

  • graycat 1831 days ago
    TL/DR: The message is simple: "Just send money."!
    • lsofzz 1831 days ago
      Ha Ha! ;_;