Shame if someone vikinged it away . <| sep |> Texas or Alaska would win . West Coast would go down first . <| sep |> I ' ve read a few things Huszar writes . He ' s a smart guy . My takeLet me begin by setting aside his argument for speeding up the arrival of the next AI winter , and instead focus on what I think motivated this , and has motivated similar postings by others in the pastOne thing that one learns , as one advances in ones career , is how to formulate reasonable goals for work that people can further build on and use in their own efforts . It ' s really difficult to formulate good problems to work on , and is a major reason that many graduate students fizzle out before earning a ph . d . they reach too far , and make no progress at all . And I would say talk of solving intelligence is like one of those unreasonable goals that novice students in Machine Learning might formulate it ' s right up there with proving the Riemann Hypothesis . It also is the kind of goal that a Venture Capitalist might be drawn towards for its audacity high risk , and potentially high reward . Articulating goals like this also makes people suspicious of the field of machine learning . And ML researchers don ' t want to be looked down on as people promoting hype . Ok , so that ' s why the goal is rejected by ML researchers . But now if you look at the statement from the perspective of people in cognitive science , neuroscience , or GOFAI researchers , it ' s not so unreasonable a goal , given that they use a broader set of methods and keep in mind that Hassabis works in some of these fields . For a graduate student , it would still be but not for a large , wellfunded effort . One might even say that AI is defined by the goal , in the same way that curing cancer is a motivating goal of many cancer researchers many of the early pioneers of AI really did want to solve intelligence . They just underestimated how difficult the problem was . And even after they found out , they still wanted to solve intelligence . They may not have said so in their grant proposals but the goal was still there , in the background . So , my take is that it ' s a bit of a strange goal for people in Machine Learning to pursue , as ML is not really about solving intelligence it ' s more a subfield of CS and statistics . However , it ' s perfectly reasonable for DeepMind to pursue this goal , especially since it ' s not completely a Machine Learning company .