Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 8 of 171
DeepMind and the Gödel Machine
many of the writers cited above would point to dozens of cool AI projects, such as Jürgen Schmidhuber’s Gödel Machine, which can self-improve by writing its own code after it proves the new code is more optimal. It is a stunning model, but has yet to be really programmed because of the serious technical challenges involved. (Of course these challenges will be overcome eventually.) Or they might point to the success of the artificial intelligence startup based in London called DeepMind, recently acquired by Google for half a billion dollars. Larry Page has said that DeepMind is the most exciting thing he has seen in a long time. DeepMind created an artificial intelligence system that can teach itself how to play video games—oftentimes better than humans. The algorithm is simply given the instruction to increase the game score and it learns the rest by itself. Google wants to apply these “deep learning” algorithms to many types of data, from healthcare to finance.