AI research endured years of failure and frustration before new techniques in deep learning unleashed the swift, astonishing progress of the last decade.

Michael’s recent book A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence explores what we can learn from this history, and examines where we are now and where the field is going.

We discuss:

• Why the Cyc project’s aim to encode ‘all human knowledge’ (!!) into a functioning AI got stuck, despite years of intense effort. 
• What OpenAI’s GPT-3 language-generating AI system really knows about making an omelette.  
• Why the next generation of AI systems may have to combine symbolic and non-symbolic approaches. 

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