Gary Marcus

Big science is historically non-optimal. But it keeps many scientists employed and perhaps one of these scientists may be the person making a future breakthrough. Would you rather the money be wasted elsewhere (as it usually is)?

Again, you have changed the subject. Most of this money is currently not being applied to general A.I. but to DL only.

I don't think you can make that conclusion that the money is being spent on DL only. I don't know yet where the Chinese, Canadians, French, Germans are placing bets. DoD have some ideas, which they call 'Third Wave AI', that goes beyond symbolists and connectionist approaches.

I am very familiar with DARPA’s program. Yes, it desires to push beyond DL, but DL is very much the baseline. As for China - and it is difficult to get uncensored information- they seem to have a maniacal DL focus.

But this conversation is distracting: my simple original point is that there is a huge pile of money at national levels being poured into some very specific A.I. approaches...and that is a little concerning to me, not unlike what happened in Japan.

You went off on a tangent suggesting I condemned general funding for research..that is not at all what I was saying. Don’t overthink the topic: my spidey sense is tingling, that is all.

If your concern is that there's going to be a lot of wasted money then I think that is misplaced. I guarantee that many of these nations will 'waste' a ton of money for minimal results. That's just the nature of basic research.

No, I am mostly concerned of the opportunity cost...as @GaryMarcus has observed, a lot of these new and heavily funded efforts are proceeding with vigor but with hardly any understanding or appreciation for the history of AI