The Alan Turing Institute has failed to develop modern AI in the UK
Quoting Rich Sutton, who wrote the perfect response some years ago:<p>"The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin. The ultimate reason for this is Moore's law, or rather its generalization of continued exponentially falling cost per unit of computation. Most AI research has been conducted as if the computation available to the agent were constant (in which case leveraging human knowledge would be one of the only ways to improve performance) but, over a slightly longer time than a typical research project, massively more computation inevitably becomes available. Seeking an improvement that makes a difference in the shorter term, researchers seek to leverage their human knowledge of the domain, but the only thing that matters in the long run is the leveraging of computation. These two need not run counter to each other, but in practice they tend to. Time spent on one is time not spent on the other. There are psychological commitments to investment in one approach or the other. And the human-knowledge approach tends to complicate methods in ways that make them less suited to taking advantage of general methods leveraging computation."[a]<p>The very smart folks at the Alan Turing Institute are learning firsthand how bitter the lesson can be.<p>---<p>[a] <a href="http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html" rel="nofollow">http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html</a>