These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means

Several such projects sprung up around this time, but the biggest and best-known involved a system called Cyc (short for encyclopaedia), which hoped to catalogue the entirety of common sense in a knowledge base. This was a remarkable discovery, because of course the network had never attended a classical concert, and nobody had told it that they are both stringed instruments with curvaceous wooden bodies. To understand why, think of personalized AI as a recommender system that proposes products, activities or advice, and refines its future suggestions via social feedback from the user. There is no principled reason why predicting future signals should not be the basic objective for a generally capable AI system.