<table><tr><th>From:</th><th>on behalf of Ben Goertzel</th></tr><tr><td>Sent:</td><td>Wednesday, November 27, 2013 6:55 AM</td></tr><tr><td>To:</td><td>Jeffrey Epstein</td></tr><tr><td>Subject:</td><td>Re: Thanks! (&amp; proposal, Google, etc.)</td></tr></table>

By the wayM(who is now living in Hong Kong as well) and I are having a lot of fun thinking through this proposal you've asked for -- it's quite refreshing to "think big" ;-)

On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 12:15 AM, Ben Goertzel <ben@goertzel.org> wrote:
> Hi,

Thanks for taking the time from your busy morning to chat w/ me...
I can talk again at 9AM or 10AM your time basically any day you choose... 7PM your time also works... just let me know...
You've mentioned the "deception" theme to me a number of times before; but this time we're at a stage with OpenCog development where we could actually take that as a development goal (simulating human deceptive behavior on the broad level...)
I will put together a proposal such as you've requested: roughly $25M to be used over 3 years, resulting in breakthrough AGI goals by the end. The outline is clear in my head (core AGI work + NLP + sensors/actuators + distributed computing infrastructure), but I want to think it through a little (specifically regarding what incremental milestones to suggest), so I'll aim to get you something by Monday, if that's all right...
You mentioned Google: I've visited Ray Kurzweil and his team there in Mountain View once, and will visit them again on Jan. 7 2014. If you happen to be in California then, you could crash the meeting; that would be pretty interesting for all concerned ;-) .... My former student & employee Dr. Moshe Looks is working for Ray there, which has given me an inside view of what they're doing. It's really not AGI at this point; they're aimed at helping Google exploit theire Knowledge Graph better. Ray's aim is to impress Larry Page enough, by doing useful Knowledge Graph stuff for Google, that Larry will eventually fund Ray's brain-building work....
I understand your frustration with my slow progress over the years --- and I don't think the slowness is because I'm inefficient; I think it's mostly because this is a big task with many parts to build and fit together. (Of course, I've also been slowed down a bit by the fact that I'm always spending part of my time doing non-AGI stuff to generate income....) At the modest but steady pace I've been taking, I *will* get there to the end goal of advanced AGI, but obviously not as fast as we'd like..

>

But, bear in mind that, even without a lot more $$, we'll have 10 students/postdocs on OpenCog here next year; so I'm hopeful we can make it a breakthrough year.... But of course, it would be **great** to be able to move significantly faster; and significantly more $$ would indeed enable that.... I hope we can find a way to really accelerate the work! ...
>
Thanks ;)
> ben
>
>
> --
> Ben Goertzel, PhD
> 
>
> "In an insane world, the sane man must appear to be insane". -- Capt. James T. Kirk

<u>Ben Goertzel, PhD</u>

"In an insane world, the sane man must appear to be insane". -- Capt. James T. Kirk
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