The goal of artificial general intelligence is not new: Brooks's 1990 paper Elephants Don't Play Chess already named general purpose human level intelligence as the holy grail of AI research.
Resolved true The record shows it happened or was so.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
The evidence is the person's or their organisation's own records.
What would count as true or false
Test: Brooks's 1990 paper 'Elephants Don't Play Chess' describes general-purpose, human-level intelligence as the 'holy grail' or ultimate goal of AI research, which shows that the AGI goal predates recent claims of novelty. True: the paper (Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 1990) contains such a statement in substance. Mostly true: the paper names human-level or general intelligence as AI's long-standing goal, but in different words. Mixed: the paper only alludes to it vaguely. Mostly false: the paper does not say this, although the goal is demonstrably older from other sources. False: the paper does not say this and the AGI goal cannot be shown to be older.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (3)
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E1 Elephants Don't Play Chess Robotics and Autonomous Systems (copy hosted at vladestivill-castro.net) · 1990 Own record
“Given that neither classical nor nouvelle AI seem close to revealing the secrets of the holy grail of AI, namely general purpose human level intelligence equivalence,”
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E2 Elephants Don't Play Chess Robotics and Autonomous Systems (copy hosted at vladestivill-castro.net) · 1990 Own record
“There is an alternative route to Artificial Intelligence that diverges from the directions pursued under that banner for the last thirty some years.”
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E3 Artificial General Intelligence Scholarpedia (Ben Goertzel) · November 2015
“In 2005, Springer published an edited volume titled "Artificial General Intelligence" (Goertzel and Pennachin, 2005). In 2006, the first formal research workshop on "AGI" was held, in Bethesda, Maryland”
Reasoning
The 1990 paper 'Elephants Don't Play Chess' [E1] calls 'general purpose human level intelligence equivalence' 'the holy grail of AI', which matches the test's wording in substance. The same paper [E2] refers to directions pursued under the banner of AI for 'the last thirty some years', but does not itself say that general intelligence was the goal over that period. Goertzel's Scholarpedia article [E3] dates the 'AGI' label to 2005–2006, after the paper, so the goal named in 1990 came before the newer term.
Cite this claim
Rodney Brooks, “The goal of artificial general intelligence is not new: Brooks's 1990 paper Elephants Don't Play Chess already named general purpose human level intelligence as the holy grail of AI research.” (said 15 July 2018). Verdict: resolved true. Reliability API, claim c_5a464147e9d0, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_5a464147e9d0
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
More factual claims by Rodney Brooks
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“But since 1991 I have made a distinction between two concepts where a machine, or creature can be either, neither, or both situated and embodied.”
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“Each column from bottom to top is a pure feed forward network, with no search, no iteration, no conventional algorithm at all.”
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“By March of 2023, it was clear that the next big thing had arrived in AI, and that it was Large Language Models.”
By March 2023 it was clear that large language models were the next big thing in AI.
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Resolved true
“@yejinchoinka is providing a “common sense” rebuttal on the @TED stage.”
Yejin Choi gave a "common sense" rebuttal on the TED stage in April 2023.
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