Hugo de Garis - Research Update

Earlier this evening I looked up Hugo de Garis' website for the first time in over a year. If you've been following artificial intelligence research for more than 2 or 3 years then you'll remember that Hugo de Garis was quite a prominent character back in 2000/2001. He would frequently appear in populist TV shows and magazine articles claiming that he was only a couple of years away from building an artificial brain with the intelligence of a cat. Within 5 or 6 years he hoped to have constructed a billion cell, self-evolving, neural network which would begin to show human levels of intelligence.

He even went on preach alarmist claims about how super-intelligent robots could take control of the Earth and wipe out the human race - the Artilect War.

Of course none of this has happened yet. And de Garis seems to have quietened down with his self-promoting hype. Judging from his website he hasn't developed any new AI hardware in the last year. In fact the site seems to have been hardly updated since 2002.

The two new scientific papers which are alluded to look as if he is focussing on the theory of quantum computing and using quantum computers to evolve neural networks. Hmmm. All I feel when reading these papers is scepticism. A shame. Because some of his ideas are really great. The trouble is, he is all talk and no trousers.

Sennaps, the company de Garis was involved in setting up in 2002, also hasn't updated it's website in over a year. Senapps claimed to be a research and development company focussed on creating SENtient APPlicationS. Unfortunately the website is all very flash, but very lacking in beef.