Beyond Nous 2023
26 August 2022 | Thoughts
When I told Husein let us start developing our chatbot product for Mesolitica: my intuition was to deliver something that could be the foundation of future products — AI Avatars or personal digital twins.
It took me a while to answer his original question: “Khalil, what product should we build?”
During that period, I seek answers from a philosophical POV.
Reading articles, essays & books surrounding AI development: commercial & research.
The book “AI 2041” & “The Age of AI” gave me a window to all possible outcomes: covering both pessimist and optimist views — Point B
The book “Intelligent Automation” gave me an updated view into the world of automation which leverages current AI capabilities — Point A
Between point A and B, a missing link that is worth exploring is the understanding of consciousness.
Answering the question: “what makes us human?”
Instead of directly jumping to the deep end to find the answer, an approach for us as a startup is clear, to teach an AI system to:
0️⃣ Process: NLP + ASR
1️⃣ Understand: NLU + NMT
2️⃣ Respond: NLG + TTS
..
*️⃣ Interact: NLI + Unity
Hopefully on our journey to achieve *️⃣, we will benefit from future AI research: namely from the idea that is presented by Yann LeCun in this article around “Background Knowledge”.
“A system trained on language alone will never approximate human intelligence, even if trained from now until the heat death of the universe.”
As for 2022, we will deliver practical intelligence for businesses and (maybe) individuals.
This is the motivation behind the name “Nous”: which literally means practical intelligence 😃
Beyond Language
Abandoning the view that all knowledge is linguistic permits us to realize how much of our knowledge is nonlinguistic. While books contain a lot of information we can decompress and use, so do many other objects: IKEA instructions don’t even bother writing out instructions alongside its drawings; AI researchers often look at the diagrams in a paper first, grasp the network architecture and only then glance through the text
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Khalil Nooh Co-Founder & CEO