I'm flummoxed by this question. From what I see, AI is at the core of much of what's happening in Silicon Valley and in tech in general.
But then, I'm also using semantic web tools in building a search engine for financial news at http://Newsley.com. Right now we're indexing and automatically categorizing 500 financial news articles a day. And, I'm really looking forward to adding on recommender systems and use some machine learning with the scads of data we're collecting.
AI research and related topics and startups rarely make news. Is it really such a dead field? There's never any breakthroughs announced, and there's no grandiose research projects underway that I know of.
AI companies are all over the place. Any decent online ad platform is essentially a huge recommender system. Search and search quality are essentially problems that traditionally fit into a "AI" category. Have you shopped on Amazon recently? Where would they be without their recommendation system. Same with Netflix.
I just bought a $40 HD webcam that comes with software that can track points on my face in real time. It then drives a 3D puppet in sync with my facial expressions and movements. When I was studying animation 8 years ago, it took $500K worth of equipement to do motion capture. Gazehawk launched a few months ago, and are already profitable selling eye tracking tools: http://www.gazehawk.com/.
You can now buy a friggin robot to vacuum your living room for $150. The US airforce now considers commanding a wing of drones essential experience for Colonels interested in promotion. Most drone pilots in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars a pilot their aircraft from offices in Nevada. Robots are essential members of bomb and IED disposal teams. One of DailyBooth's founders was stuck in the UK because of visa problems, so last year he was attended invetsor meetings virtually by using an Anybot.
You can play virtual golf by swinging a controller in your living room if you own a Wii. The last RPG that I played was Oblivion and I was blown away by the character AI. That was years ago. I'm afraid to buy any new games because they'll suck up so much of my time.
Far from whithering away, just the opposite has happened. What used to be considered AI has now become so commonplace that we don't think twice about using it. If you don't believe me, just Google around for a while. You'll find the answer.
I know what you mean, but I think we're still at the zygote-stage of A.I.
When I go to Google and type "Where can I buy a hamburger", Google is completely useless -- but I do see 4 instances of the same Steve Martin comedy sketch from Youtube. It turns out all search engines absolutely suck for giving reasonable answers to reasonable questions. There is an enormous amount of room for innovation, and if there is innovation going on, it simply isn't making news, and it doesn't appear to be getting the kind of investment attention it should.
The point being made here is that we are still unable to build programs which interpret language nearly as effectively as the human brain. Our programs still have little skill in determining context in language - which will be an important step in reaching Kurzweillian levels of computing competence.
However, it should be noted that Natural Language Processing and studies in word sense disambiguation have brought us closer, people still cherish the "Dude, where's my flying car" impatience of technology.
The flip side is that if you type just 'hamburger' into maps.google.com, you'll likely get a map of all the hamburger stands near your present location (based on either GPS or your IP address).
I'd argue that this is pretty damn smart, and it is way ahead of where we were 10 years ago.
I think the military drones are proof of the failure of AI research. Every single one of those devices lack AI, they must be controlled by a person. They are large remote control weapons, but not intelligent robots. The military funds plenty of research on AI but haven't actually fielded autonomous systems yet.
Many military robots are purely remote controlled, but many others integrate often substantial levels of autonomy. Most UAVs provide autonomous navigation and stationkeeping, for example, and often much more; other military robots operate with no human in the loop whatsoever (eg, AUVs).
It's also interesting to consider the autonomy of fast-react weapons-in-the-loop systems such as AA/SAM sites and ABM installations (eg, Patriot), and the contribution of that autonomy to associated friendly-fire incidents. Methods normally considered AI---probabilistic filters, reasoning, and data fusion, in particular---are fundamental to such systems.
Forgive me, I failed to make this clear, but I work on such systems and I don't think they are all that smart. The code for station keeping is less interesting than the code for directions on Google Maps. (Connecting GPS points in space is pretty damn easy). Landing a UAV is pretty sweet, but I still wouldn't call it AI. The complexity is on the control side, but if you call that AI then is your cruise control in your car AI?
I think that's very good that people still control the military drones. You don't want the drone dropping a bomb where it is not supposed to just because there was some suspicious movement there. No matter how well you can program the robot and how much elaborate heuristics you can give it, at this point it seems to me that humans are infinitely more flexible in making decisions. I wouldn't allow computers make life-and-death decisions any time soon.
But then, I'm also using semantic web tools in building a search engine for financial news at http://Newsley.com. Right now we're indexing and automatically categorizing 500 financial news articles a day. And, I'm really looking forward to adding on recommender systems and use some machine learning with the scads of data we're collecting.
AI research and related topics and startups rarely make news. Is it really such a dead field? There's never any breakthroughs announced, and there's no grandiose research projects underway that I know of.
AI companies are all over the place. Any decent online ad platform is essentially a huge recommender system. Search and search quality are essentially problems that traditionally fit into a "AI" category. Have you shopped on Amazon recently? Where would they be without their recommendation system. Same with Netflix.
I just bought a $40 HD webcam that comes with software that can track points on my face in real time. It then drives a 3D puppet in sync with my facial expressions and movements. When I was studying animation 8 years ago, it took $500K worth of equipement to do motion capture. Gazehawk launched a few months ago, and are already profitable selling eye tracking tools: http://www.gazehawk.com/.
You can now buy a friggin robot to vacuum your living room for $150. The US airforce now considers commanding a wing of drones essential experience for Colonels interested in promotion. Most drone pilots in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars a pilot their aircraft from offices in Nevada. Robots are essential members of bomb and IED disposal teams. One of DailyBooth's founders was stuck in the UK because of visa problems, so last year he was attended invetsor meetings virtually by using an Anybot.
You can play virtual golf by swinging a controller in your living room if you own a Wii. The last RPG that I played was Oblivion and I was blown away by the character AI. That was years ago. I'm afraid to buy any new games because they'll suck up so much of my time.
Far from whithering away, just the opposite has happened. What used to be considered AI has now become so commonplace that we don't think twice about using it. If you don't believe me, just Google around for a while. You'll find the answer.