Paul Allen Wants to Teach Machines Common Sense
SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft's co-founder Paul Allen said Wednesday that he was pumping an additional $125 million into his nonprofit computer research lab for an ambitious new effort to teach machines "common sense."
The money for the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence will about double the lab's budget over the next three years, helping to fund existing research as well as the new effort, called Project Alexandria.
"To make real progress in A.I., we have to overcome the big challenges in the area of common sense," said Mr. Allen, who founded the software giant Microsoft in the 1970s with Bill Gates.
Today, machines can recognize nearby objects, identify spoken words, translate one language into another and mimic other human tasks. But these machines struggle with other basic tasks. When confronted with heavy traffic or unexpected situations, driverless cars just sit there.
In the mid-1980s, Doug Lenat, a former Stanford University professor, with backing from the government and several of the country's largest tech companies, started a project called Cyc. He and his team of researchers worked to codify all the simple truths that we learn as children, from "you can't be in two places at the same time" to "when drinking from a cup, hold the open end up."
Mr. Lenat welcomed the new project. But he also warned of challenges: Cyc has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, running into countless problems that were not evident when the project began. He called them "buzz saws."
▍生词好句
pump /pʌmp/: vt. 注入
additional /əˈdɪʃ(ə)n(ə)l/: adj. 额外的
ambitious /amˈbɪʃəs/: adj. 有野心的
common sense: 常识
mimic /ˈmɪmɪk/: vt. 模仿
confront /kənˈfrʌnt/: vt. 面对
heavy traffic: 拥挤的交通
backing /ˈbakɪŋ/: n. 支持；帮助
codify /ˈkəʊdɪfʌɪ/: vt. 编成程序
buzz saw: 圆形电锯（可以理解为“碎钞机”）