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Paul Allen Wants to Teach Machines Common Sense

“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.

But these machines struggle with other basic tasks. Though Amazon’s Alexa does a good job of recognizing what you say, it cannot respond to anything more than basic commands and questions. When confronted with heavy traffic or unexpected situations, driverless cars just sit there.

A.I. “recognizes objects, but can’t explain what it sees. It can’t read a textbook and understand the questions in the back of the book,” said Oren Etzioni, a former University of Washington professor who oversees the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “It is devoid of common sense.”

Mr. Allen helped fund Cyc, and he believes it is time to take a fresh approach, he said, because modern technologies make it easier to build this kind of system.

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.”

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/technology/paul-allen-ai-common-sense.html