Re: Failure of AI so far

From: Stephen Reed (reed@cyc.com)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 15:51:46 MDT


On Thu, 22 May 2003, Dani Eder wrote:

At Cycorp, we have a staff of approximately 60 workers (aside from admin)
who mainly use white box AMD computers running Linux. We also have a
white box server farm for email, file storage, databases, web sites and so
forth that is very much what one would expect for a computer software
company our size.

The computer assets per AI worker are on the order of $2,000, adjusting
for depreciation. Typical CPU is the AMD 2000+, and desktop computers
average about one year old, with the power users receiving a new computer
each year.

We are able to hire more staff by using commodity computers.

I believe that we are the largest government funded AI organization.
-Steve

> Using my own workplace, the Space Station software
> test lab, as an example of a government funded
> computer lab, we have about $100K of equipment per
> person. So a well-funded AI project with half a
> dozen people (my guess at how large such a project
> would be today) might afford $600K in computers.
>
> This will buy you at present about 2.5 Tflops in
> a commodity cluster type setup. So in the next
> few years I expect to start seeing some real progress
> in AI research because the hardware is starting
> to get powerful enough.

-- 
===========================================================
Stephen L. Reed                  phone:  512.342.4036
Cycorp, Suite 100                  fax:  512.342.4040
3721 Executive Center Drive      email:  reed@cyc.com
Austin, TX 78731                   web:  http://www.cyc.com
         download OpenCyc at http://www.opencyc.org
===========================================================


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:42 MDT