There are still others working on artificial general intelligence, but it's definitely more marginal, and half the time I find someone doing something interesting it's some work to figure out whether they are crazy or brilliant :) E.g. Ben Goertzel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel
It's hard to tell. But the thing that seemed most concerning was that at one point, they suffer some big setback and change things around. Except he's pleased that a large amount of code is still useful, doing maintenance work. I have no real basis, but my instinct says that if dealing with e.g. socket code is even remotely a concern at all, you're probably not actually solving real AI problems.
Actually, the bigger thing is that it's just highly improbable they were so close to creating AI and for lack of a few dozen megabucks they aren't able to do so. It's such a tiny amount of money to supposedly bring on the singularity.
Especially when you see he was selling a Market Predictor product. It's like those scams where they're going to take your money and buy gold in the Caribbean and bring it back so ya get 2x back. If you actually had market predicting software, I dunno, you could ... put your own money in? Even more recently, Peter Thiel was funding MIRI right? So if anyone close thought this was actually in reach and just needed a bit more Java code to be written, it seems rather probable they'd be able to find _some_ funding. Shit, if you really believed it'd bring about a positive GAI then you'd probably work on it in the open, find some way of completing it over a decade or two (barring severe procrastination and motivational issues).
None of this adds up. I'm not sure what he was doing at SIAI/MIRI, but I've no real clue wtf they actually do anyways.
OK so, "important research" avenue. Apart from making AGI so we can have robots (wtf?). And growing brains in a vat. We should apparently just use Google's "databases of text" to dev a search engine that "really understands stuff". As if Google hasn't though of this "avenue". Oh, and cold fusion and femtotech. I think my estimate of this guy actually making AI has dropped significantly. "Avenues of research" eh? You'd have better luck reading the Player's Handbook and picking your top 8 favourite spells you wish were real.
