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That could be done for twenty-six different possibilities, but it couldn’t be done for ten thousand. It was just a matter of scaling up the whole system that makes this possible today. There are maybe five thousand picturable common nouns in English, ten thousand if you include things like special kinds of plants and beetles which people would recognize with some frequency. What we did was train our system on 30 million images of these kinds of things. It’s a big, complicated, messy neural network. The details of the network probably don’t matter, but it takes about a quadrillion GPU operations to do the training.

Our system is impressive because it pretty much matches what humans can do. It has about the same training data humans have—about the same number of images a human infant would see in the first couple of years of its life. Roughly the same number of operations have to be done in the learning process, using about the same number of neurons in at least the first levels of our visual cortex. The details are different; the way these artificial neurons work has little to do with how the brain’s neurons work. But the concept is similar, and there’s a certain universality to what’s going on. At the mathematical level, it’s a composition of a very large number of functions, with certain continuity properties that let you use calculus methods to incrementally train the system. Given those attributes, you can end up with something that does the same job human brains do in physiological recognition.

But does this constitute AI? There are a few basic components. There’s physiological recognition, there’s voice-to-text, there’s language translation—things humans manage to do with varying degrees of difficulty. These are essentially some of the links to how we make machines that are humanlike in what they do. For me, one of the interesting things has been incorporating those capabilities into a precise symbolic language to represent the everyday world. We now have a system that can say, “This is a glass of water.” We can go from a picture of a glass of water to the concept of a glass of water. Now we now have to invent some actual symbolic language to represent those concepts.

I began by trying to represent mathematical, technical kinds of knowledge and went on to other kinds of knowledge. We’ve done a pretty good job of representing objective knowledge in the world. Now the problem is to represent everyday human discourse in a precise symbolic way—a knowledge-based language intended for communication between humans and machines, so that humans can read it and machines can understand it, too. For instance, you might say “X is greater than 5.” That’s a predicate. You might also say, “I want a piece of chocolate.” That’s also a predicate. It has an “I want” in it. We have to find a precise symbolic representation of the desires we express in human natural language.

In the late 1600s, Gottfried Leibniz, John Wilkins, and others were concerned with what they called philosophical languages—that is, complete, universal, symbolic representations of things in the world. You can look at the philosophical language of John Wilkins and see how he divided up what was important in the world at the time. Some aspects of the human condition have been the same since the 1600s. Some are very different. His section on death and various forms of human suffering was huge; in today’s ontology, it’s a lot smaller. It’s interesting to see how a philosophical language of today would differ from a philosophical language of the mid-1600s. It’s a measure of our progress. Many such attempts at formalization have happened over the years. In

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