Welcome to episode 129 with Peter Voss

The week’s episode features a conversation with Peter who is an expert in artificial intelligence. He was an electronics engineer who fell in love with software and embarked on a journey to figure out what intelligence is. From there, he wanted to figure out how to build intelligent software.

Peter has several companies to his name that are involved in research and commercializing intelligence engines. He has taken time off to study intelligence and how children learn; how intelligence differs from animals, and what has been tried in the field of AI.

Peter has been building artificial brains since 2002 and coined the term “artificial general intelligence.” This refers to AI that can think and learn the way humans do. He’s currently focused on conversational AI and intelligent chatbots that can understand and remember context and reason about things. The conversation touches on the complexity of the human brain and the challenges of modelling emotion in AI.

What did we discuss?

His research and studies on intelligence led to several fundamental conclusions. He took about five years off to really understand what intelligence is and how it can be measured. One of his main conclusions was that intelligence is not just about being able to perform a task.  It’s about being able to generalize and apply what has been learned to new situations.

Another conclusion was that intelligence is not just about processing information, but it’s also about having common sense knowledge and understanding the world around us.

Regarding the role of emotion, I felt that that emotions play a significant role in human intelligence.  In the context of artificial intelligence, Peter believes that it’s important to focus on building a system that can reason and learn like humans without incorporating emotions.

Peter is now focused on developing conversational AI that can understand, reason, and learn from its interactions with humans. This is where his highly personalised chat assistant comes in. They are an intelligent service programmed to learn from you. It learnt to work with your personal preferences and to adapt from your replies.

You can hear more from this episode in this week’s podcast and find out more about Peter from www.aigo.ai or his LinkedIn profile here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vosspeter/