I don’t personally work on AGI and I don’t think the majority of “AGI progress” comes from people who label themselves as working on AGI. I think much of the progress comes from improved tools due to research and usage in machine learning and statistics. There are also of course people in these fields who are more concerned with pushing in the direction of human-level capabilities. And progress everywhere is so inter-woven that I don’t even know if thinking in terms of “number of AI researchers” is the right framing. That said, I’ll try to answer your question.
I’m worried that I may just be anchoring off of your two numbers, but I think 10^3 is a decent estimate. There are upwards of a thousand people at NIPS and ICML (two of the main machine learning conferences), only a fraction of those people are necessarily interested in the “human-level” AI vision, but also there are many people who are in the field who don’t go to these conferences in any given year. Also many people in natural language processing and computer vision may be interested in these problems, and I recently found out that the program analysis community cares about at least some questions that 40 years ago would have been classified under AI. So the number is hard to estimate but 10^3 might be a rough order of magnitude. I expect to find more communities in the future that I either wasn’t aware of or didn’t think of as being AI-relevant, and who turn out to be working on problems that are important to me.
I don’t personally work on AGI and I don’t think the majority of “AGI progress” comes from people who label themselves as working on AGI. I think much of the progress comes from improved tools due to research and usage in machine learning and statistics. There are also of course people in these fields who are more concerned with pushing in the direction of human-level capabilities. And progress everywhere is so inter-woven that I don’t even know if thinking in terms of “number of AI researchers” is the right framing. That said, I’ll try to answer your question.
I’m worried that I may just be anchoring off of your two numbers, but I think 10^3 is a decent estimate. There are upwards of a thousand people at NIPS and ICML (two of the main machine learning conferences), only a fraction of those people are necessarily interested in the “human-level” AI vision, but also there are many people who are in the field who don’t go to these conferences in any given year. Also many people in natural language processing and computer vision may be interested in these problems, and I recently found out that the program analysis community cares about at least some questions that 40 years ago would have been classified under AI. So the number is hard to estimate but 10^3 might be a rough order of magnitude. I expect to find more communities in the future that I either wasn’t aware of or didn’t think of as being AI-relevant, and who turn out to be working on problems that are important to me.