vetta project

In the aftermath of Webmind I still wanted to work on building a general purpose AI. I didn’t think the Webmind design was ever going to work and I wanted to make a fresh start. I had a few ideas and a name, but that was all. The name was “vetta”, which I found in a Sanskrit dictionary to mean roughly “the one with knowledge”. It also meant “summit” in Italian. It looked cool, sounded cool. I talked to some of the Brazilians at Webmind about these things, but then I had to leave New York and decided to take some vacation time to travel and clear my head. During that time they went back home and decided that they really liked the name too. So much so, they started two companies Vetta Technologies (as mentioned in this BBC article), and Vetta Labs.

Six months later Ben Goertzel was putting together a book on “Real AI” and was looking for authors. I suggested that this title wasn’t politically smart as the implication was that everybody else wasn’t doing real AI work. I suggested instead “Artificial General Intelligence”, or AGI. I did some Googling and was unable to find anybody using the term. Ben wasn’t crazy about the idea but after a few days thought decided that although the new name wasn’t as exciting, I did have a point. So he went with it as the title of the book. Slowly the usage of this phrase has grown over the years, due no doubt to the AGI email list and the artificial general intelligence research institute. I guess it’s now going mainstream as I just saw this article on Forbes using the expression.

It’s funny how words get around. If I don’t make it as an AI/finance researcher, I should consider going into the product naming business!