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Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

nytimes.com

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Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#131

Post by gimmeThaBeet »

bernardopires wrote: post #99
darksaints wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've identified four areas where it excels. Only a few billion more areas to go. And sure, we can now have algorithms that can categorize dogs based on collections of pixels better than humans can. Get back to me when they've figured out double entry accounting, splitting atoms, building bridges and spaceships, or improve upon TCP-IP.

This is a computer science award, nobody is claiming that AI will revolutionize the fields you mention (which are at best loosely related to CS). It doesn't have to be useful literally everywhere to have value.

This is mildly related, Matt Levine seems more popular around these parts nowadays, he had a bit a few months ago that I find resonates when I see people who seem to constantly seem to speak vaguely in stock market terms and bubbles and soforth. Not really directed to you, more to the parent.

>On the other hand, if you bet that stocks will go down, you have some compensating psychic rewards. For one thing, occasionally stocks will go down, and you will be praised for your prescience in predicting the crash, and the people who were long will be mocked for their complacency. How smart you will feel!

>For another thing, even if stocks haven’t gone down, you get to borrow psychically, as it were, against that future moment of glory. You can just go around sort of saying “this is unsustainable and eventually stocks will go down and I will be praised for my prescience,” and people will be surprisingly willing to say “yes that’s correct, I admire your hypothetical prescience.” Particularly since the 2008 financial crisis, financial markets—and financial media—have a strongly entrenched narrative of prescient bears and complacent bulls, a widespread sense that any rising market is suspect and that the cynical view is always the smart one.

It's just weird to me there's always people looking to figure out a way to call the top on absolutely everything.

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#132

Post by [deleted] »

mindcrime wrote: post #115
darksaints wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people actually are claiming that these new NNet advancements are the key that will unlock AGI, which by its very nature implies that they will be as advanced, or more advanced, than humans in all forms of intelligence. They're lightyears away from that, but now the general public is buying into the hype and thinking it's a decade or two away. NNets are already a disappointment to nearly any applied researcher t…

Yes, people actually are claiming that these new NNet advancements are the key that will unlock AGI, which by its very nature implies that they will be as advanced, or more advanced, than humans in all forms of intelligence. Who are "people" in this context? Are you talking about the general public, or misinformed journalists who are writing about things they don't understand? Because from what I've seen, by and larg…

[deleted]

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#133

Post by briga »

luminati wrote: post #129

The Chinese must be furious. I was at a local government plenary session at Chengdu (long story) a couple of year back. The lead speaker kept waxing about how China invented and contributed AI to the world. I mentioned some points about about China's AI contributions/influence : 0. Algorithms -> The OGs as celebrated by this Turing Award (Canadian, but mostly led by American universities. On thing I did mention was d…

Do you really think China has done anything on the level of these three? Basically every new neural network architecture in recent memory is underpinned by Hinton's work on back-propagation.

China has done some fantastic work in ML, but I think the award was a long time coming for these three.

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#134

Post by hokumguru »

luminati wrote: post #129

The Chinese must be furious. I was at a local government plenary session at Chengdu (long story) a couple of year back. The lead speaker kept waxing about how China invented and contributed AI to the world. I mentioned some points about about China's AI contributions/influence : 0. Algorithms -> The OGs as celebrated by this Turing Award (Canadian, but mostly led by American universities. On thing I did mention was d…

Did you zero-index your list on purpose, or just out of habit?

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#135

Post by mindcrime »

mindcrime wrote: post #114
darksaints wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI winter doesn't mean people stop using it. AI winter and spring aren't a phenomenon specific to AI...in essence it's the same dynamic found in economic bubbles. In almost every economic bubble we see actual economic benefit underlying the hype, but the hype grows bigger than the benefit can account for, triggering eventual collapse of the hype. The thing that you should notice is that when the bubble collapses we d…

AI winter doesn't mean people stop using it. ... The thing that you should notice is that when the bubble collapses we don't stop buying, we just stop overinvesting. Right, but that doesn't match the way I feel the term "AI Winter" has been used. Now I could be mis-interpreting things, but I've always looked at an "AI Winter" as a period of under investment, created as an over-reaction to the mechanics you're referri…

D'oh. Too late to edit, but this:

less pronounced and extended pullback like we've seen in the past.

should read:

less pronounced and extended pullback than we've seen in the past.

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#136

Post by lainga »

hokumguru wrote: post #134
luminati wrote: post #129

The Chinese must be furious. I was at a local government plenary session at Chengdu (long story) a couple of year back. The lead speaker kept waxing about how China invented and contributed AI to the world. I mentioned some points about about China's AI contributions/influence : 0. Algorithms -> The OGs as celebrated by this Turing Award (Canadian, but mostly led by American universities. On thing I did mention was d…

Did you zero-index your list on purpose, or just out of habit?

It's an HN custom for, at least, references ([0], [1], ...)

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#137

Post by slashcom »

jimfleming wrote: post #75
tanilama wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But highway network doesn't work as well as ResNet, and ResNet is simpler.

Highway connections are actually used heavily in NLP in combination with LSTMs.

And replaced by residual connections in transformers, which are absolutely dominating LSTMs now.

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#138

Post by dkural »

orbifold wrote: post #5

For a more balanced view of the history of deep learning see Schmidhuber‘s review http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-overview.html and http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/who-invented-backpropagation... .

Fascinating! Thank you for sharing. The issues around the assignment of credit is as old as science and the concept of discovery; reading "The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution" by David Wootton really opened my eyes into how this is actually a fundamental feature of our modern conception of scientific discovery (sounds counter-intuitive.. I know!). It's like a societal "bug".

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#139

Post by mostafab »

srean wrote: post #116
backpropaganda wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"merely" People deserve credit for taking an idea and running with it. Without Hinton's efforts (in 1987, 2006, or 2012), deep learning would have never seen the explosive growth.

But is PR what Turing award is for though ?

PR is what awards are all about

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#140

Post by Judgmentality »

mindcrime wrote: post #115
darksaints wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people actually are claiming that these new NNet advancements are the key that will unlock AGI, which by its very nature implies that they will be as advanced, or more advanced, than humans in all forms of intelligence. They're lightyears away from that, but now the general public is buying into the hype and thinking it's a decade or two away. NNets are already a disappointment to nearly any applied researcher t…

Yes, people actually are claiming that these new NNet advancements are the key that will unlock AGI, which by its very nature implies that they will be as advanced, or more advanced, than humans in all forms of intelligence. Who are "people" in this context? Are you talking about the general public, or misinformed journalists who are writing about things they don't understand? Because from what I've seen, by and larg…

Let's use a concrete example of technology being overpromised to the public - self-driving cars. Now there is some debate as to whether or not general AI needs to be invented in order to make self-driving cars a reality, but I don't want to dive too deeply into that. One thing that's obvious is that self-driving cars have already been promised to the public (Waymo claims to have launched last year but it's really just a private beta with a handful of users). Cruise is supposed to launch a public service this year in SF. Zoox is supposed to do the same in 2020 (and in custom built cars, no less). And there's no doubt that machine learning plays a critical role in the advancement of self-driving cars.

Now if you talk to the actual researchers/engineers when they're not afraid of hiding behind their NDAs (basically a friend at a bar), these people will talk about the challenges and how much work there is to do and so on. But the company's public stance, and the many billions of dollars chasing this area, is that it's just around the corner.

The point is, there is a lot of hype and it's easy to understand why. Elon Musk is happy to proclaim that Tesla is already selling the hardware for full self-driving vehicles, and it's just the regulators holding him back (which is absurd, to put it kindly). This is the same person saying AI is a bigger threat than nuclear weapons. So arguably the largest tech celebrity isn't even talking about when, he's saying it's here and we need to be prepared. This is the kind of person shaping the public's opinion.

But the money chasing these investments are mostly from private VC firms and tech companies, not public research grants. Once investors realize AI just isn't good enough for self-driving cars right now they won't want to keep throwing billions of dollars behind it. And that's when we arrive at a winter. Even Alphabet is starting to get weird about raising its stock price, so not even the tech giants are immune from this.

There are many other verticals that follow the same story, I was just using the most obvious example of an industry that has billions flowing into it despite nobody having a real product on the promise of advancements in AI and "the time is now!" But eventually (my guess is next year, but I'm old enough to know it's impossible to time these things) the hype will come crashing down to reality and that is when funding will dry up.

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