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Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

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Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#31

Post by psb217 »

gillesjacobs wrote: post #22
suddenlybananas wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be influenced downstream by papers you haven't personally read.

Of course, but if you haven't read them you also shouldn't cite them. And that's where Schmidhuber goes off the rails: publicly shaming published papers into citing you isn't good academic practice. It's bullying.

"if you haven't read them you also shouldn't cite them" -- this is wildly incorrect in an academic context. If I'm using ResNets, I should cite the original ResNet paper, even if I haven't read it. If I'm using Transformers, I should cite the original Transformer paper, even if I haven't read it. If my work is a direct extension of method B, and method B is a direct extension of method A, I should cite the source of A, even if I haven't read it.

You can't claim independence from past work simply because you didn't look directly at it. The job of an academic researcher is to know the landscape of relevant ideas, where they come from, where they're going, and to hopefully contribute a few new good ones.

Citation chains should extend back from your work, along a reasonable line conceptual inheritance, back to a reasonable point of origin. Schmidhuber has different definitions for both of these reasonables than the bulk of the ML research community, to a point that makes him difficult to satisfy.

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#33

Post by eru »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #20
jcattle wrote: post #3

There's this crowd on HN which is very vocal against academia. From what I've seen, the main points are that academia isn't efficient, most of the science coming out of academia is useless and that the whole system is just a waste of taxpayers money. Instead, what is often argued, all good research is done in private labs. Then pointing to SpaceX, Moderna, OpenAI, Google, etc. And while it is very true that often the…

This is a straw-man if I ever saw one. Practically no one is against hard science research, properly conducted. The issues are rampant fraud / p-hacking / unreproducible garbage mixed with an unhealthy dose of ideological monoculture and indoctrination, garnished with rising tuition prices while sitting on huge endowments in case of the Ivy Leagues.

> Practically no one is against hard science research, properly conducted.

As long as you do that with your own money (or money got freely given from other people), sure.

If you use taxpayer money, that's a different game.

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#34

Post by vld_chk »

letssaythat wrote: post #26
MeteorMarc wrote: post #14

Also see Schmidhuber's take on the Hinton + Hopfield Nobel prize: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/physics-nobel-2024-plagiari...

[flagged]

Hm, first time I see that Russian bots came to HN, but here we are. The history of comments of this account is insane.

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#35

Post by jongjong »

It's crazy to think that if Elon Musk hadn't mentioned Schmidhuber, most people would have no idea.

It's nauseating how all the researchers who happened to work for big tech got tons of media coverage but Schmidhuber and his team were getting zero coverage yet they made massive contributions. I bet there are many others not mentioned.

Nobody even knows about Frank Rosenblatt. It's insane how distorted our perception of innovation is.

Even science has been corrupted. It makes one doubt every story we're told about who invented what.

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#36

Post by inigyou »

psb217 wrote: post #31
gillesjacobs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, but if you haven't read them you also shouldn't cite them. And that's where Schmidhuber goes off the rails: publicly shaming published papers into citing you isn't good academic practice. It's bullying.

"if you haven't read them you also shouldn't cite them" -- this is wildly incorrect in an academic context. If I'm using ResNets, I should cite the original ResNet paper, even if I haven't read it. If I'm using Transformers, I should cite the original Transformer paper, even if I haven't read it. If my work is a direct extension of method B, and method B is a direct extension of method A, I should cite the source of…

You should read those papers then

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#37

Post by pembrook »

jcattle wrote: post #3

There's this crowd on HN which is very vocal against academia. From what I've seen, the main points are that academia isn't efficient, most of the science coming out of academia is useless and that the whole system is just a waste of taxpayers money. Instead, what is often argued, all good research is done in private labs. Then pointing to SpaceX, Moderna, OpenAI, Google, etc. And while it is very true that often the…

I feel like you're constructing a strawman to argue against. I visit this site almost daily and the prevailing sentiment is usually the polar opposite of what you're suggesting.

If sentiment on HN were as you say, how could your pro-academia and anti-big tech comment be sitting at the top as the most upvoted comment?

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#38

Post by utopiah »

elorant wrote: post #24
jcattle wrote: post #3

There's this crowd on HN which is very vocal against academia. From what I've seen, the main points are that academia isn't efficient, most of the science coming out of academia is useless and that the whole system is just a waste of taxpayers money. Instead, what is often argued, all good research is done in private labs. Then pointing to SpaceX, Moderna, OpenAI, Google, etc. And while it is very true that often the…

I do a lot of work that is based on academic research, aka building a proprietary sparse embedding model. My issue with academia is that they don’t bother to solve the practical issues. They tell you how to build a PPMI model, but what about hitting a database that’s 500TB to find co-occurrence numbers? This isn’t even touched so you’d then have to go and invent a bazillion of algorithms yourself to make your life ea…

The practical issue of academia is epistemological. It's about learning how a phenomenon came to exists. If you are looking for efficiency the field of academia related to learning how to do so is computational complexity and it works quite well.

The goal of academia isn't to be practical, "only" learning.

Re: Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom

#39

Post by contingencies »

jcattle wrote: post #3

There's this crowd on HN which is very vocal against academia. From what I've seen, the main points are that academia isn't efficient, most of the science coming out of academia is useless and that the whole system is just a waste of taxpayers money. Instead, what is often argued, all good research is done in private labs. Then pointing to SpaceX, Moderna, OpenAI, Google, etc. And while it is very true that often the…

Every western academic nearly systematically ignores eastern science and philosophy: classicism means "western European". Never mind Europe only flourished intellectually post Islam, which imported the science and engineering of China and India, critically including printing and zero[0]. IMHO this is why distaste for academia grows: it's based on appeals to authority which are demonstrably farcically misplaced. Alternatively stated: the emperor has no clothes, much less silk or paper!

Just as the Dewey Decimal System really only served the purpose of providing the facetious nominal linearization of an arbitrary depth ontological oversimplification, so too humans are much more like random pattern matching machines than festidious sense-makers glued to absolutes derived from false appeals to static mono-perspective ontological hierarchies. The same is becoming lived experience in the LLM age, although the tiktokked youth apparently cannot string ten words together or focus longer than three seconds to attest, I'd wager they can feel it. Are we losing something by rejecting the habit of rigorously manually tending to spurious and temporary ontologies? Yes. Is it necessarily a loss in the long term? Probably not, in the same way we no longer write long-form letters or leave calling cards. Are we gaining something in response? Yes, at a minimum much stronger cross-pollination between ivory towers by fearless exploratory pragmatists who disrespect the would-be scope of nominal professions in favor of holistic thinking... both AI and human.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...

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