Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

awards.acm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 119 posts

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#4

Post by khaledh »

ofirpress wrote: post #3

Good time to re-read The Bitter Lesson: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...

Indeed a bitter lesson. I once enjoyed encoding human knowledge into a computer because it gives me understanding of what's going on. Now everything is becoming a big black box that is hard to reason about. /sigh/

Also, Moore's law has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now more than ever, AI is putting a lot of demand on computational power, to the point which drives chip makers to create specialized hardware for it. It's becoming a flywheel.

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#5

Post by anonzzzies »

khaledh wrote: post #4
ofirpress wrote: post #3

Good time to re-read The Bitter Lesson: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...

Indeed a bitter lesson. I once enjoyed encoding human knowledge into a computer because it gives me understanding of what's going on. Now everything is becoming a big black box that is hard to reason about. /sigh/ Also, Moore's law has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now more than ever, AI is putting a lot of demand on computational power, to the point which drives chip makers to create specialized hardware for it…

I am still hoping AI progress will get to the point where the AI can eventually create AI's that are built up out of robust and provable logic which can be read and audited. Until that time, I wouldn't trust it for risky stuff. Unfortunately, it's not my choice and within a scarily short timespan, black boxes will make painfully wrong decisions about vital things that will ruin lives.

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#9

Post by kleiba »

ofirpress wrote: post #3

Good time to re-read The Bitter Lesson: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...

This depends a little bit on what the goal of AI research is. If it is (and it might well be) to build machines that excel at tasks previously thought to be exclusively reserved to, or needing to involve, the human mind, then these bitter lessons are indeed worthwhile.

But if you do AI research with the idea that by teaching machines how to do X, we might also be able to gain insight in how people do X, then ever more complex statistical setups will be of limited information.

Note that I'm not taking either point of view here. I just want to point out that perhaps a more nuanced approach might be called for here.

Post reply on HN