None of Gary’s comments were original either. I don’t know what I’d call this, but I’ve seen similar behavior elsewhere. This weird “flag planting” behavior to try to get credit without doing any actual work, as well as disregarding all prior work. Normally the “predictions” are vague or could be applied to anything. It seems borderline like a mental illness of some sort, but I’m not a mental health professional.
How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?
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Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?
#12Gary Marcus is the definition of petty. He brands himself as an ai skeptic but in reality he's just a clout chaser more obsessed with being right and his own image than anything else.
In his mind he is always right. Every single tweet he made, every single sentence he has said is never wrong. He is 100% right everyone else is 100% wrong.
Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?
#13I expected this to be a smear / petty argument article. In fact, it's a concise, highly specific, quote by quote critique. I don't have enough context to take a side, but this is not just a rant. Beyond their interpersonal disagreements, I do wonder if LeCunn is seeing diminishing marginal returns to deep learning at FB...
The points are indeed very specific, but they are about opinions, mostly not-even-wrong statements, just reasonable unquantifiables.
The elephant in the room is the use of the word "deep" in the field IMHO: it means something else than "many layered neural network" in common parlance...
Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?
#14Not taking any sides one way or the other regarding whatever debate exists between Yann and Gary. But for what it's worth, I'd just like to point out that this overall notion of "neural symbolic" integration is fairly old by this point in time. It's gone a little bit in and out of vogue (sort of like neural networks in general, but not to the same degree) over the years. Outside of Gary, the other "big name" I'd cite who has spoken about this topic is Ron Sun. See:
* https://books.google.com/books?id=n7_DgtoQYlAC&dq=Connection...
* https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/10719871
* https://www.amazon.com/Integrating-Connectionism-Robust-Comm...
Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?
#15Gary Marcus is the definition of petty. He brands himself as an ai skeptic but in reality he's just a clout chaser more obsessed with being right and his own image than anything else. In his mind he is always right. Every single tweet he made, every single sentence he has said is never wrong. He is 100% right everyone else is 100% wrong.
So what? Is he actually right, or is he wrong? A good argument delivered badly is still a good argument.
Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?
#16Isn't this just a case of over-fitting? Recent LeCun has perhaps been over-fitted to Marcus's past writing. Maybe some augmentation (with new ideas) will resolve the issue?
Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?
#17Gary Marcus is the definition of petty. He brands himself as an ai skeptic but in reality he's just a clout chaser more obsessed with being right and his own image than anything else. In his mind he is always right. Every single tweet he made, every single sentence he has said is never wrong. He is 100% right everyone else is 100% wrong.
So what? Is he actually right, or is he wrong? A good argument delivered badly is still a good argument.
He's a fool who hurls criticisms, gets repeatedly disproven, and doesn't actually execute on anything. It's obvious why le cun's words carry more weight; he and his labs get shit done; he speaks from experience, not sophistry.
In other words, Gary Marcus has managed to match some linguistic sub-patterns between two articles, but has not proved he is intelligent.
Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?
#18Isn't this just a case of over-fitting? Recent LeCun has perhaps been over-fitted to Marcus's past writing. Maybe some augmentation (with new ideas) will resolve the issue?
I mean, there's that old saying about "standing on the shoulders of giants" and similar refrains for a reason. All science is cumulative and builds on things that came before. And a lot of times it seems that old ideas "go dormant" for a time, and then come roaring back due to some small tweak or change in available technology, etc. See the entire history of neural networks for example.
So I guess I'd say that if Gary has a legitimate beef, it would just be in regards to acknowledgement / citation / whatever. If Yann really was familiar with Gary's older work, then came around to the same ideas, but refused to acknowledge Gary, that could be seen as somewhat petty and vindictive. That said, I have no idea to what extent that is actually the case. Not trying to take sides here. I respect both guys to a tremendous degree.
Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?
#19Gary Marcus is the definition of petty. He brands himself as an ai skeptic but in reality he's just a clout chaser more obsessed with being right and his own image than anything else. In his mind he is always right. Every single tweet he made, every single sentence he has said is never wrong. He is 100% right everyone else is 100% wrong.
So what? Is he actually right, or is he wrong? A good argument delivered badly is still a good argument.
Name one academic you look up to who never admits he is wrong.
Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?
#20These guys know better than to rev the tachometer up in the lay press talking about AGI and “achieve human level intelligence” and stuff. This fluff, unfortunately, sells and so when you’ve got an ego big enough to be talking this way in the first place I suppose you feel like you have to do it?
Machine learning researchers optimize “performance” on “tasks”, and while those terms are still tricky to quantify or even define in many cases, they’re a damned sight closer to rigorous, which is why people like Hassabis who get shit done actually talk about them in the lay press, when they deal with the press at all.
We can’t agree when an embryo becomes a fetus becomes a human with anything approaching consensus. We can’t agree which animals “feel pain” or are “self aware”. We can sort of agree how many sign language tokens silverbacks can remember and that dolphins exhibit social behavior.
Let’s keep it to “beats professionals at Go” or “scores such on a Q&A benchmark”, or “draws pictures that people care to publish”, something somehow tethered to reality.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: lots of luck with either of the words “artificial” or “intelligent”, give me a break on both in the same clause.