121–130 of 159 posts
Extremely pleased to see the weird feud with Schmidhuber sparking up again, completely pointless feuds like that are very entertaining, especially since all involved figures have done good work and don't seem to be sabotaging each other's students. It's like pro wrestling for nerds.
Flagged. This site never ceases to amaze me. I'm assuming flagged for ad hominem, while this guy just basically insults everyone else in the thread. Nice!
It saddens me to see these people being given awards for improving the surveillance and manipulation capabilities of advertising corporations. This isn't how you encourage people to use their abilities to contribute to society in a positive way.
AI has the potential for massive positive effects as well as massive negative effects.
What saddens me is that we have systems and incentives in place which encourage governments and corporations to use powerful technologies to negative ends.
* Obviously there is room to quibble about the positive/negative balance of individual technologies, e.g. gunpowder, bio-weapons, etc., however I am sure a circumspect analysis could find positives even in things developed primarily to improve the efficiency of war.
Do you think (HN) that this incentive boost will mean more people who're working on fringe risky ideas will get the energy and persistence to keep going? Will we see a bump in 10 or so years of innovations coming from people who would have otherwise given up (had this award not been given)? Hard to measure of course, but what's your hunch?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoa. Personal attacks will get you banned here. We've warned you about this more than once before. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here. When you do, don't miss this one, since it should have changed your assumption about the GP: " Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize…
Just a note, I did not find it any more rude than other comments that get a free pass. Commenting that more familiarity with the literature is necessary can be a very factual claim.
And we still don't know if/how biological brains perform backpropagation. Perhaps we should consider calling NNs "weight networks" instead.
That was pretty much hashed out in the 70s when NN interest got going again. I'm not sure there is much value in recapitulating the discussion....
Also, there is educational value in conversation.
What is the value to you in shutting down a conversation someone else is interested in having?
At least cite the answer to the question if you feel it's settled scholarship.
This is well deserved, but IMO it also signals an upcoming AI winter. This cycle has happened several times before: 1) Some scrappy researcher on a low budget develops a new AI technology that shows promise in a specific area. 2) More researchers take that idea and successfully apply it more broadly. 3) Massive investment in research happens, pushing PhD candidates into extracting every possible nuance out of that te…
There's good reason to think that the AI Winter / AI Spring cycle is done. AI techniques are now creating so much real world value (more so than in the 80's / 90's) that there may well not be any more "AI Winter" events. Or perhaps they will be, but they'll be less pronounced. Maybe an "AI Fall" instead of "AI Winter". Part of that too, is that I think people now realize that narrow AI is sufficient to create tremend…
Now it feels to me we are in a design winter again: there are still a lot of designers on staff, but they are relegated to a "touch up" role... They have been moved ahead of implementation (which is good) but they are expected to "touch up" concepts generated by management in a matter of days. Very similar to when designers would get a few days to clean up a UI that was already implemented.
Sort of off topic, but just and example that widespread use and business value doesn't mean something can't fall back into a winter of sorts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Schmidhuber did way more than LSTMs. And they still are SOTA on many tasks. You clearly are not very familiar with the field.
I'm not saying that Schmidhuber is not important pioneer in the field. When you put researchers or groups into order of importance, the work from this trio comes before others, including Schmidhuber. The Turing Award is given to those at the top and it's not inclusive. If I could give Turing Award for someone in the field who has not received it yet, I would give it to Vladimir Vapnik.
So would I, but I don't think that will happen. He's is pretty much an antithesis to everything Deep Learning is about. Theory-first over trial-and-error, math over intuition, small datasets over big data, advances in understanding vs advances in results.
I haven't seen a single discussion of his paper on combining classifiers[1] anywhere on the web.
[1] - http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/papers/volume17/16-137/16-137.pdf
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 due to the sheer factory production of Chinese PhDs, there is a lot of stuff arxiv from China )
1. Frameworks -> Tensorflow, PyTorch (American)
2. Hardware -> Nvidia (American)
3. Distribution -> Github (American)
4. Education -> Medium, Github, Youtube, Fast.ai (American)
5. Cloud -> AWS, Google, Azure (American)
China has some equivalent for all of them, ie. PaddlePaddle by Baidu, AliCloud, etc. but none of them have the reach, influence or domination of the American counterparts.
Suffice to say that my points weren't taken too well and have been disinvited since then.
I would love to hear a long form podcast with all three (and a CS knowledgeable interviewer)