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

How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?

garymarcus.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 90 posts

Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?

#21

Post by mrtranscendence »

jackblemming wrote: post #11

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.

I think Marcus’s problem here is less with not being given credit as it is with how LeCun has suddenly shifted to similar opinions without any attempt at reconciling how, until very recently, he openly denigrated Marcus and his ideas.

Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?

#22

Post by mrtranscendence »

sdenton4 wrote: post #17
actually_a_dog wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He’s matched some “linguistic patterns” that seem to indicate that LeCun has adopted ideas for which people like you call Marcus a fool. I’m going to cut him some slack.

Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?

#23

Post by xani_ »

> LeCun, 2022: Today's AI approaches will never lead to true intelligence (reported in the headline, not a verbatim quote); Marcus, 2018: “deep learning must be supplemented by other techniques if we are to reach artificial general intelligence.”

I swear same thing was being said 10+ years ago

Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?

#24

Post by mirekrusin »

mindcrime wrote: post #7
blueyes wrote: post #6

Wow, Gary Marcus just Schmidhubered Yann LeCun. The ironic thing of course is that Yann has not been at the forefront of AI for many many years (and Gary, of course, never has). Facebook's research has failed to rival Google Brain, DeepMind, OpenAI, and groups at top universities. So to the extent that Yann is copying Gary's opinions, it's because they both converge at a point far behind the leaders in the field. Yan…

So to the extent that Yann is copying Gary's opinions, it's because they both converge at a point far behind the leaders in the field. Behind? Why do you say so? If anything, they may both (now) be a bit ahead of the curve. AFAICT, while the idea of neuro-symbolic integration is pretty old (Ron Sun, among others, was talking about it ages ago), the idea is still far from widely pursued by the mainstream thread of AI…

Also having "an idea" expressed as one or two sentences is something different than implementing, trying out and writing paper about "an idea".

Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?

#25

Post by adamsmith143 »

oldgradstudent wrote: post #4
frisco wrote: post #3

How many days, cumulatively, has Gary Marcus held the SOTA record for any well known machine learning task?

Any specific reason this is relevant to the arguments in his post?

Because Marcus isn't a practitioner and never has been. He's a public intellectual from a different field acting like he's an AI expert. You would never listen to criticisms of a Physics theory from a Biologist and you shouldn't listen to criticisms of Neural Networks from a Psychologist.

He's proven time and time again that he doesn't understand the methods at work and doesn't even seem interested in trying to do so.

Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?

#26

Post by mirekrusin »

santoshalper wrote: post #9
frisco wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is he even arguing here? That he has been cheated out of some kind of credit? Credit for what? Afaict he has never actually shown something novel based on his ideas to work in a way that has mattered.

He is arguing that Yann LeCun is taking ideas from other researchers without citation or credit, and that this is a sign of insecurity and ego.

"Ideas" here being few commonly used words put together barely forming a sentence, not some algorithm, research or deep paper.

Ie. the whole "idea" being "hey, for gai we need something different than this gtp3" tweet, not "idea" as in "hey I invented this new thing I call LSTM, check it out [link to paper, results what not]".

Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?

#27

Post by adamsmith143 »

obblekk wrote: post #2

I 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...

Diminishing returns? Have you read the Gato, Palm, Stable Diffusion, etc. papers? Progress is racing ahead. Nothing is stalling... the only thing stopping progress from accelerating even faster is data.

Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?

#28

Post by uh_uh »

Is Marcus trying to create the impression that somehow he is a more impactful AI contributor than LeCun? It's going to be a tough sell because I know LeCun's name from his technical work whereas I know Marcus' name from him constantly moaning about LeCun on social media. In what _tangible_ ways did Marcus contribute?

Re: How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?

#30

Post by bjornsing »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #21
jackblemming wrote: post #11

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.

I think Marcus’s problem here is less with not being given credit as it is with how LeCun has suddenly shifted to similar opinions without any attempt at reconciling how, until very recently, he openly denigrated Marcus and his ideas.

Marcus has a strong case there, but he could do a better job focusing on that issue…
Post reply on HN