How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas? • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by fxtentacle » Wed, Sep 28, 2022, 9:49 PM UTC

serioussecurity wrote: post #29

Gary Marcus' contribution to the field is to post the same rant about how it's not real intelligence, every 6 months. Why does he keep getting up voted?

No actually he links to old research which is becoming relevant now. I mean the main beef in this article is that LeCun used to dismiss certain ideas and now he's presenting them as his own ideas. So there is value in revisiting old theoretical research and turning it into practical applications now that we finally have enough GPU power to do so.

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

#62

Post by whoisjuan » Wed, Sep 28, 2022, 9:51 PM UTC

This guy and his weird AI feud nobody cares about.

Why do people keep upvoting his stuff?

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

#63

Post by julvo » Wed, Sep 28, 2022, 9:54 PM UTC

Time will tell if we need symbolic representations or if continuous ones are sufficient. In the meantime, it would be more productive to present alternative methods or at least benchmarks where deep learning models are outperformed, instead of arguing about who said what first and criticising without offering quantitative evidence or alternatives

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

#64

Post by paganel » Wed, Sep 28, 2022, 10:02 PM UTC

bjourne wrote: post #49

So the idea is that statistical language modelling is not enough. You need a model based on logic too for "real" artificial intelligence. I wonder what the evidence for this claim is? Because the inferences and reasoning GPT3 is already capable of is incredible and beats most expert systems that I know of. And GPT4 is around the corner, Stable Diffusion was published like only a few months ago. I don't see why not mo…

> Stable Diffusion was published like only a few months ago

Honest question: what's "intelligence"-like about Stable Diffusion?

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

#65

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 28, 2022, 10:04 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#66

Post by paganel » Wed, Sep 28, 2022, 10:06 PM UTC

serioussecurity wrote: post #29

Gary Marcus' contribution to the field is to post the same rant about how it's not real intelligence, every 6 months. Why does he keep getting up voted?

Because it's not real intelligence and because lots of money and expertise are thrown at something that's not going to get us closer to AGI.

As a neo-luddite myself I'm personally fine with that (as I'm personally fine with us throwing money away at CERN), but there are people who still think that AGI is possible and who also think that reaching AGI is a worthy goal, so those people might not be ok with chasing windmills.

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

#67

Post by zone411 » Wed, Sep 28, 2022, 10:14 PM UTC

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…

Schmidhuber Schmidhubered LeCun himself :) https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf&noteId=GsxarV_Jy...

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

#68

Post by demopathos » Wed, Sep 28, 2022, 10:16 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #64

bjourne wrote: post #49

So the idea is that statistical language modelling is not enough. You need a model based on logic too for "real" artificial intelligence. I wonder what the evidence for this claim is? Because the inferences and reasoning GPT3 is already capable of is incredible and beats most expert systems that I know of. And GPT4 is around the corner, Stable Diffusion was published like only a few months ago. I don't see why not mo…

> Stable Diffusion was published like only a few months ago Honest question: what's "intelligence"-like about Stable Diffusion?

By some metrics, intelligence is self evident. Especially in the context when you mean approximately the same thing between intelligence/conscious.

There is some intangible property I observe when I look at a human and determine they are conscious. There is some intangible property I observe when I look at a dog and determine it is conscious. There is some intangible property I observe when I look at stable diffusion and determine it is conscious.

Some attempts to explain this intangible property have been made. Almost all of the time disagreements in these explanations boil down to semantics. Yes, I consider the ability so solve problems a demonstration of intelligence. Yes, I consider to Stable Diffusion to be solving problems in this way. Also yes, I consider a hard-coded process to be behaving in a similar way.

At the end of the day we seem to define consciousness as something that makes us sufficiently sad when we hurt it.

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

#69

Post by chaxor » Wed, Sep 28, 2022, 10:20 PM UTC

mirker wrote: post #57

mardifoufs wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't necessarily doubt you but can you give me an example of an expert system that is more capable ?

GPT3 can’t perform algebra over all 32 bit numbers. A trivial Python script can.

It behaves more like your nephew than a computer in that case. Interesting that this is often the example given for why computers are bad at certain tasks, and humans are good at others.

It is quite incredible that nothing changed about the architecture in gpt-2 vs gpt-3 (just way more connections), yet it aquired fundamentally new behavior - that if performing arithmetic calculation - despite not having large amounts of training data on the subject. I think this is the type of phenomenon that shows we are quite poor at estimating what these systems will be capable of when scaling up. So acting as if we're sure it won't lead to improvements in AI is as idiotic as claiming that it will. There are far too many people on hacker news that follow this fad of being dismissive of AI, because they make the common mistake of equating cynicism with intelligence.

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

#70

Post by zone411 » Wed, Sep 28, 2022, 10:24 PM UTC

xani_ wrote: post #23

> 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

Yes, it's been a common view.