This guy has been the biggest blowhard in AI for years if not decades.
Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit
61–70 of 105 posts
Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit
#62List of "famous" ML people not to waste time on: - Gary Marcus - Juergen Schmidhuber - Pedro Domingos - Max Tegmark - Eliezer Yudkowsky Some context for people unfamiliar with ML research: the author, Schmidhuber, is well known for claiming that he should get credit for many ML ideas. Most ML researchers think that: - He doesn't deserve the credit he claims, in most if not all cases. - There's a few cases where his p…
The sad part is that Schmidhuber is not a grifter by any means. If the turning prize for deep learning could go to 5 people instead of 3, he would very likely be on that list. His lab is excellent and was easily Europe's best deep learning lab for decades before it blew up. Some of his complaints are valid too. European labs often get ignored, and he has been sidelined despite being one of the most important people i…
Like the Carl Hewitt of ML?
Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit
#63Copying and pasting Urban Dictionary's definitions of "to schmidhuber"[a], "schmidhuber"[b] and "schmidhubered"[c]: --- to schmidhuber When you publicly claim that someone else's idea that is remotely resembling your own is stolen from you. --- schmidhuber 1) To interject for a moment and explain how one's recent popular idea is a few transformations away from your 1991 paper. 2) To miraculously produce fifty years o…
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Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit
#64Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit
#65Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
His students you mean, otherwise he would be first author. Academia is just like capitalism, with credits substituting for capital. The capital owner (laboratory head/professor) always gets a cut of everything published.
Authorship conventions vary a lot within the academia. In general, the closer the name is to either end of the author list, the more significant their contributions likely were. Things also vary from paper to paper. Sometimes the first author just did the actual work for somebody else, and sometimes they also made significant intellectual contributions. (If the first author is listed as the sole corresponding author,…
Yep, in ML, the head of the lab is always last author.... even if it was equal contribution work with their own PhD student.
The PhD student needs the street cred a lot more than a tenured PI.
Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
He talks a lot about the singularity but the biggest singularity I can see is in his ratio of "talks about AI" divided by "actual AI contributions".
There's nothing wrong with being a communicator to the public.
Agreed, although I personally prefer when actual experts are communicating to the public. But that's not all he's doing, Tegmark also intends to influence global policy on AI research, random example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/21/ai-focuse...
Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically ideas are a dime a dozen. Sure, your idea might be a good one, but how do we spot your grain of sand is special when it looks the same as the rest of the desert? Essentially having an idea isn't useful to others. Demonstrating that your idea has legs is useful to others. I don't have to deal with citing papers, but I once had to deal with people pitching me ideas, wanting me to sign an NDA, in exchange for…
> Basically ideas are a dime a dozen. There's a spectrum of ideas, from groundbreaking to "dime a dozen". In tech startups, and in almost all of computer science, most ideas are a dime a dozen, and the value is in the execution. But clearly, some ideas are groundbreaking. Einstein rightfully gets the credit for an on-paper hypothesis that wasn't proved until decades later via a chain of critical discoveries and exper…
Ideas are a dime a dozen in the sense that the same idea will often occur to dozens of people, on a dime's worth of effort. Relativity theory wasn't anything like that. Einstein made predictions that no one else was making. When one of them from GR was confirmed a few years ago, Lenny Susskind famously marveled at the foresight, saying "they didn't call him Einstein for nothing!".
Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit
#69This whole comment section is full of absolutely unacceptable ad-hominem attacks on Schmidhuber, from people who most likely haven't even read any of the works in question and are certainly not showing any of the "intellectual curiosity" this site is supposed to be about. Anyone who cares about academic integrity should at least not attack someone complaining of plagiarism. That sort of attack is the academic equival…
I tried reading one of his papers that he claimed contained an important concept avant la lettre. It was unreadable and it required an almost Marxist torture of the text to make it confess (weakly and unconvincingly) that it contained anything remotely like the idea he claimed it did.
What is "Marxist torture"?
Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Credit belongs to whoever actually makes it work. That is according to whom? Is it a rule you just came up with or accepted practice? And if it's accepted practice, in what community is it accepted practice? Because where I publish and review there's really no such rule and credit belongs to the people who deserve credit for the work they've done that was useful to others.
Basically ideas are a dime a dozen. Sure, your idea might be a good one, but how do we spot your grain of sand is special when it looks the same as the rest of the desert? Essentially having an idea isn't useful to others. Demonstrating that your idea has legs is useful to others. I don't have to deal with citing papers, but I once had to deal with people pitching me ideas, wanting me to sign an NDA, in exchange for…
I don't know enough about this area of research to have an opinion on this particular topic, but I've noticed a trend with this sort of thing with my colleagues. They both claim at different times, depending on whether it benefits them, that
(1) Ideas are a dime a dozen, and making it work or bringing it to fruition, is the important thing
and
(2) The idea is the important thing; the specific implementation by someone doesn't matter, as they're just doing what the idea creator or discoverer laid out for others to follow.
Sometimes I feel like there's a fundamental paradox there that arises a lot in numerous areas of work, business, and economics.