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> “I understand the state-of-the-art papers,” he says. “The math is simple. For the first time in my life, I’m like, ‘I know everything there is to know.’ ” Ye
by thedz 11y ago
> “I understand the state-of-the-art papers,” he says. “The math is simple. For the first time in my life, I’m like, ‘I know everything there is to know.’ ”
Yep, he's still in his twenties.
- buro9 11y agoBut that belief is enough to attempt something that more experienced people would hesitate to start. Naivety is a very good thing at times. I've seen average people achieve incredible things, and not because what they did was incredible... but just because they started work on things that no-one else thought they could complete. Some way into it, when enough progress has been made, people have rushed to give support because "halfway there but badly done" is a hell of a lot better than "not even started yet".
- peckrob 11y agoA friend of mine in college had a very good saying about this that I always keep in mind: "There's nothing like succeeding at something you weren't even qualified to attempt."
- thedz 11y agoI don't disagree with that. I've worked with some very smart people in my 20s who sounded similar to Hotz -- enthusiastic, retrospectively naive about their understanding of a field, but above all, superbly intelligent. They did really great things, things that maybe didn't work perfectly or as envisioned, but still things that might scared off more experienced folks. But also now that I am in my 30s, and they are as well, we frequently look back at that time and laugh about being that young. "Man, you were fun to work with, but also what were we thinking" So I definitely wish Hotz all the luck. If nothing else, the more smart people working on the problem of self driving cars, the better. My comment mostly stemmed from amusement of his quotes.
- kbenson 11y agoThere have been people in my past that wanted to start a project that I didn't think they were capable of finishing, because either it was too large, they didn't have the skills/smarts (not that I thought they were stupid, just that I thought it would take exceptional intelligence), or both. A few of them succeeded, either in the original task, or the effort and journey was well worth the price paid. Part of this was hubris. The thought of someone I considered less capable than myself accomplishing something I felt I could not damaged my ego. This was humbling. Part of this was experience. The experience to know that attempting the hard or impossible is sometimes worth the effort, whether you succeed or not. This was educational. Part of this was ambition. Ambition to do something new, to ignore the naysayers and noways when needed, and forge your own path, which I've always felt short on, but have steadily worked on over time. This is ongoing.
- webjprgm 11y agoAnother part of my problem is that I have too many projects I want to do. Learning about AI is one example, but I've instead done a series of web and mobile apps which are much closer to success. It would take a lot of time to read all the AI research and become good enough to tackle a problem like self-driving cars, and I've only got my spare time at home, with which I must also make sure my wife remains happy (ignoring her seems to make her unhappy for some reason) and keep my sanity (read fiction or play a video game some times) and take care of my house (the lawn just won't stay mowed). I do remember being about 19 and thinking I was the best programmer in the world. By about 22 I had rewritten as much of my old code as I possibly could because it was so horrible. Somewhere between there and now I've gotten a cynical bit of humility to tamper my ego. I think the cynical part is that my ambition has not lessened, just my belief that I can succeed. One Steve Jobs philosophy is focus and say no. I'm guessing I could do better if I said no to all but a single project.
- untog 11y agoSure. But that belief is a genuine worry when you are talking about creating something that'll move a hulk of metal down a road at 70mph.
- lintiness 11y agoif we don't have laws currently, we sure as hell need them. i can't imagine letting everybody try their own self-driving software.
- mikeg8 11y agoI don't think this would help at all because 1) most people are not interested in making their own self-driving car and 2) the small niche who is interested isn't going to worry about following the laws, as Hotz states in the piece.
- hospes 11y agoMillions of drunk people drive on the roads. People can buy assault weapons, with no training and background checks. People who make self-driving software should be the least of our concerns.
- dymk 11y agoThere are laws against drunk driving (and harsh penalties for those that are caught), and you can't buy a firearm without a background check from a dealer (with more states requiring gun show dealers perform background checks now, too). People building untested self driving cars is an entirely legitimate concern.
- purplerabbit 11y agoLegitimate: yes. Worthy of concern: absolutely not.
- tim333 11y agoThere aren't laws against driving while teenage: "Nationally, 963,000 teen drivers were involved in police-reported motor vehicle crashes in 2013, which resulted in 383,000 injuries and 2,865 deaths" I'd worry about that more than the odd geek with a laptop.
- kamaal 11y ago>>I've seen average people achieve incredible things In my opinion, we must never underestimate people. >>but just because they started work on things that no-one else thought they could complete. Nothing fails like smartness. The reason why a few people achieve the impossible while far more intelligent and smart people don't is because of the curse of intelligence makes them believe certain things are impossible. The fool didn't know it was impossible, so he did it.
- ishanr 11y ago"Naivety is a very good thing at times." He might not be naive.
- dpacmittal 11y ago>Naivety is a very good thing at times. Thats what I think 'foolish' means in "Stay hungry, stay foolish."
- sixQuarks 11y agoI would totally agree with you IF this kid hadn't proven his chops with iPhone and PS3 hacks, not to mention building a self-driving car in his garage. I also realize this kid probably won't end up making a huge dent in the universe.... but.... statistically speaking, there should be several "Leonardo da Vinci"- level humans alive right now. Why not this kid?
- sangnoir 11y ago> I would totally agree with you IF this kid hadn't proven his chops with iPhone and PS3 hacks, not to mention building a self-driving car in his garage. Impressive as they are, his chops still don't support his claim to "know everything there is to know". The Dunning-Kruger effect is in full swing.
- david_shaw 11y agoSure, but that claim was made in the context of deep-learning networks. He went to work for an AI company, and realized that he knew -- from reading cutting-edge academic papers -- as much as the forefront of the field. He wasn't claiming to know everything there is to know in general, or even in software development, just that he can understand and implement machine learning with the best of them. Personally, I don't doubt that claim.
- darkmighty 11y agoThe field doesn't require a particularly extensive background either. A good grasp of linear algebra and multi-variable calculus basically has you set to understanding even the state of the art in the field. Of course, coming up with the papers would require a whole lot more work.
- username3 11y agoTypical twenty year olds don't read all the state-of-the-art papers on a subject before saying they know it all. It sounds more like he's caught up on the latest AI research and fundamentals.
- nightski 11y agoIf he really did read the papers then it's clear he would not say this. The papers aren't an end. They describe incremental progress. Having just returned from NIPS where most of the researchers are saying "We don't know" all the time, it is ironic.
- mturmon 11y agoPrecisely. We have some stuff that works and we don't know why.
- robotresearcher 11y agoPeople in their twenties wrote those papers.
- grahamannett 11y agoThe math in any of the paper's he's most likely referring to aren't some theoretical pde maths or abstract algebraic geometry stuff... it's pretty understandable if you can grasp a "graduate level" linear algebra course.
- robotresearcher 11y agoThat's true. My point was to respond to the breathless reporting about that this guy has achieved so young. He's replicating the work of other mostly young people. Doing it the first time is the trick. (I'm very familiar with this literature - see my username)
- josefresco 11y agoI wish I could upvote this more. A person in their 20's knows nothing, but thinks they've outsmarted the world. It's not until your 30's that you realize how big of an idiot you were/are and how much of the world you actually understand (read: little).
- mikeg8 11y agoThis whole: "Twenty year olds don't know shit but 30 year olds are so enlightened" sentiment needs to stop. I agree that many younger people think they understand more than they do but that's just part of growing up and we all go through it.
- YooLi 11y agoYou are misunderstanding the sentiment. No one is saying 30 year olds know everything, they are saying 30 year olds _realize_ they don't know everything.
- sirkneeland 11y agoOr as Socrates put it, "the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing" (probably one of the more Buddhist-ish gems from Western philosophy)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- drumdance 11y agoAge is shorthand for "I've spent X years making a lot of mistakes and learning from them."
- sangnoir 11y agoWhy does it need to stop if you agree that its a fact of life. No one is saying 30 y/o's are enlighted, just that they have a bit more perspective. The same can be said for twenties vs. teens. It's not that teens are idiots - they are just teens with the life-experiences & perspective of a teen
- mturmon 11y agoI cringed. Saying "the math is simple" -- ouch. The writer must have been barely able to suppress his glee when that one popped out.
- Dylan16807 11y agoWhile I don't know a lot about the subject, I would bet that's likely right. As in, there are very hard problems, but the actual mathematics are not all that hard.
- bloaf 11y agoI don't doubt it at all. Keep in mind that "simple" is relative, we have to ask "simple compared to what?" For lots of people, I be that the math involved in these neural nets is the most complicated math they've ever done. They would never say it is simple, because they themselves barely grasp it. But in my experience, topics in mathematics have a funny way of becoming very simple the moment you "graduate" to thinking about a slightly more general mathematical framework. Someone who has digested enough of the AI literature to think about the methods in aggregate is very likely to be in a position to see any particular method as a "simple" implementation of some more general set of principles.
- mturmon 11y agoAs a general observation, what you say has some truth to it. But the particular quote is referring to learning rates in autonomous robotics, especially visual classification in complex real-world scenes. I have worked and published in ML since the early 1990s, was a program chair for the learning track at NIPS one year, participated in the same DARPA learning-to-drive program that Yann LeCun did, and don't consider the math behind "state-of-the-art papers" to be simple. Just taking deep learning: there are a lot of tricks and recipes (e.g., rectified-linear activations, number of layers, staged training) that are not mathematically understood. It's exciting, but mathematically still a jungle. Just because a neophyte can code and optimize a network does not mean that the math that explains why it actually works is simple. As engineers, we need to understand why it works before using it in a safety-critical situation.
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- Dylan16807 11y agoThat statement is clearly tongue-in-cheek, come on. "I well-understand the cutting edge of this narrow research area" is less fun to say, but that's the meaning.
- ishanr 11y agoIts so much fun to see people who crossed their 20s doing nothing close to great, get so jealous.
- mipapage 11y ago"I know everything there is to know." I kind of took that to be like how Musk talks about needing to know first principles. In the article you can see that he was humble about what he thought he knew, took jobs here and there and eventually confirmed that he was at the cutting edge, that he knew 'everything there is to know' about this special area. That's when he realized that he was qualified to try this. IMO, anyway ;)
- drumdance 11y agoOn a smaller scale, I remember one day realizing that I, a self-taught programmer, knew more than my boss. Within six months I left to start my own company.
- mipapage 11y agoNice. I'm still struggling to feel I know enough to do my own thing other than lead gen and optimization for others.
- SonicSoul 11y agoHow smart was your boss and how did it go with your company ?
- drumdance 11y agoThe boss was pretty smart in the sense of knowing how to work with big corporations to build large decision support systems. But his technical knowledge was fairly shallow. I sold my first company and the investors did very well, but I made tons of stupid mistakes in the process. Not least of which was holding on to dotcom stock that I thought would go to the moon but which mostly went down the drain.
- ksk 11y agoWell, a lot of people on HN certainly comment on technology without immodesty and an air of authority. It does feel boorish to have someone say that out-loud though.
- swombat 11y ago> I know everything there is to know. If only he knew about the Dunning Kruger effect...
- relkor 11y agoTo be fair, this is machine learning we are talking about, not algebraic topology. The experts in ML are still proud of the fact that they figured out the chain rule...
- cinquemb 11y agoNevermind that they have no idea of the behavior of the partial derivatives nor attempts to model such when presenting their "latest and greatest", at least from most of the stuff I've read that's been posted here…
- walrus 11y ago> The experts in ML are still proud of the fact that they figured out the chain rule... I assume you're talking about using backpropagation with gradient descent. Backpropagation itself isn't all that interesting. The interesting part is that it works for practical problems and doesn't get stuck in shallow local minima.
- ryanSrich 11y agoI'd typically tend to agree with you (that a guy in his 20's saying he knows everything is ludicrous), but geohot is an actual savant.
- rokhayakebe 11y agoNobody created anything great by first fully appreciating the size and difficulty of their endeavor. I would say, underestimating a problem, and overestimating one's skills are crucial to innovation and progress.
- serge2k 11y agoor just legitimately an expert on the field.
- nathan_f77 11y agoHe may well know everything there is to know today, but there's bound to plenty more breakthroughs in AI research. It would be like Newton saying "I know everything there is to know about physics today".
- staticint 11y agoI take that to mean that for the first time in his life he read the papers and fully understood them without needing additional background, not that there isn't more to learn outside of those papers.