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I got my PhD in machine learning and NLP and did a 3-yr postdoc on deep learning. My advisor shared the following wisdom with me: "When the experts in your fie

I got my PhD in machine learning and NLP and did a 3-yr postdoc on deep learning. My advisor shared the following wisdom with me: "When the experts in your field say that saying can be done, they are probably right. When the experts in your field say that something cannot be done, they are not necessarily right."

_delirium 9y ago
> When the experts in your field say that saying can be done, they are probably right. Generally yes, but they may be significantly off on the timeframe. One famous example is that once alpha-beta search was invented (in the late 1950s), Herb Simon predicted that "within ten years a digital computer will be the world's chess champion". That did eventually happen, using techniques not even all that different from alpha-beta search, but it took 40 years rather than 10. Many of the 1980s neural nets claims turned out to be eventually vindicated too, but it took 30 years, which was quiet a bit longer than the optimistic portion of 1980s "connectionists" expected. That's the type of skepticism I usually have with claims today too. When people say "there will be fully autonomous self-driving cars on the road by 2020", I don't doubt it'll happen, but whether it'll happen in less than 3 years I have more doubts about. You could argue AI researchers have gotten better at accurately predicting the timeframes of advances than they were in the early days of AI, but I'm not sure there is solid evidence of that (would be interesting if someone has studied it).
- Houshalter 9y ago
  It can happen the other way around too though. Few people predicted the massive jump in AI ability the last few years. Notable AI researchers said it would take decades to get to human accuracy on imagenet, and they were wrong within a few years. I recall reading the first deep learning Go papers around 2015 and thinking that superhuman Go AI was inevitable in a few years. And when I discussed it with other people they were very skeptical and thought it was unlikely. And then AlphaGo came out...
  - rspeer 9y ago
    > Few people predicted the massive jump in AI ability the last few years. I'm guessing you work in image recognition, or mostly hear from people who work in image recognition. There is more to AI, and not all of it is instantly improved by a convolutional neural net.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
bluetwo 9y ago
If I was having coffee with a PhD in ML and NLP who has years of experience in deep learning, I would ask this: What are the most valuable, unsolved problems in the field?
akkartik 9y ago
That is Clarke's First Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

_delirium 9y ago

> When the experts in your field say that saying can be done, they are probably right. Generally yes, but they may be significantly off on the timeframe. One famous example is that once alpha-beta search was invented (in the late 1950s), Herb Simon predicted that "within ten years a digital computer will be the world's chess champion". That did eventually happen, using techniques not even all that different from alpha-beta search, but it took 40 years rather than 10. Many of the 1980s neural nets claims turned out to be eventually vindicated too, but it took 30 years, which was quiet a bit longer than the optimistic portion of 1980s "connectionists" expected. That's the type of skepticism I usually have with claims today too. When people say "there will be fully autonomous self-driving cars on the road by 2020", I don't doubt it'll happen, but whether it'll happen in less than 3 years I have more doubts about. You could argue AI researchers have gotten better at accurately predicting the timeframes of advances than they were in the early days of AI, but I'm not sure there is solid evidence of that (would be interesting if someone has studied it).

Houshalter 9y ago
It can happen the other way around too though. Few people predicted the massive jump in AI ability the last few years. Notable AI researchers said it would take decades to get to human accuracy on imagenet, and they were wrong within a few years. I recall reading the first deep learning Go papers around 2015 and thinking that superhuman Go AI was inevitable in a few years. And when I discussed it with other people they were very skeptical and thought it was unlikely. And then AlphaGo came out...
- rspeer 9y ago
  > Few people predicted the massive jump in AI ability the last few years. I'm guessing you work in image recognition, or mostly hear from people who work in image recognition. There is more to AI, and not all of it is instantly improved by a convolutional neural net.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

bluetwo 9y ago

If I was having coffee with a PhD in ML and NLP who has years of experience in deep learning, I would ask this: What are the most valuable, unsolved problems in the field?

akkartik 9y ago

That is Clarke's First Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws