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The author is just spouting off on a topic he doesn't understand. It's just a rehashing of Chomsky's hatred of statistical NLP. He pulls off the neat trick of a

The author is just spouting off on a topic he doesn't understand. It's just a rehashing of Chomsky's hatred of statistical NLP. He pulls off the neat trick of approximating knowledge of artificial intelligence by hoodwinking the New York Times, but he doesn’t have insight into the topic he's talking about.

webaba 9y ago
I believe he has much more insight than most AI researchers/engineers. What's going on in AI right know looks exactly like what happened in the 1960s, sucking all the resources into something (i.e Deep Learning) without looking at the big picture, without looking at epistemological questions, and not training new grads on solid AI foundations anymore like probability theory and logic. Not asking the right questions in terms of expressivity of models, sensitivity analysis, robustness and manifold learning. The next AI winter is coming.
- randcraw 9y ago
  Yes, but the next AI Winter will be far less bleak and job-free as that of the 80's, IMO. The hayday of DL-based AI is likely to continue for 10+ Years, as we refine the methods and see how far word2vec and improved compositionality of the many existing DL methods takes us. AI is likely to improve rapidly for another decade, IMHO. But I agree that DL AI, if not augmented substantially, will stop well short of AGI and consciousness. But 10 years is a long time in internet years. I would not be at all surprised if there's another word2vec (or two) arose before then to displace the tectonic plates yet again.
  - webaba 9y ago
    Indeed, DL-based AI is likely to continuue - rightfully so - for non-safety critical domains (translation, games, ...) It's crazy that few people notice that real world applications with safety issues (where 99.9% accuracy is a joke) - ex: self driving vehicles - require much more that what DL has to offer. The AI community's sloppiness when it comes to safety and robustness engineering will lead to the some serious problems (when it comes to real-world industrial applications). But yeah there will still be jobs for people playing around.
jesperlang 9y ago
Can you describe what you mean by "he doesn't understand"? His background is in psychology and neuro science so his view on intelligence is probably quite different than person coming from computer science. For me he puts words onto something I've felt recently, that what we're doing is cool and all, but just doesn't feel like the right way to approach it. We're just putting loads of data and computing power into something that produces results that looks intelligent, but digging deeper bares no resemblence to what a neuro scientist would call intelligent..
- CuriouslyC 9y ago
  I feel like you're conflating sentience and intelligence. Algorithms don't have to reduce to anything special to display intelligent behavior. After all, humans reduce to chemistry. All that is required is the ability to solve problems. As for sentience, we don't understand it, so the only way we'd recognize it is if it was extremely similar to human sentience.
- bhickey 9y ago
  I'm riffing on his writing -- > Even Google Translate, which pulls off the neat trick of approximating translations by statistically associating sentences across languages, doesn’t understand a word of what it is translating. This is just another incarnation of "AI is the thing we haven't done." He's parroting Chomsky's disdain for statistical models and John Searle's fundamental misunderstanding of AI. For the former, Norvig has a fair rundown of Chomsky's complaints (http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html). > bears no resemblance to what a neuroscientist would call intelligent TensorFlow gets results. The neuroscientist can claim it's a P-zombie, but they need to point to some criteria for accepting something as intelligence. Otherwise we're just moving goalposts.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    >> Even Google Translate, which pulls off the neat trick of approximating translations by statistically associating sentences across languages, doesn’t understand a word of what it is translating. >This is just another incarnation of "AI is the thing we haven't done." I don't think so - it appears to be an objectively correct assessment of the current state of the art. > Otherwise we're just moving goalposts. The first movement of the goalposts was to call '80s technology AI. Now they are drifting back to where they started. On the other hand, I am surprised by the claim that AI is stuck; my outsider's impression is that progress has accelerated. Perhaps the impression of being stuck comes from more people realizing how difficult a problem it is.
homarp 9y ago
The author was working at an AI start-up company, Geometric Intelligence (acquired by Uber)
- skgoa 9y ago
  Working at a startup does not make you an expert. Especially when your opinion goes against what pretty much everyone else in the field thinks.
  - webaba 9y ago
    "Especially when your opinion goes against what pretty much everyone else in the field thinks" -> Most Deep learning people are consumers or hardware manufacturers, very few researchers in the field, and most people that have deep knowledge of it would agree with this guy.
  - zackbrown 9y ago
    > Working at a startup does not make you an expert. Especially when your opinion goes against what pretty much everyone else in the field thinks. Achievements are perhaps the best yardstick for expertise. Whether a person has worked at a startup or has contrarian viewpoints are both irrelevant. Gary Marcus was co-founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, successfully raised some money and grew a team, [1] then successfully sold the company to Uber, after which he directed Uber's AI lab. He has a PhD from MIT in cognitive science. And he's been a professor of Neural Science at NYU for nearly 20 years. [2] I'm no expert, but he seems like one to me. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/geometric-intelligence https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/geometric-intelligen... [2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-marcus-b6384b4/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-marcus-b6384b4/
kcidttub 9y ago
The author is a tenured professor at one of the best institutions in the world - what do you have to show for yourself? If you honestly think the author should be discredited because you don't find is PhD appealing, you need to take a step back and seriously readjust your arrogance level.

webaba 9y ago

I believe he has much more insight than most AI researchers/engineers. What's going on in AI right know looks exactly like what happened in the 1960s, sucking all the resources into something (i.e Deep Learning) without looking at the big picture, without looking at epistemological questions, and not training new grads on solid AI foundations anymore like probability theory and logic. Not asking the right questions in terms of expressivity of models, sensitivity analysis, robustness and manifold learning. The next AI winter is coming.

randcraw 9y ago
Yes, but the next AI Winter will be far less bleak and job-free as that of the 80's, IMO. The hayday of DL-based AI is likely to continue for 10+ Years, as we refine the methods and see how far word2vec and improved compositionality of the many existing DL methods takes us. AI is likely to improve rapidly for another decade, IMHO. But I agree that DL AI, if not augmented substantially, will stop well short of AGI and consciousness. But 10 years is a long time in internet years. I would not be at all surprised if there's another word2vec (or two) arose before then to displace the tectonic plates yet again.
- webaba 9y ago
  Indeed, DL-based AI is likely to continuue - rightfully so - for non-safety critical domains (translation, games, ...) It's crazy that few people notice that real world applications with safety issues (where 99.9% accuracy is a joke) - ex: self driving vehicles - require much more that what DL has to offer. The AI community's sloppiness when it comes to safety and robustness engineering will lead to the some serious problems (when it comes to real-world industrial applications). But yeah there will still be jobs for people playing around.

jesperlang 9y ago

Can you describe what you mean by "he doesn't understand"? His background is in psychology and neuro science so his view on intelligence is probably quite different than person coming from computer science. For me he puts words onto something I've felt recently, that what we're doing is cool and all, but just doesn't feel like the right way to approach it. We're just putting loads of data and computing power into something that produces results that looks intelligent, but digging deeper bares no resemblence to what a neuro scientist would call intelligent..

CuriouslyC 9y ago
I feel like you're conflating sentience and intelligence. Algorithms don't have to reduce to anything special to display intelligent behavior. After all, humans reduce to chemistry. All that is required is the ability to solve problems. As for sentience, we don't understand it, so the only way we'd recognize it is if it was extremely similar to human sentience.
bhickey 9y ago
I'm riffing on his writing -- > Even Google Translate, which pulls off the neat trick of approximating translations by statistically associating sentences across languages, doesn’t understand a word of what it is translating. This is just another incarnation of "AI is the thing we haven't done." He's parroting Chomsky's disdain for statistical models and John Searle's fundamental misunderstanding of AI. For the former, Norvig has a fair rundown of Chomsky's complaints (http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html). > bears no resemblance to what a neuroscientist would call intelligent TensorFlow gets results. The neuroscientist can claim it's a P-zombie, but they need to point to some criteria for accepting something as intelligence. Otherwise we're just moving goalposts.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  >> Even Google Translate, which pulls off the neat trick of approximating translations by statistically associating sentences across languages, doesn’t understand a word of what it is translating. >This is just another incarnation of "AI is the thing we haven't done." I don't think so - it appears to be an objectively correct assessment of the current state of the art. > Otherwise we're just moving goalposts. The first movement of the goalposts was to call '80s technology AI. Now they are drifting back to where they started. On the other hand, I am surprised by the claim that AI is stuck; my outsider's impression is that progress has accelerated. Perhaps the impression of being stuck comes from more people realizing how difficult a problem it is.

homarp 9y ago

The author was working at an AI start-up company, Geometric Intelligence (acquired by Uber)

skgoa 9y ago
Working at a startup does not make you an expert. Especially when your opinion goes against what pretty much everyone else in the field thinks.
- webaba 9y ago
  "Especially when your opinion goes against what pretty much everyone else in the field thinks" -> Most Deep learning people are consumers or hardware manufacturers, very few researchers in the field, and most people that have deep knowledge of it would agree with this guy.
- zackbrown 9y ago
  > Working at a startup does not make you an expert. Especially when your opinion goes against what pretty much everyone else in the field thinks. Achievements are perhaps the best yardstick for expertise. Whether a person has worked at a startup or has contrarian viewpoints are both irrelevant. Gary Marcus was co-founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, successfully raised some money and grew a team, [1] then successfully sold the company to Uber, after which he directed Uber's AI lab. He has a PhD from MIT in cognitive science. And he's been a professor of Neural Science at NYU for nearly 20 years. [2] I'm no expert, but he seems like one to me. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/geometric-intelligence https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/geometric-intelligen... [2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-marcus-b6384b4/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-marcus-b6384b4/

kcidttub 9y ago

The author is a tenured professor at one of the best institutions in the world - what do you have to show for yourself? If you honestly think the author should be discredited because you don't find is PhD appealing, you need to take a step back and seriously readjust your arrogance level.