From Yann LeCunn. --- Numenta, Vicarious, NuPic, HTM, CLA, etc. Jeff Hawkins has the right intuition and the right philosophy. Some of us have had similar ide

From Yann LeCunn. --- Numenta, Vicarious, NuPic, HTM, CLA, etc. Jeff Hawkins has the right intuition and the right philosophy. Some of us have had similar ideas for several decades. Certainly, we all agree that AI systems of the future will be hierarchical (it’s the very idea of deep learning) and will use temporal prediction. But the difficulty is to instantiate these concepts and reduce them to practice. Another difficulty is grounding them on sound mathematical principles (is this algorithm minimizing an objective function?). I think Jeff Hawkins, Dileep George and others greatly underestimated the difficulty of reducing these conceptual ideas to practice. As far as I can tell, HTM has not been demonstrated to get anywhere close to state of the art on any serious task. I still think [Vicarious] is mostly hype. There is no public information about the underlying technology. The principals don’t have a particularly good track record of success. And the only demo is way behind what you can do with “plain vanilla” convolutional nets (see this Google blog post and this ICLR 2014 paper and this video of the ICLR talk). HTM, NuPIC, and Numenta received a lot more publicity than they deserved because of the Internet millionaire / Silocon Valley celebrity status of Jeff Hawkins. But I haven’t seen any result that would give substance to the hype. Don’t get fooled by people who claim to have a solution to Artificial General Intelligence, who claim to have AI systems that work “just like the human brain”, or who claim to have figured out how the brain works (well, except if it’s Geoff Hinton making the claim). Ask them what error rate they get on MNIST or ImageNet. ---- Reference: http://fastml.com/yann-lecuns-answers-from-the-reddit-ama/ http://fastml.com/yann-lecuns-answers-from-the-reddit-ama/