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This is unbelievably wrong. Deepmind has probably the best academic group in RL. The difference between Deepmind and OpenAI is that Deepmind favors academic en

by chaxor 3y ago

This is unbelievably wrong. Deepmind has probably the best academic group in RL. The difference between Deepmind and OpenAI is that Deepmind favors academic endeavours and novelty much more, while completely ignoring any commercialization or products, while OpenAI is the stark opposite in that they almost entirely focus on products first, and typically their academic endeavours are just slight modifications of other works scaled up. Don't get me wrong, Sutskyver (et al) has done incredibly good work previously, but when it comes to the products, they're much more engineering and marketing polish than scientific endeavours. Botvinick's work on metaRL for example is an interesting direction that Deepmind has shown that few other companies that are only interested in engineering would venture towards.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
That's the thing with Deepmind though. They almost never actually end up advancing things because A) they don't release weights and B) they don't usually develop their ideas into useful tools themselves, forcing others to redo all their work. So yeah, it's essentially a PoC PR stunt factory. Just look at AlphaZero. They make a huge deal about a suspiciously set up match against Stockfish. Supposedly revolutionising computer chess. But the problem is the computer chess community had to redo all of the work, including all the training to build Leela Chess Zero. Due to lack of Google-sized datacentres the training took years to catch up to the weights in AlphaZero. Same thing with AlphaGo, same thing with transformers. Now, in AI, usually getting a proof of concept is the easy part. Developing that into an idea that actually works in real world situations is usually the hardest part. I completely reject your idea that somehow the work by OpenAI is less worthy of recognition. I think that's just nonsense. And surely, Google created Deepmind to actually make them product ideas, not create new competitors, which is what has happened.
- qumeric 3y ago
  > Now, in AI, usually getting a proof of concept is the easy part. Developing that into an idea that actually works in real world situations is usually the hardest part. I disagree. Of course there is a lot of engineering involved and it's also very important but it's much easier to rebuild things based on published research than develop novel ideas.

by chaxor 3y ago

mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago

That's the thing with Deepmind though. They almost never actually end up advancing things because A) they don't release weights and B) they don't usually develop their ideas into useful tools themselves, forcing others to redo all their work. So yeah, it's essentially a PoC PR stunt factory. Just look at AlphaZero. They make a huge deal about a suspiciously set up match against Stockfish. Supposedly revolutionising computer chess. But the problem is the computer chess community had to redo all of the work, including all the training to build Leela Chess Zero. Due to lack of Google-sized datacentres the training took years to catch up to the weights in AlphaZero. Same thing with AlphaGo, same thing with transformers. Now, in AI, usually getting a proof of concept is the easy part. Developing that into an idea that actually works in real world situations is usually the hardest part. I completely reject your idea that somehow the work by OpenAI is less worthy of recognition. I think that's just nonsense. And surely, Google created Deepmind to actually make them product ideas, not create new competitors, which is what has happened.

qumeric 3y ago
> Now, in AI, usually getting a proof of concept is the easy part. Developing that into an idea that actually works in real world situations is usually the hardest part. I disagree. Of course there is a lot of engineering involved and it's also very important but it's much easier to rebuild things based on published research than develop novel ideas.