3 ms·

The sad part is that Schmidhuber is not a grifter by any means. If the turning prize for deep learning could go to 5 people instead of 3, he would very likely b

by screye 3y ago

The sad part is that Schmidhuber is not a grifter by any means. If the turning prize for deep learning could go to 5 people instead of 3, he would very likely be on that list. His lab is excellent and was easily Europe's best deep learning lab for decades before it blew up. Some of his complaints are valid too. European labs often get ignored, and he has been sidelined despite being one of the most important people in deep learning himself. But man doesn't know when an argument runs out of gas. His claims get grander with every passing year. He would've just been the 'get off my lawn' grandpa of deep learning, but he somehow comes across as even more insufferable than that. I wonder if 2023 schmidhuber was created because the polite one from a decade ago was ignored. A sort of evil phase, if you will. I feel bad for him. He did get passed over of some deserved awards and recognition. But he reeks of resentment and thats never a good look.

throwup238 3y ago
> I feel bad for him. He did get passed over of some deserved awards and recognition. But he reeks of resentment and thats never a good look. It's a terrible look. We're in the middle of one of the biggest gold rushes in tech history and he's wasting time complaining when he claims to be one of its pioneers? That effort is much better invested in building stuff but I suspect he's fallen into the classic PI trap of writing grants all the time and leaving the real work to the rest of the faculty, atrophying his skills too much to do anything now that the industry is moving so quikcly.
- logicchains 3y ago
  >atrophying his skills too much to do anything now that the industry is moving so quikcly. His recent papers are still cutting edge. He's already solved self-improving AI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.05780 https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.05780 , it just needs to be scaled up.
  - KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
    His students you mean, otherwise he would be first author. Academia is just like capitalism, with credits substituting for capital. The capital owner (laboratory head/professor) always gets a cut of everything published.
    - jltsiren 3y ago
      Authorship conventions vary a lot within the academia. In general, the closer the name is to either end of the author list, the more significant their contributions likely were. Things also vary from paper to paper. Sometimes the first author just did the actual work for somebody else, and sometimes they also made significant intellectual contributions. (If the first author is listed as the sole corresponding author, it usually indicates the latter.) Sometimes the last/senior author just brought the money in, sometimes they were primarily mentoring the first author, and sometimes they were the driving force behind the project.
      - screye 3y ago
        Yep, in ML, the head of the lab is always last author.... even if it was equal contribution work with their own PhD student. The PhD student needs the street cred a lot more than a tenured PI.
        jltsiren 3y ago
        In some fields and some situations, last-author papers are actually more valuable than first-author papers. A first-author paper tells that you are capable of working as a junior researcher, while a last-author paper is a signal of your success as a senior researcher. I once had a paper where I shared first authorship with four other people. That implies that the project was large enough that different people were in charge of different subprojects. Which in turn implies that the senior author must have made major contributions by being in charge of the entire project.
      - derbOac 3y ago
        This is getting off-topic, but I've given up making heads or tails of authorship. I know senior authors who are last on a paper just because they're senior and realize they (1) didn't really contribute much at all (they might have just inserted themselves on a paper), and (2) invoke the old meaning of last author knowing that the meaning has changed, so they end up being "the senior author" who gets a lot of credit just because they're senior. Even producing the data takes on new meaning in an age of open science where datasets are distributed freely. What's the difference between citing an original study paper to give credit to the study PIs, and having them as a last author? Should someone who generates a dataset be last author on every paper using that data? Sigh. Academics is so broken.
senderista 3y ago
Like the Carl Hewitt of ML?

by screye 3y ago

throwup238 3y ago

> I feel bad for him. He did get passed over of some deserved awards and recognition. But he reeks of resentment and thats never a good look. It's a terrible look. We're in the middle of one of the biggest gold rushes in tech history and he's wasting time complaining when he claims to be one of its pioneers? That effort is much better invested in building stuff but I suspect he's fallen into the classic PI trap of writing grants all the time and leaving the real work to the rest of the faculty, atrophying his skills too much to do anything now that the industry is moving so quikcly.

logicchains 3y ago
>atrophying his skills too much to do anything now that the industry is moving so quikcly. His recent papers are still cutting edge. He's already solved self-improving AI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.05780 https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.05780 , it just needs to be scaled up.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  His students you mean, otherwise he would be first author. Academia is just like capitalism, with credits substituting for capital. The capital owner (laboratory head/professor) always gets a cut of everything published.
  - jltsiren 3y ago
    Authorship conventions vary a lot within the academia. In general, the closer the name is to either end of the author list, the more significant their contributions likely were. Things also vary from paper to paper. Sometimes the first author just did the actual work for somebody else, and sometimes they also made significant intellectual contributions. (If the first author is listed as the sole corresponding author, it usually indicates the latter.) Sometimes the last/senior author just brought the money in, sometimes they were primarily mentoring the first author, and sometimes they were the driving force behind the project.
    - screye 3y ago
      Yep, in ML, the head of the lab is always last author.... even if it was equal contribution work with their own PhD student. The PhD student needs the street cred a lot more than a tenured PI.
      - jltsiren 3y ago
        In some fields and some situations, last-author papers are actually more valuable than first-author papers. A first-author paper tells that you are capable of working as a junior researcher, while a last-author paper is a signal of your success as a senior researcher. I once had a paper where I shared first authorship with four other people. That implies that the project was large enough that different people were in charge of different subprojects. Which in turn implies that the senior author must have made major contributions by being in charge of the entire project.
    - derbOac 3y ago
      This is getting off-topic, but I've given up making heads or tails of authorship. I know senior authors who are last on a paper just because they're senior and realize they (1) didn't really contribute much at all (they might have just inserted themselves on a paper), and (2) invoke the old meaning of last author knowing that the meaning has changed, so they end up being "the senior author" who gets a lot of credit just because they're senior. Even producing the data takes on new meaning in an age of open science where datasets are distributed freely. What's the difference between citing an original study paper to give credit to the study PIs, and having them as a last author? Should someone who generates a dataset be last author on every paper using that data? Sigh. Academics is so broken.

senderista 3y ago

Like the Carl Hewitt of ML?