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LeCun is such a hack and is guilty exactly the same hype as OpenAI. Firstly his insistence on “self supervised learning” which is just a wrong and unhelpful re

LeCun is such a hack and is guilty exactly the same hype as OpenAI. Firstly his insistence on “self supervised learning” which is just a wrong and unhelpful rebranding of existing methodologies. Followed by talking about VicREG as if it’s a meaningful contribution and not just hacked together crap which is not only theoretically unfounded but plain nonsensical. Followed again by his “JEPA” work which again is just a rebranding of other works like BYOL and data2vec. Its so frustrating to see this guy pop up and try to claim credit for an entire field of representation learning which he hasn’t made a single meaningful contribution to in decades.

optimalsolver 3y ago
>“self supervised learning” which is just a wrong and unhelpful rebranding of existing methodologies What are those methodologies?
- loveparade 3y ago
  Self-supervised learning is such a trivial concept that it doesn't need a new term. It's just marketing/PR speech to attract attention. You could just call it "generating labels from data" All these stupid new terms of trivial concepts confuse people who are new to the field. That's nothing new though, research has always been like this, people love to make up new phrases that they can own and sell as novel ideas to reviewers, even if they're just trivial renamings. It's nothing more than a PR game.
  - optimalsolver 3y ago
    If people didn't consider it a useful pointer to a certain set of ideas, it wouldn't have caught on in the ML community. That's how language works.
- ml-anon 3y ago
  In the 90’s and 2000’s we called it unsupervised learning. In fact there is a direct formal equivalence between many so-called self supervised learning techniques and matrix factorization. And literally no one would claim that matrix factorisation is anything other than unsupervised. Similarly Yann makes such a big deal about not doing contrastive learning when contrastive methods and his JEPA nonsense can also be shown to be formally equivalent. He’s a grifter like the rest of them. There’s a reason why he basically holds no power at Meta and hasn’t been in charge of AI research there in a long time.
benreesman 3y ago
He won the fucking Turing. I think you can rock your CV alongside “he’s such a hack”. I’ve met the guy a few times (briefly), and I’m aware of his general vibe. I don’t agree with him about everything, but “hack” is absurd, and I’m not posting about who is a hack (or even a crook) under a burner alt. What’s your Fields medal for?
- ml-anon 3y ago
  Just because he made a good thing decades ago doesn’t mean he has any clue about what is going on now. Many of us actually work in the field and are tired of the mindless hype and self promotion. LeCun is just upset people aren’t hyping his crap rather than OpenAIs. But I’m sure you can give a good reason why he calls it self supervised instead of unsupervised and JEPA instead of BYOL or data2vec and what his actual contributions to the field of modern representation learning are. Pauling had a Nobel, didn’t stop him being a crank about vitamin C.
  - benreesman 3y ago
    I didn’t say you can’t criticize household names with the highest honor in their field. I’m saying that it takes some cheek to say there’s nothing original about results that many experts (who are nothing to do with me, and me in a narrow way) think are pretty hot shit. I try (and sometimes fail) to confine my strident claims requiring strident evidence to topics I’m willing and able to get into the nitty gritty on, and bring my CV and reputation to the party as a courtesy. Anyone can post biased-sounding shit and hand-wave over the substance of the claim under an 11-month burner named with malice aforethought to talk shit and be able to disavow it. I gave you a rather firm tap on the shoulder about how borderline at best this move is, and under the assumption you’ve got an HN main, you know this. I had hoped you might put the effort that went into doubling down into explaining the apparently obvious prior art, the whataboutism kick flip into the Shockley Race IQ trope made zero people more enlightened and steered a contentious thread even further off the rails. Nobel laureates do in fact go off the friggin rails from time to time, but I don’t think LeCun is an interesting comparison to Kary Mulis past “AM Radio yelling”. I’m calling that one out. Maybe elaborate on a pretty debatable claim instead?

optimalsolver 3y ago

>“self supervised learning” which is just a wrong and unhelpful rebranding of existing methodologies What are those methodologies?

loveparade 3y ago
Self-supervised learning is such a trivial concept that it doesn't need a new term. It's just marketing/PR speech to attract attention. You could just call it "generating labels from data" All these stupid new terms of trivial concepts confuse people who are new to the field. That's nothing new though, research has always been like this, people love to make up new phrases that they can own and sell as novel ideas to reviewers, even if they're just trivial renamings. It's nothing more than a PR game.
- optimalsolver 3y ago
  If people didn't consider it a useful pointer to a certain set of ideas, it wouldn't have caught on in the ML community. That's how language works.
ml-anon 3y ago
In the 90’s and 2000’s we called it unsupervised learning. In fact there is a direct formal equivalence between many so-called self supervised learning techniques and matrix factorization. And literally no one would claim that matrix factorisation is anything other than unsupervised. Similarly Yann makes such a big deal about not doing contrastive learning when contrastive methods and his JEPA nonsense can also be shown to be formally equivalent. He’s a grifter like the rest of them. There’s a reason why he basically holds no power at Meta and hasn’t been in charge of AI research there in a long time.

benreesman 3y ago

He won the fucking Turing. I think you can rock your CV alongside “he’s such a hack”. I’ve met the guy a few times (briefly), and I’m aware of his general vibe. I don’t agree with him about everything, but “hack” is absurd, and I’m not posting about who is a hack (or even a crook) under a burner alt. What’s your Fields medal for?

ml-anon 3y ago
Just because he made a good thing decades ago doesn’t mean he has any clue about what is going on now. Many of us actually work in the field and are tired of the mindless hype and self promotion. LeCun is just upset people aren’t hyping his crap rather than OpenAIs. But I’m sure you can give a good reason why he calls it self supervised instead of unsupervised and JEPA instead of BYOL or data2vec and what his actual contributions to the field of modern representation learning are. Pauling had a Nobel, didn’t stop him being a crank about vitamin C.
- benreesman 3y ago
  I didn’t say you can’t criticize household names with the highest honor in their field. I’m saying that it takes some cheek to say there’s nothing original about results that many experts (who are nothing to do with me, and me in a narrow way) think are pretty hot shit. I try (and sometimes fail) to confine my strident claims requiring strident evidence to topics I’m willing and able to get into the nitty gritty on, and bring my CV and reputation to the party as a courtesy. Anyone can post biased-sounding shit and hand-wave over the substance of the claim under an 11-month burner named with malice aforethought to talk shit and be able to disavow it. I gave you a rather firm tap on the shoulder about how borderline at best this move is, and under the assumption you’ve got an HN main, you know this. I had hoped you might put the effort that went into doubling down into explaining the apparently obvious prior art, the whataboutism kick flip into the Shockley Race IQ trope made zero people more enlightened and steered a contentious thread even further off the rails. Nobel laureates do in fact go off the friggin rails from time to time, but I don’t think LeCun is an interesting comparison to Kary Mulis past “AM Radio yelling”. I’m calling that one out. Maybe elaborate on a pretty debatable claim instead?