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My point is that a discovery always seems simple and inevitable once it has happened. Newton's laws are pretty simple, all things considered, but it still took
by _Algernon_ 1y ago
My point is that a discovery always seems simple and inevitable once it has happened. Newton's laws are pretty simple, all things considered, but it still took most of human history for those to be discovered.
An average high school student doing physics today could derive Newton's laws. That doesn't mean that that student put in the same situation as Newton, would have been capable of discovering newton's laws.
- roenxi 1y agoNewton had to invent calculus before his laws made sense. There isn't anything equivalent to that in modern machine learning. It uses concepts that are centuries old except for maybe a few stats techniques that might be around WWII era since there was a big stats push around then. Plus back-propagation which is a pretty big deal, but it is hardly new to the boom we're seeing right now. It is an idea that was sitting around for a while before hardware changes made it effective.
- amelius 1y agoBut "invention" here is really different. They are basically trying out stuff and seeing what works, but they have no idea how it actually works. We're essentially watching a bunch of investor-backed alchemists here.