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Highly glorifying, badly credited article that reads like a state propaganda piece. Hinton's work is amazing and his contribution has been immense, but this art
by fchollet 11y ago
Highly glorifying, badly credited article that reads like a state propaganda piece. Hinton's work is amazing and his contribution has been immense, but this article is a joke.
Such science "journalism" is seriously hurting the field, including the researchers that are lionized in these articles. It also makes large groups of researchers who've been working hard on advancing the field think they don't matter in the eyes of the public, and that can be quite demoralizing.
That "unsupervised cats" paper from 2012 had nothing new in it at the time, although it was a feat of parallelization on a cluster of CPUs. Three years later its (uninteresting) results are not used anywhere. But Google used it as a PR piece at the time, and hundreds of journalists have been presenting it as some kind of game-changing breakthrough. It continues to this day.
- canistr 11y agoKeep in mind that this is the Toronto Star. A local paper here in Toronto for obviously a broad audience outside of tech. For a country and city that has a heavy inferiority complex and suffers greatly from the "Brain Drain" of technical talent to the US, this is one of those articles that's meant to inspire. Not an article for Canadians/Torontonians to puff their chests. So I wouldn't be so critical about it's so called "propaganda" aspect.