[projectramo]

This is frustrating:

Consider this:

LeCun, 2022: Today's AI approaches will never lead to true intelligence (reported in the headline, not a verbatim quote); Marcus, 2018: “deep learning must be supplemented by other techniques if we are to reach artificial general intelligence.”

How can that be something that LeCun did not give Marcus credit for? It is borderline self evident, and people have been saying similar things since neural networks were invented. This would only be news if LeCun had said that "neural nets are all you need" (literally, not as a reference to the title of the transformers paper).

And furthermore, if LeCun had said that, there are literally dozens of people who have also said that you need to combine the approaches.

He cites a single line:'LeCun spent part of his career bashing symbols; his collaborator Geoff Hinton even more so, Their jointly written 2015 review of deep learning ends by saying that they “new paradigms are needed to replace rule-based manipulation of symbolic expressions.”'

Well, sure because symbol processing alone is not the answer either. We need to replace it with some hybrid. How is this a contradiction?

To summarize: people have been looking for a productive way to combine symbolic and statistical systems -- there are in fact many such systems proposed with varying degrees of success. LeCun agrees with this approach (no one has anything to lose by endorsing adding things to any model), but Marcus insists he came up with it and he should be cited.

Ugh.