Problems at Singularity University | Hacker News Reader

Problems at Singularity University

bloomberg.com

52 pointsmeri_dian15 comments

Um, did anyone really not see this coming?

Their whole deal was “we are going to merge humans and machines”, yet it had zero technical side on how to do that.

“It has become a conference and seminar company” .....

No, that’s what it was from day 1.

It was pretty clear from the beginning that this was all hype and talk with very little substance, but I thought it would slide more towards the cult direction (scientology-style, that is). What I read in this article suggests it's not going there, which frankly is almost a relief : a cult would be more concerning than just a failing company.

Not true.

Co-founder Ray Kurtzweil has a personal belief on that, which he wrote a book about (How to Create a Mind). In it, he describes his Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind, the theory that the neocortex is a hierarchical system of pattern recognizers, and argues that emulating this architecture in machines could lead to an artificial superintelligence. I believe he now works to bring natural language understanding to Google, hired personally by CEO

Ok, that sounds cool. Is there a proof of concept somewhere?

It's not surprising. If anyone's been following Singularity University, it's obvious that the degree was absolutely worthless, and they let anyone teach. Not sure what anyone gets out of the program.

I literary didn't know they were actually working towards the singularity in any technical way. Just thought they were like TED, but only lecturing on one theme (singularily focused, one might say).

>conferences and executive education (tuition: $14,500 for a weeklong program) will become the bulk of Singularity’s work.

looks like they've pivoted straight to pure gold mining. Our VP recently boasted about neural networks [which were briefly mentioned] in his coursework ~25 years ago. I can only imagine the size of his inflation after "executive education from Singularity University" when he gets to it - he probably wouldn't be able to fit into his office anymore.

Difficult to bring about the singularity without historic levels of technical competency and financial investment. Anything less is simply being contemptuous of the true challenge that must be overcome to achieve even 1/10th of what could be possible. A bunch of lectures, or sci-fi-esque stories really aren't going to do anything to achieve it past the first batch that really opened it up, but they do have an effect on what people care about, and what motivates them, so they aren't totally worthless.

Imagine if scientists approached bringing about the Manhattan Project without also demanding 10% of US GDP for five years, multiple state spanning test sites, absolute discretion, and the work output of hundreds of thousands. Same goes for the Apollo project.

Achieving the promises of the Singularity - whatever that happens to be exactly - is bigger than all of those nation spanning projects combined.

And we will only get there through enormous quantities of technical and organizational blood, sweat and tears spanning decades, and more likely, centuries. The work required is bigger than every research org, every country, and every company, so it looks less like "hard take off" and more like faster plodding.

I have the impression that you think the Singularity University is an organization that tries to bring about the Singularity. It's not. It's an organization that yells "Singularity!" and then organizes talks about food delivery startups.

I don't have that impression. I do believe we need a coalition that builds towards the ideals promised. The closest we have is the FANG cohort, but even then in only a few verticals (with some "progress" not being particularly helpful long term), with the rest of the economy improving drastically slower than they should. Science is the same - outside of some fields.

What I am saying is that if we do want to achieve impressive results at a massive scale, it's gonna require everyone to up their respective games by an order of magnitude. Globally we need everything to get better, much faster, period.

Well no one can argue with your point that to achieve massive results in a massive scale it requires a big effort from a lot of people. So to your own point Singularity University cannot (and is not claiming) do this with a 10 week program or conferences for that matter. But they are trying to stir a conversation, a brainstorm if you will, towards problems that matter. This is not the singularity. I am talking about bringing 80 graduates together to brainstorm solutions on real problems like poverty, health, energy, education and so forth using technology. A brainstorm like that will have a lot of content which is never pursued while other ideas are. The real science is up to the founders to conduct after the program. Hardly any "real science" can be conducted in a 10 week program. So what is the problem this mission?

Then you argue almost anyone can teach there? What are you basing that on? If you look at their faculty you will find some very impressive faculty members teaching there - some of which are also students from past programmes which speaks to the fact that 1) There are some impressive students in the classes with a lot of industry specific knowledge and 2) Students will come back and teach other students because the cause matters to them and SU is a place they like to be.

The issues around fraud and sexual assaults are obviously real issues but events in the past that the university, like any other, organizations has to deal with and prevent - and which they are dealing with.

I may not agree with everything SU is doing. I have a medical background and am not a "tech person" when it comes down to it, so a lot of the conversations around making humans machines and so forth does not grab my immediate interest. But the conversations, discussions and brainstorming sessions I have participated in at SU were legit, interesting and focused on real problems. The solutions and teams that come out from there will have to put in years and years of work, sweat and tears to create impact, but that is no different from you and me and everyone else trying to launch an impactful company.

I may also not agree entirely with the direction the University is going but every organisation must make their own decisions on their direction. You nor I have the data or insights to understsand why they are changing direction, if we had we may just have come to the same conclusions. I am excited to see where it will take them in the future and hope they will hold on to their goal of creating impact that matters in the world.

Thing set up by Wadhwa turns out to be problematic. Colour me surprised.

Thanks to SU. People now know what a hype factory looks like.

With a startup founded at SU (in 2014), and as a YC company (W2016) I would like to add some color to this discussion.

The Bloomberg article has one goal; discredit SU! Statements such as 'Google pulled their funding from GSP' is just plain wrong. According to SU, THEY decided to pause GSP. Google, therefore, moved their support towards the SU Startup program.

The article talks about bad sexual behavior from a former employee back in 2013. When I was at SU in 2014, I thought it was almost cringing to hear how everyone was instructed NOT to engage romanticly with anyone. I was like, c'mon, we're grownups!! To say that they didn't learn from the 2013 incident is not true. And.. the 'financial fraud argument' is ridiculous - any company can experience a bad employee. Fired and out - whats more could they do?

Here is my SU experience. In summer 2014 my co-founder and I attended the GSP program:

- We were 80 students with different domain expertise from 36 countries. We spent 10 weeks at SU's campus at NASA Ames in Mountain View.

- We were briefed about a broad range of technologies, so we had a general understanding of which direction tech is moving.

- The worlds most pressing problems were presented. Think shortage of food, clean water, energy crisis, access to health, etc.

- The 'homework' was now to come up with moonshots that could impact +1b people positively in 10 years.

Was that experience valuable? Yes. Though none of the SU companies have hit the 1b person impact mark, it has seeded a wide range of projects - our own company is one.

One of the hype machines of this world is Peter Diamandis, the co-founder of SU. He might be too much of a capitalist for my taste, but his consistent launch of moonshots is wild and he is an extraordinary entrepreneur... Have you guys seen X-prize, Planetary Resources, and Human Longevity? Just yesterday he launched 'Celularity', and raised $250m in funding for using 'waste placentas' to develop new stem cell therapies. SU was founded to create similar moonshots.

SU used to be a non-profit but switched to a for-profit model to expand their reach. That's how conferences came about. I too ask myself if it's sustainable? Maybe. Change is happening quickly, and big corps are used to pay big bucks for the consultants of the world. In that world, SU's brand on 'exponential thinking' is fragile, but they are trying to expand their offering. The risk in their business model is how hard they ride their brand, where articles like this one are straight out poisonous.

I would take a look at who is promoting this article. Who would benefit from the SU slandering? There is a lot of money in conferences, and SU just announced $32m to address that market.

My thinking on SU is that it's an organization educating people on technology development, with a goal of framing it into positive human development. The world needs more of that!

At least for us, that thinking helped us frame a solution, with a very large potential for positive impact. Later, YC was the perfect segway into creating a scale-able company.

Anyway, wanted to share my two cents..

I’ve heard horror stories from a former employer. But they raised...

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