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Comment by salt-licker | Hacker News Reader

Do you consider gwern not to be an AI expert? I think this is a reasonably technical explanation of how we may not be as far away from AGI as some choose to believe: https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis

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Nah, he’s more of a hobbyist in AI. I don’t necessarily think you need to be explicitly in academia to produce good academic work (independent researchers do exist), but he hasn’t really produce anything (in terms of actual theoretical/experimental results) that could be regarded as a substantial contribution to the field. He’s made some anime datasets though, maybe it could be useful to some.

I often wonder if being too close to the experimental results and current techniques blinds some people from seeing the bigger picture. Gwern certainly seems good at analyzing large-scale trends in AI research, perhaps broad high-level knowledge of the field is advantageous for this vs deep understanding of specific neural network details.

I trust Hinton and LeCun who have actually created the trends and bigger picture and invented the now "current" techniques over commentators who show up years later and offer shallow non peer reviewed analysis and predictions.

Reminds me of this talk by the failed tech startup's non technical CEO who apparently was able to see the bigger picture that scientist aspergers needs weren't able to see.

https://youtu.be/ukgnU2aXM2c

I am not sure who this person is. How much has he published in ML and what is his h-index.

As examples, Le Cun has a h-index of 127 Hinton 164 Goodfellow 75 etc. None of them consider AGI to be a realistic possibility this century. Kurzweil, the AGI proponent, has an hindex of 22.

always remember that the scientific community was pretty much against Einsteins ideas when he first began publishing.

I don't recall any such thing. His papers were peer reviewed and published in science journals by the scientific community. Minkowski famously followed up with the concept of spacetime as a consequence of relativity.

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