Eric Schmidt plans to give A.I. researchers $125M

It's a miracle it works at all. Making ML models is like making smooth and comfortable sofas by arranging spiked rocks. Now by arranging the right rock juuuuuust right you can get any shape, and indeed you can, but the shapes we're trying to make would be a hell of a lot easier to make using pillows. It's a miracle it ever succeeds at all, and the problem definitely is the basic building blocks.

Polynomials are famous for 2 reasons: 1) they're "spikey". When making more accurate matches what you're doing is adding every "higher frequency components" that do their own spiking. They fix something at one place, and screw lots of stuff up everywhere else 2) at their ends they almost always go off into infinities. Technically zeroes are possible, but you just never see that.

And Neural Networks have challenges that humans don't seem to have: 1) they have sudden, very "weird" ideas. All koalas are koala's, except if you modify pixel 381 down 10%, then it's an elephant. 2) they have ridiculous predictions outside of their training range. You might say "of course they do", but humans don't, and neither do animals ... what does a reasonable human/animal do when confronted with an impossible situation? They respond the same way they respond to the closest reasonable situation they know. A human seeing a tidal wave come for him runs away from the wave. That may be stupid, if they've got little chance to outrun it, but a neural network would just stand there, start shaking, and drop uncontrolled to the floor.

These problems seem related to using polynomials (as opposed to, say, sum-of-10-gaussians) for prediction. Those error surfaces we started with ... they don't quite look like 10 gaussians either ... but they kind of look a lot closer to those gaussians than to polynomials. They look like smooth, slowly sloping curves.

Schmidt doesn’t run Google by any definition of the word run. He also has a great track record of funding basic science (Schmidt Science Fellows).

That paper was activism dressed up as science. It even tried to coin a derogatory term for language models. The authors were full of vitriol on forums against many respected researchers. After calling them out on their perceived ethical problems, they refused to have a dialogue in order not to "offer a platform" to their opponents. Never seen anything like it in 10 years of following the field. It was so sad to see people trying to have a sincere talk and being shut down.

If there is any good outcome from that scandal is that now big model papers devote 50% of their length to harm analysis. A bunch of better papers on harm reduction came out in the last year. The authors of the scandal paper moved on to exploit their new gained notoriety, so it wasn't necessarily a bad career step for them.

He doesn't.

> that fired a bunch of people for publishing research about the harms of AI

They didn't.

They fired one person for pointing out internal race and gender issues at the company, and particularly management dishonesty in the handling of those issues (part of that firing process was a constructive termination campaign—an effort to make the workplace hostile enough to them that they would quit—that involved, among other things, subjecting her research to review processes not used for other researchers at Google in the same area, which came to light around a piece on the harms of AI, which, sure, it was in the company's interest to suppress, but the only reason that even became an issue is because of the process they had already focussed on her to force her out.)

Then they fired a number of other people for things like pointing out holes in the narrative around firing the first person, including pointing out the unusual research oversight process.

In the process, a number of people also quit the company over those events.

You're either extremely misinformed or are intentionally lying, but either way, this is just a flat out incorrect statement on multiple levels. You can just google "Timnit Gebru" to find out all the details of her dismissal. And Eric Schmidt doesn't run Google, and had literally zero to do with Timnit and others getting fired(which - to be clear, was entirely because of their response to Google's response to their paper, not because of the paper itself).

Take a billionaire. Any one. At some point they inevitably will have made a public proncement something like "Why do we bother with these useless politicians ? I am a self made man. I can make much better investment decisions than those guys. Let me keep all my money and I will keep making better investment decisions."

Guess what - Maybe. Err, Mostly No.

Look firstly you are not a self-made man. You are an investment from your society that built a school, paid the teachers, injected you with vaccines and fed your growing body and mind and after twenty years of that sent you and millions like you out to make money and give some of it back in tax to pay for the repairs to the roads and schools and hospitals.

And even after that you did not do all the work at your compmay yourself - you hired people (at a presumably fair wage) and arranged things so that more of the profits flowed to you than to them. This was all legal. (I hope!)

But most especially you were not the only visionary in the desert. Every startup that succeeds has competitors - there is even a Sillicon Valley saying "competition is Gods way of saying there is money to be made". You gave a great pitch - but it fell on fertile ground. Investors realised this was a good opportunity and pushed cash into your hands, engineers and sales people realised this was the industry they wanted and shoved CVs into your hands.

You did a great job as an Enteprenuer - well done. But you were not the only one, you are not an island and you are fortunate to have benefitted from a specific corporate structure. Imagine how rich you would be if you had started a co-operative owned solely by employees or like a Vanguard investment fund owned by shareholders (unlike most hedge funds). you would still be rich - just normal rich.

Of course my dear self made billionaire, you probably are a better invester than our politicians, smarter too. But that is not the point. We are asking them to make investments that dwarf even your funds - the President of the USA hands out a 6Trillion dollar budget and that's just the federal bit. And we want a bit more ... accountability and a bit more responsiveness from the guy investing so much of our hard earned.

If you want to invest that (and let's agree you will probably do a better job) you need to persuade us (ie your new investors) that you are the right person to spend it. So is your name on the ballot? No? ok so you are not, in our terms, handing out a prospectus. in tat case you don't get to invest on our behalf. how it works is that people who invest our tax money get elected. That way we can remove them when we don't like it. (it's not a great system i have to admit but no better alternatives seem to exist)

So give us back (most?) of then money you made. we will use it to build schools for the next entrepreneurs, and also lots of other stuff we will all massively argue about.

In short, you are an investment in our massive VC fund, and you have paid off handsomely. Now we want our exit please. Death and taxes are the only two promises we ever make.

Having said that we would be very interested in your manifesto (sorry prospectus). Can you do anything about the potholes round my way?

I don't think effective tax rates for the uber wealthy have ever been lower.

I am now drunk enough to mistake HN for twitter so should stop.

Having dealt with the exasperations of trying to start a small business from California (years ago), the burden of bureaucracy seemed nowhere proportional to the short-term aspirations... resulting in a quite negative influence to the initial intentions of the projects to be performed.

I guess that my wish is that they'd make at least trivial to have any entrepreneurial activity (well, maybe it boils down to the state your business is in), until it really grows into something (morally?) taxable.