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Comment by glitchc | Hacker News Reader

Say what? Show some respect, son!

Hinton published the seminal paper on backpropagation. He also invented Boltzmann machines, unsupervised learning and mixture of ecperts models. He championed machine learning for 20 years even though there was zero funding for it through the 80s and 90s. He was Yann LeCun's PhD adviser. That means Yann LeCun didn't know ass from tea kettle until Hinton introduced him to machine learning.

Know perchance a fellow by the name of Ilya Sutskever? ChatGPT ring any bells? Also a student of Hinton's. The list is very long.

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“Show some respect?”

Do these historical accolades give him a blank check to be wrong in the present?

re-read the comment he was responding to.

"sounds like he's a poster boy who rode on the success of others"

The person who wrote that didn't even bother checking who Hinton was before pulling that sentence out of their ass.

Frankly, this all sounds like hero worship and the language is very cringe.

I know the backprop paper. I've read it in the early 2000s. And I remember Hinton as a co-author. Same with Boltzmann machines. Co-author. "Advisor to that great guy", "Teacher of this great guy", "Nobel price together with that guy" <- all of this leads me to the above conclusion. YMMV

Come on there is space for theatrics on hacker news

just one example of the halo effect: having been instrumental in the development of an important technology doesn't magically make one an expert in the economic impact of that technology, as economy is a completely different field of study

    Frankly, this all sounds like hero worship and the language is very cringe.

"Frankly, I just want to be a contrarian"

"Hell hath no fury like a conformist scorned"

I'm not a fanboy, far from it. I'm not affiliated with the lab or his work. I'm not even a big fan of machine learning. But Hinton's contributions to the field cannot be understated. He single-handedly kept it alive for two decades amid a massive lack of funding. Anyone who has worked in research will attest that this is an incredible feat.

People on Hacker News seems to idolize the lone genius who somehow pulled himself up from his bootstraps. That person does not exist. The truth is that great minds are made, moulded into shape. That the best people behind our AI technology emerged from his lab is no coincidence. Those trash-talking Hinton on this forum are unlikely to achieve 1/100th of what he has accomplished.

“The housecat may mock the tiger,” said the master, “but doing so will not make his purr into a roar.” [1]

[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/end-user.html

Ah, someone who enjoys defending his tigers against cats. Well, enjoy your low hanging fruits, tiger. Someone "so knowledgeable" and totally not a poster boy making bold claims that don't come true at all will continue not making sense to me. But don't get me wrong, I know this is an old man shakes fist at cloud kind of situation. Who cares what doesn't make sense to me anyway? My academic circles don't, and they do fine. I continue to contribute what little I can. But my field is more SR than NN.

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