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Comment by ansk | Hacker News Reader

Of all Schmidhuber's credit-attribution grievances, this is the one I am most sympathetic to. I think if he spent less time remarking on how other people didn't actually invent things (e.g. Hinton and backprop, LeCun and CNNs, etc.) or making tenuous arguments about how modern techniques are really just instances of some idea he briefly explored decades ago (GANs, attention), and instead just focused on how this single line of research (namely, gradient flow and training dynamics in deep neural networks) laid the foundation for modern deep learning, he'd have a much better reputation and probably a Turing award. That said, I do respect the extent to which he continues his credit-attribution crusade even to his own reputational detriment.

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I think one of the best things to learn from Schmidhuber is that progress involves a lot of players and over a lot of time. Attribution is actually a difficult game and usually we are only assigning credit to those at the end of some milestone. It's like giving a gold medal to the runner in the last leg of a relay race or focusing only on the lead singer of a band. It's never one person that does it alone. Shoulders of giants, but those giants are just a couple of dudes in a really big trenchcoat.

Another important lesson is that often good ideas get passed over because of hype or politics. We often like to pretend that science is all about the merit and what is correct. Unfortunately this isn't true. It is that way in the long run, but in the short run there's a lot of politics and humans still get in their own way. This is a solvable problem, but we need to acknowledge it and create systematic changes. Unfortunately a lot of that is coupled to the aforementioned one.

  > I do respect the extent to which he continues his credit-attribution crusade even to his own reputational detriment.

As should we all. Clearly he was upset that others got credit for his contributions. But what I do appreciate is that he has recognized that it is a problem bigger than him, and is trying to combat the problem at large and not just his own little battlefield. That's respectable.

It's a bit of an aside but I believe this is one reason Zuckerberg's vision for establishing the superintelligence lab is misguided. Including VCs, too many people get distracted by rock stars in this gold rush.

Just last week I said something inline with that[0]. Many people conflated my claim that Meta has a lot of good people with "Meta /is/ winning the AI race". I just claimed they had some of who I think are some of the best researchers in the field, but do not give them nearly the same resources or capacity to further their research that they give to these "rock stars". Tbh, the same is true for any top lab, I just think this happens more at Meta because Meta is so metric and rock star focused.

So I agree. The vision is misguided. I think they'd have done better had they taken that same money and just thrown it at the people they already have but who are working in different research areas. Everyone is trying to win my doing the same things. That's not a smart strategy. You got all that money, you gotta take risks. It's all the money dumped into research that got us to this point in the first place.

It's good to shift funds around and focus on what is working now, but you also have to have a pipeline of people working on what will work tomorrow, next year, 5 years, and 10 years. The people are there that can do that work. The people are there that want to do the work. The only thing is there's little to no people that want to fund that work. Unfortunately it takes time to bake a cake.

Quite frankly, these companies also have more than enough money to do both. They have enough money to throw cash hand over fist at every wild and crazy idea. But they get caught in the hype, which is no different than an over focus on the attribution rather than the process or pipeline that got us the science in the first place.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45554147

Also, it reminds us that the powerful write history. But history can be rewritten as the balance of power shifts. I imagine the world will hear all about China's contributions to the field if they continue their ascent.

> That said, I do respect the extent to which he continues his credit-attribution crusade even to his own reputational detriment.

Lol, I still used to notice him before covid when he was railing against Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun. Can't believe he's still going.

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