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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

I think there's an excellent chance that deep learning research will lead to a machine that can pass the Turing test in the not too distant future. I can't say if it will be within exactly 14 years or not, but if you've been following the latest developments in deep learning, the path to get there is much more clear today than it was even five years ago.

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I think you are greatly overestimating what deep learning can do. In the 90s, we could recognise digits accurately. Now we can do the same with traffic signs even in bad weather etc. That is exactly the kind of progress that we have made in 14 years. And let's not forget this is a manually tuned algorithm for a particular problem.

It's great progress, but it is also a far cry from what humans can do and there is no clear path at all to get there - currently.

The recent advancements using RNN is much more than sign recognition. It's about language generation, control and reinforcement learning, and attention.

I assume that deep learning will help with coming up with suitable replies. But will it also helping with keeping track of state, ie. making sure that the computer's answers are consistent? It seems to me that this will be the hardest part about passing the Turing test.

Re keeping track of state: https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10153098860532200

Could you give some info on where to keep up with the latest on deep learning for the quasi-layman (I've got a bachelors in CS)?

From what I've seen arXiv has a lot of papers that are new and related. It might be a good place to start.

agreed - there are current approaches that are becoming feasible as infrastructure is opened up and affordable to the general public. It's a game changer but a lot of people misinterpret the meaning and implications it seems like. A good question to ask is how this advance would affect you directly.

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