Connectionists: Geoff Hinton, Elon Musk, and a bet at garymarcus.substack.com

[Geoffrey Hinton]

I shouldn't respond because your main aim is to get attention without going
to the trouble of building something that works (personal communication, Y.
LeCun) but I cannot resist pointing out the following Marcus claim from
2016:

"People are very excited about big data and what it's giving them right
now, but I'm not sure it's taking us closer to the deeper questions in
artificial intelligence, like how we understand language or how we reason
about the world. "

Given that big neural nets can now explain why a joke is funny (for some
subset of jokes) do you still want to stick with this claim?  It seems to
me that the reason you made this claim is because you have a strong prior
belief about how language understanding and reasoning must work and this
belief is remarkably resistant to evidence.  Deep learning researchers have
seen this before. Yann had a paper rejected by a vision conference even
though it beat the state-of-the-art and one of the reasons given was that
the  model learned everything and therefore taught us nothing about how to
do vision.  That particular referee had a strong idea of how computer
vision must work and failed to notice that the success of Yann's model
showed that that prior belief was spectacularly wrong.

Geoff




On Thu, Jun 9, 2022 at 3:41 AM Gary Marcus <gary.marcus at nyu.edu> wrote:

> Dear Connectionists, and especially Geoff Hinton,
>
> It has come to my attention that Geoff Hinton is looking for challenging
> targets. In a just-released episode of The Robot Brains podcast [
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Otcau-C_Yc], he said
>
> *“If any of the people who say [deep learning] is hitting a wall would
> just write down a list of the things it’s not going to be able to do then
> five years later, we’d be able to show we’d done them.”*
>
> Now, as it so happens, I (with the help of Ernie Davis) did just write
> down exactly such a list of things, last weekm and indeed offered Elon Musk
> a $100,000 bet along similar lines.
>
> Precise details are here, towards the end of the essay:
>
> https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/dear-elon-musk-here-are-five-things
> <https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/dear-elon-musk-here-are-five-things?s=w>
>
> Five are specific milestones, in video and text comprehension, cooking,
> math, etc; the sixth is the proviso that for an intelligence to be deemed
> “general” (which is what Musk was discussing in a remark that prompted my
> proposal), it would need to solve a majority of the problems. We can
> probably all agree that narrow AI for any single problem on its own might
> be less interesting.
>
> Although there is no word yet from Elon, Kevin Kelly offered to host the
> bet at LongNow.Org, and Metaculus.com has transformed the bet into 6
> questions that the community can comment on.  Vivek Wadhwa, cc’d, quickly
> offered to double the bet, and several others followed suit;  the bet to
> Elon (should he choose to take it) currently stands at $500,000.
>
> If you’d like in on the bet, Geoff, please let me know.
>
> More generally, I’d love to hear what the connectionists community thinks
> of six criteria I laid out (as well as the arguments at the top of the
> essay, as to why AGI might not be as imminent as Musk seems to think).
>
> Cheers.
> Gary Marcus
>
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