The definitive weekly newsletter on A.I. and Deep Learning, published by Waikit Lau and Arthur Chan. Our background spans MIT, CMU, Bessemer Venture Partners, Nuance, BBN, etc. Every week, we curate and analyze the most relevant and impactful developments in A.I.
We also run Facebook’s most active A.I. group with 191,000+ members and host a weekly “office hour” on YouTube.
Editorial
Thoughts From Your Humble Curators
The interesting news last week is perhaps Prof. LeCun harsh criticism on Sophia, the “First Robotic Citizens” and his back-and-forth with Dr. Ben Goetzel, the Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics. We’ll take a closer look in this issue.
Other than Sophia, we also incorporated several interesting blog posts this week. Perhaps the most interesting one is Google Brain’s review of 2017 on deep learning, which deserves your time to read.
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News
Prof. Lecun vs Dr. Goertzel
Have you heard of Sophia, the first robotic citizen? They are all related to the very colorful Dr. Ben Goertzel, an ex-Math professor, Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics and the Chairman of Artificial General Intelligence Society, as well as the OpenCog society.
Both Sophia and SingularityNet are more controversial products and we will take an impartial look in our fact-checking section. But Prof. Lecun is certainly on the critical side on Sophia. He harshly criticizes TechInsider who did an “interview” with Sophia:
This is to AI as prestidigitation is to real magic.
Perhaps we should call this “Cargo Cult AI” or “Potemkin AI” or “Wizard-of-Oz AI”.
In other words, it’s complete bullsh*t (pardon my French).
Tech Insider: you are complicit in this scam.
But then Dr. Goertzel comeback acerbically:
Obviously I don’t agree with his statements. I find it kind of funny. Like Facebook is obviously gathering everyone’s personal data and then using machine learning to post Russian-generated fake news onto everyone’s Facebook page to make them vote for Donald Trump. After using machine learning this way to manipulate people’s minds, Facebook wants to take on a startup for making a loveable robot.”
Also Dr. Goertzel thinks other AI organizations are “jealous” of the public attention. Of course that leads to Prof. LeCun said:
Not the least bit. My purpose is to combat a deliberate attempt to mislead the public.
Since Dr. Goertzel is involved in both Sophia and another high-profile project, SingularityNet.io, we expect this kind of back-and-forth will keep on for a while.
Blog Posts
The 3 Tricks That Made AlphaGo Zero Work
This is a very good article written by Seth Weidman on the details of how AlphaGo works. The three tricks it mentioned are MCTS, how policy and value networks were trained, and how the board was represented as a Resnet.
On doing PhD
An interview with NYU Professor Kyunhyun Cho – he talks about his thoughts on how to do a PhD on Machine Learning.
CVPR 2018 Learned Image Compression Challenge
Deep learning has surprising applications on image compression. e.g. In 2016, researchers such as George Toderici find that they can us VAE-type of method to compress image to a level of JPEG standard. And recent advance has improved the technique so much that compression ratio can exceed or match current industry standards.
CVPR 2018 Leared Image Compression Challenges is an interesting opportunity to improve the state-of-the-art of this exciting field. So check it out!
Google Brain Team Looking Back 2017
Part I of Jeff Dean’s review on Google Brain’s work in 2017. Here is Part II
Open Source
MIT AGI MOOC
MIT is going to released a new classed just on AGI. A series of lecture, the class has impressive set of guest lecturers including Ray Kurzweil, Andrej Karparthy and Ilya Sutskever. Perhaps the more interesting part about the lectures is that it has both DL-based and non-DL-based of lecturers so it gives a balanced point of view.
Video
Justin Timberlake
You want to know how much hype is there for AIDL? Just check out Justin Timberlake’s “Filthy”: his MV starts at “Pan-Asian Deep Learning Conference”.When you listen to the lyrics, it does give you a feeling of the lyricist is an AGI supporter. Is he/she actually a member of AIDL too?
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