After Winning Nobel Prize, Geoffrey Hinton Said He Was Proud Ilya Sutskever 'Fired Sam Altman' (techcrunch.com) 24
An anonymous reader shares a report: Geoffrey Hinton accepted a Nobel Prize this week, recognizing the foundational work on artificial neural networks that earned him the nickname "godfather of AI." In a speech Tuesday, Professor Hinton praised one student -- alluding to OpenAI's former Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever -- for revolting against OpenAI's CEO. "I was particularly fortunate to have many very clever students -- much cleverer than me -- who actually made things work," said Hinton. "They've gone on to do great things. I'm particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman."
How much did Hinton really do for chatbots? (Score:2)
Without the attention mechanism, weren't neural networks incapable of getting context-sensitive grammar right?
Re:How much did Hinton really do for chatbots? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Why are we listening to him about chatbots then?
Re:How much did Hinton really do for chatbots? (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of Hinton's actual work is in things like Boltzman machines, which are classic physics models. That work turned out to be tremendously useful for general purpose modelling, which is also used extensively in physics.
There's also no Nobel category for CS or math but both, particularly math, are so important in fundamental physics that they're often indistinguishable.
Re:How much did Hinton really do for chatbots? (Score:4, Interesting)
Neural networks accomplished plenty even without the attention mechanism. Before Hinton, you were dealing with perceptrons, not DNNs. Hinton** made it possible to train a DNN. DNNs were used in everything from translation to image recognition before the advent of the attention mechanism. I was at a lab using DNNs for brain segmentation back in the early/mid 2000s.
Yes, the attention mechanism (in part) brought about our current AI boom, letting networks deal well with long contexts of interdependent data. But it would have been impossible to reach that point - obviously - without first being able to train DNNs with backprop.
** Most inventions have more than one parent, and the same is true with backpropagation. But Hinton's work made it a viable, mainstream thing.
He also was an early researcher on unsupervised learning, which is another key enabler of today's AI systems. Also, a list of his students is basically a who's who list of people who developed the technology that led to Transformers and modern AI systems.
Missed opportunity (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Movie at 11.
OpenAI is weird.
"It would be wise to view any investment in [OpenAI] in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world"
A lot of people, including me, were invested in clean energy, especially ETFs. Who ever poo-poo'd on that hype train (Exxon?) is likely to be the architects of our demise as a species, but anyhow, a lot of the money that would go into clean energy is going into this bullshit, because it will be bett
Re: Missed opportunity (Score:3)
I'll tell you. Money WILL be raw resources; matter, energy, In the post AGZ world, "Labor" will be commonplace, hence its relative value contribution will approach zero.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Missed opportunity (Score:1)
Re: Missed opportunity (Score:2)
Indeed, we might have AI-proximates that were more than simply quirky chatbots sampled on liberal West coast Americans and predictable image generators.
Re:Missed opportunity (Score:5, Interesting)
It's totally the other way around. The board wanted to fire Sam Altman because he was a podcasting bro and was taking over (now successful) and removing all ethical constraints on OAI and generally being a giant rich douchebag and taking tons of stock for himself.
The problem was ever hiring him in the first place. If that hadn't happened, Ilya would be CTO, and someone decent would be CEO, and openAI would be open and changing the world for good.
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Re:Missed opportunity (Score:4, Insightful)
They underestimated Sam's ability to coerce people to get behind him. Basically convinced a few people to publicly stand up for him, then incrementally convinced more employees that there was a riot going on about his firing and that the whole company and everything they cared about was going to collapse if he wasn't reinstated, to get more and more people to call for his reinstatement.
Never underestimate a VC guy's ability to gain and hold onto power.
Fake physics prize (Score:1)
For fake (as in not real world) physics.
The old man yelling at clouds shtick is just the cherry on top.
Of a kind with peace prizes for warmongers and dictators, and literature prizes for plagiarists.
Prediction: a medicine prize for assisted suicide* within our lifetimes.
*I'm actually in favor of legalized euthanasia. I just think it's not medicine in the sense of going to the doctor to fix what's making you sick.
O rly? (Score:3)
Dear RightwingDipshit,
Please note that the pair of scientists won the prize for the research that uncovered previously unknown characteristics of biological neural networks. The reason it was of such importance was it's applicability to artificial neural networks.
Re: O rly? (Score:2, Troll)
None of which has anything to do with the structure of matter or energy. The study of which is commonly known as physics. Which is why it should not be a physics prize.
Re: (Score:3)
Both Hinton and Hopfield did their orignal work in things like the spin glass model, Ising model and Boltzman machines. These are absolutely models of "the structure of matter or energy."
Never mind that physics as a subject is about things that are physical (and are not chemistry or biology).
Even smart people can be petty (Score:3)
OpenAI is on its way to becoming just another player and not worth getting mad about.