dmm | (Reply)

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dmm

Day 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnsqHSCBgX0

Hopefully, today will be more interesting (most of the invited keynote speakers are today).

(Late start again; I don't know, it might be better to just watch a replay later unless one wants to participate in chat; but I'll try to watch real-time. Schedule change: Francois Chollet first.)

Francois Chollet is pessimistic, is focusing on things which don't adapt and generalize well, (deliberately?) ignoring things which do (perhaps, it is just a function on his Keras focus; a typical work in this field does not generalize, but some do generalize, it's just takes special efforts focused on that; but it might be that autonomous driving does work less well than it should because those systems are too specialized; perhaps, if they are taught to do more tasks than strictly necessary they would work better). The end result is that he is very biased (similarly to his views on impossibility of intelligence explosion; so that's not new about him). So, his criticism is mostly correct about the bulk of the field, but what is missing from his presentation is that many people came to these conclusions a while ago, and actually started to do something about that and actually started to create more adaptable systems.

And we should do more of those!

Then his talk becomes more useful, as he talks about his nice work, in particular, his Abstraction & Reasoning Corpus (ARC) test set: https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1228011358362324992?lang=en ; https://www.kaggle.com/c/abstraction-and-reasoning-challenge/overview ; https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547

Prototype-centric abstraction vs program-centric abstraction (both are important).

Yes, a useful talk, if one discounts the initial segment. A lot of interesting material.

At the end he is talking non-sense on program synthesis, ignoring a variety of advances enabling to avoid discrete search. So the end is not too useful either.