Why are deep learning technologists so overconfident?
Is there actual overconfidence?<p>I think that if just in 2020 we did a survey about whether the capabilities of (for example) the image generation systems discussed in other today&#x27;s threads would materialize at 2022, then more than half of deep learning technologists would have said that it&#x27;s not going to happen so fast, demonstrating underconfidence instead of overconfidence.<p>For another example, when people in NLP put up tasks like the GLUE dataset, a reasonable expectation was that it would be a meaningful benchmark for some time, but it turned out that the previously too hard tasks became too easy just a  year or so later - again, demonstrating underconfidence instead of overconfidence.<p>IMHO the overconfidence appears when people listen to PR of various companies overpromising products, not to the actual technologists doing research on the technology.