Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?
The most relevant part of the article:David Duvenaud, an assistant professor in the same department as Hinton at the University of Toronto, says deep learning has been somewhat like engineering before physics. “Someone writes a paper and says, ‘I made this bridge and it stood up!’ Another guy has a paper: ‘I made this bridge and it fell down—but then I added pillars, and then it stayed up.’ Then pillars are a hot new thing. Someone comes up with arches, and it’s like, ‘Arches are great!’” With physics, he says, “you can actually understand what’s going to work and why.” Only recently, he says, have we begun to move into that phase of actual understanding with artificial intelligence.Hinton himself says, “Most conferences consist of making minor variations … as opposed to thinking hard and saying, ‘What is it about what we’re doing now that’s really deficient? What does it have difficulty with? Let’s focus on that.’”