I was working for somebody once who seemed to think LeCun was an uninspired grind and I'm like no, LeCun won a contest to make a handwritten digit recognizer for the post office. LeCun wrote a review paper on text classification that got me started building successful text classifiers and still influences my practice. LeCun is one of the few academics who I feel almost personally taught me how to do something challenging.
But the A.I. hype is out of hand. "A.I. Safety" research is the worst of it, as it suggests this technology is so powerful that it's actually dangerous. The other day I was almost to write a comment on HN to a post from lesswrong where they apologized at the beginning of an article critical of the intelligence explosion hypothesis because short of Scientology or the LaRouche Youth Movement it is hard to find a place where independent thought is so unwelcome.
Let's hope "longtermism" and other A.I. hype goes the way of "Web3".
But the A.I. hype is out of hand. "A.I. Safety" research is the worst of it, as it suggests this technology is so powerful that it's actually dangerous. The other day I was almost to write a comment on HN to a post from lesswrong where they apologized at the beginning of an article critical of the intelligence explosion hypothesis because short of Scientology or the LaRouche Youth Movement it is hard to find a place where independent thought is so unwelcome.
Let's hope "longtermism" and other A.I. hype goes the way of "Web3".