Gary Marcus

You went off on a tangent suggesting I condemned general funding for research..that is not at all what I was saying. Don’t overthink the topic: my spidey sense is tingling, that is all.

If your concern is that there's going to be a lot of wasted money then I think that is misplaced. I guarantee that many of these nations will 'waste' a ton of money for minimal results. That's just the nature of basic research.

No, I am mostly concerned of the opportunity cost...as @GaryMarcus has observed, a lot of these new and heavily funded efforts are proceeding with vigor but with hardly any understanding or appreciation for the history of AI

What great success of AI history are people forgetting? The high development cost and higher ownership cost of hand-coded knowledge bases?

Google Search was built on classical AI and hand-coded knowledge bases. Not too shabby. So was Siri AFAIK, though embeddings surely play a role now. Weather-prediction is still classical models, not deep learning. Best driving systems still hybrids, as far as I know.

Unfortunately, those aren't good examples because search, speech recognition and weather prediction can all be done better using Deep Learning approaches. DL is an entirely new paradigm that lucky researchers have discovered because of the existence of GPUs.

Oh, but they are perfect examples...because they demonstrate there are alternatives. As for weather forecasting I have to disagree...I know what NOAA is doing, and DL is not going to be the dominant factor anytime soon.