Jason Antic

3/ As far as this apparent broader lack of civility between deep learning advocates and their discontents: I see a whole lot of arguing over nothing. I think what Jerome Pesenti says in the article is a pretty normal sentiment among most researchers and practitioners:

4/ "Deep learning and current AI, if you are really honest, has a lot of limitations. We are very very far from human intelligence, and there are some criticisms that are valid: It can propagate human biases, it’s not easy to explain, it doesn't have common sense, it’s more on

5/ the level of pattern matching than robust semantic understanding. But we’re making progress in addressing some of these, and the field is still progressing pretty fast. You can apply deep learning to mathematics, to understanding proteins,

6/ there are so many things you can do with it." Yes. Exactly. It's a tool. The vast majority of us using it aren't parading it around calling it one step from AGI. We know better esp after dealing with it the realities of daily trial/error/nudging of hyperparameters, etc.

7/ Those who are overselling deep learning seem to be those who write books/articles that need views, or do PR, or are trying to sell snake oil. Yes that's bad. But creating drama out of thin air is just a waste of time and emotion (lots of Twitter fights over this lately!).

No matter how efficient the methods become, someone will always attempt something on the largest hardware they can find. It's the laziest way to get something published.

Yes that's exactly it. We've heard the same general lament about software for decades- that when the hardware glass gets bigger, the first thing that developers do is fill that glass to the top. Just think of browsers, IDEs, etc. Not all bad usage of memory/compute, but still.