The same day that Cicero was announced, there was a friendly debate at the AACL conference on the topic “Is there more to NLP [natural language processing] than Deep Learning,” with four distinguished researchers trained some decades ago arguing the affirmative and four brilliant young researchers more recently trained arguing the negative. Cicero is perhaps a reminder that there is indeed a lot more to natural language processing than deep learning.
I am originally a CS researcher trained several decades ago, actually in the middle of an AI winter. That might explain our different viewpoints here. I also have a background in industrial research and applied AI, which has given me a lot of insight into the vast array of problems that academic research refuses to solve for you. More long-form thoughts about this are in my Demanding and Designing Aligned Cognitive Architectures.
From where I am standing, the scaling hype is wasting a lot of the minds of the younger generation, wasting their minds on the problem of improving ML benchmark scores under the unrealistic assumption that ML will have infinite clean training data. This situation does not fill me with as much existential dread as it does some other people on this forum, but anyway.
Related to this, from the blog post What does Meta AI’s Diplomacy-winning Cicero Mean for AI?:
I am originally a CS researcher trained several decades ago, actually in the middle of an AI winter. That might explain our different viewpoints here. I also have a background in industrial research and applied AI, which has given me a lot of insight into the vast array of problems that academic research refuses to solve for you. More long-form thoughts about this are in my Demanding and Designing Aligned Cognitive Architectures.
From where I am standing, the scaling hype is wasting a lot of the minds of the younger generation, wasting their minds on the problem of improving ML benchmark scores under the unrealistic assumption that ML will have infinite clean training data. This situation does not fill me with as much existential dread as it does some other people on this forum, but anyway.