[short_sells_poo]

Yes, but let's not assume the the hundreds of other scientists in the field have just been twiddling their thumbs the whole time. It is preposterous to assume that someone largely new to a highly specialized field can somehow start pushing the envelope within a week. Yes, JC is nothing short of brilliant, but these sort of assumptions just set him up to disappoint and is also highly unfair to all the other hardworking brilliant people in the field.

[rfhjt]

How many of them are doing real research, though? Corporate researchers improve ads impressions and academics researches are busy generating pointless papers or they won't be paid. Very few if any do actual research.

[p1esk]

If you look at papers from corporate AI researchers (FAIR, Google Brain, DeepMind, OpenAI, etc) they pretty much do whatever they want.

[rfhjt]

And I disagree violently. The deepmind folks are on salary and every year they need to prove that they are worth the money. This applies to Demis himself: he needs to prove that his org deserves this gaziliion of dollars per year.

[p1esk]

My point is they are not constrained to working on ads, or anything specific, and their work is not pointless.

[username90]

They are constrained to problems with annual results though.

[mr_mitm]

Generating papers is research. I don't understand why you dismiss all papers as pointless.

[dkersten]

I don’t think all papers are pointless but it’s been shown that many are not reproducible, so those are worthless and pointless. There was that guy a few months ago who tried to reproduce the results of 130 papers on financial forecasting (using ML and other such techniques) and found none of them could be reproduced and most were p-hacked or contained obvious flaws like leaking results data into the training data. An academic friend of mine who works in brain computer interfacing also says that a large number of papers he reviews are borderline or even outright fraudulent but many get published anyway because other reviewers let them through.

So I definitely wouldn’t dismiss all papers as pointless, but there certainly is a large percentage that are, enough that you can’t simply accept a published papers results without reproducing it yourself.

[rfhjt]

The need to generate publishable papers means that a researcher can only participate in activity that leads to such a paper. He can't try to work on that idea for 5 years, because if no big papers follow, he's toast /he'd probably lose funding long before that).

[p1esk]

You have to earn the right to work on your idea for 5 years and get paid. Otherwise we would be funding all kind of crackpots. First you demonstrate you're a good researcher by producing good results. Then you can work on whatever you feel like (either by getting hired at places like DeepMind, or by finding funding sources that want to pay for what you want to work on).

[rfhjt]

This is what I meant. In our society, only very few, usually already rich, can try their own ideas. Most of us have to stick with known ideas that bring profit to business owners or meaningful visibility to universities. When I was in college, I had to work on ideas approved by my professor. Now I have to work on ideas approved by my corporation. But if I had money, I'd work on something completely different. Sure, in 15 I will be rich and can start doing my own stuff, but I'll also be old and my ability will be nowhere near the peak at 25 years.

[p1esk]

What would you work on if you could? Would you say you deserve to be paid for 5 years of uninterrupted research? Do you think you have a decent chance to make a breakthrough in some field? These are the questions I ask myself.

[mr_mitm]

When you have tenure, you can work on whatever you want for as long as you want. Nobody works on an idea for five years without publishing anything, though. Progress is made step by step.

Take Albert Einstein as an example, who arguably made one of the largest leap in physics with his theory of general relativity. He never stopped publishing during that time.

[p1esk]

When you have tenure, you can work on whatever you want for as long as you want

Not quite. When you are a professor, you essentially become a manager for a group of researchers. You don't really do research yourself. Therefore, your main obligation becomes finding money to pay these researchers. So in reality you can only support the research someone is willing to pay for (via grants, scholarships, etc).

[_bxg1]

Sometimes an outside perspective is just the ticket for getting past roadblocks that've stumped the experts. If any outsider could do this, it's John.

[dimino]

Sometimes, but mostly not.

[nitwit005]

They didn't suggest he invented some new technique.

Figuring out the basics of the math and how to use whatever tools they use at FB is doable in a week.