[TaupeRanger]

It's the same hyperbolic nonsense we've seen from hundreds of other confident "researchers" over the past 50 years. Eliasmith has a book called "How to Build a Brain", Hawkins built an entire company, Numenta, around a theory that hasn't created anything remotely useful or interesting in almost 2 decades and has pivoted to creating tools for current ML zeitgeist methods.

This unknown researcher is exactly the same. Write books and papers for years while creating literally nothing of actual value or usefulness in the real world. But what else would you do in his situation? You have to publish or die in academia. Publish the 1,000th iteration of some subset of LLM architecture? Or create grandiose claims about "implementing human thought" in the hopes that some people will be impressed?

[blackbear_]

You really don't need to be so cynical, some things just need time. Light bulbs were patented only after 40 years of work by multiple researchers, and it took another half a century of work to achieve decent efficiency. Neural networks themselves have been in development for 50 years before taking off recently, and for most of that time people working in the field were considered nuts by their peers.

But if you have concrete criticism on the idea feel free to articulate.

[tuatoru]

> Light bulbs were patented only after 40 years of work by multiple researchers

Not actually true. The early ones were patented, but used filaments made of materials like platinum, and glass-blowing and evacuation were costly as well at the time.

Edison's genius was for innovation rather than invention: making things manufacturable at scale, reducing costs, and setting up profitable sales systems. A systems man.

[TaupeRanger]

I'm not cynical. I'm just tired of people making wild claims which inevitably don't pan out. Neural networks are the exact opposite of this. They became popular because people SHOWED that they were useful. The early papers on perceptrons and later feedforward NNs SHOWED that they are capable of solving classification problems at the very least. Those mentioned in my original reply have shown NOTHING for all their grandiose claims about human brains and "thought". If your theory works, then go ahead, IMPLEMENT HUMAN THOUGHT. Until then, stop writing about how you "solved" one of the deepest and most profound mysteries in human history.

[thierrydamiba]

This is why Open AI was so revolutionary. They were able to create a useful, simple, and free product that anyone can use to improve their life.

[bilsbie]

At the same time though (before LLMs) I also thought not enough people were interested in AGI and not enough people were willing to put forth half baked algorithms to try out.

[aeim]

wut?

i'm not even sure what your argument is:

- some people have tried and failed, so anyone else who tries is grandiose?

- anyone who ventures beyond streetlights is spouting hyperbolic nonsense?

and why: "creating claims in the hope that others are impressed"; rather than communicating ideas in the hopes of continuing a conversation?

- why didn't they just build it? eh, cause writing it up is the first step/ limit of budget/ project scope/ overall skill set/ etc

what a toxic take on the effort and courage required to explore and refine new perspectives on this important (and undoubtedly controversial) space

f###

[godelski]

I've been seeing an increasing cynicism for anything that isn't a finished product and I'm a bit confused and concerned. It also seems a bit random. Like someone's blog post is okay, but a research paper is garbage? These can definitely be overselling, but I think that's a different discussion about the weird academic incentives (which we definitely should have, but is different). I feel like there's just an acceptance of cynicism and complaining but weirdly not for critiques. Just feels like we're throwing context out the window arbitrarily.