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by johnthewise 713 days ago
>and the folks predicting we're just around the corner have been recognized once again as shysters, hucksters, and charlatans.

Do you think Sutskever,Hinton or Sutter are charlatans?

3 comments

I wouldn't take it that far myself, but I'm kind of perplexed by how the smartest people in the room at any given time have very optimistic timelines regarding when we'll have AGI. This isn't a modern phenomenon either. Both AI winters were preceded by experts more-or-less claiming that AGI was right around the corner.

It's as if the easiest people to fool are the researchers themselves

I think Sutskever is a charlatan outside of his area of expertise, Hinton (with whom I worked loosely at Google) is a bit of a charlatan (again, outside his area of expertise; clearly he and LeCun both did absolutely phenomenal work) and I don't know who Sutter is.

If I wanted to predict the next ten years, I'd bring in Demis Hassabis, Noam Shazeer, and Vincent Vanhoucke, from what I've read of Demis's work, and my interactions with the latter, they seem to have very realistic understanding and are not prone to hype (Demis being the most ambitious of the three, Vincent being the one who actually cracked voice recognition, and Noam because ... his brain is unmatched).

I think Sutskever is a charlatan outside of his area of expertise, Hinton (with whom I worked loosely at Google) is a bit of a charlatan (again, outside his area of expertise; clearly he and LeCun both did absolutely phenomenal work) and I don't know who Sutter is.

What do you think of Vizzini?

He was right about not getting involved in a land war in Asia, but not so much with iocaine powder?
Based on comments elsewhere in this thread and some re-reading of the definitions of those terms, I think those weren't quite right. I'm mulling over doomsayer (Hinton), and hypster (Altman). It's very similar to the folks at Google Quantum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmut_Neven) who claimed quantum supremacy over a toy benchmark.